—Heinrich Heine, from his play Almansor (1821)
Have you heard about the book that Random House Publishing Group pulled because “credible and unrelated sources” warned that the historical novel “could incite acts of violence by a small radical segment” of the Islamic community? The Jewel of Medina, Sherry Jones’ first novel, is about the Prophet Muhammad and his six-year-old child bride Aisha, a relationship that was consummated when she reached the age of nine.
Now, I’m not an expert on Islam and don’t pretend to be, but it’s obvious that there’s a problem here. Salman Rushdie, whose 1989 work The Satanic Verses led to a death threat from the Ayatollah Khomeini, complained that the publisher had bowed to intimidation: “I am very disappointed to hear that my publishers, Random House, have canceled another author’s novel, apparently because of their concerns about possible Islamic reprisals. . . . This is censorship by fear, and it sets a very bad precedent indeed.”
He’s right. Now, it’s nothing new that people write and publish books that offend certain groups. Some Christians didn’t like Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale; other Christians have wanted to ban Harry Potter. Readers of both The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird have been offended by their “racist slurs.” Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice has been classified by some as anti-Semitic. I won’t argue for or against any of these works here (although some of them rate pretty high on my all-time-favorites list), but the point is that they were published. Whether you read them or not is up to you.
In his article “Lights Out on Liberty,” reprinted in the 9/7/08 edition of The Arkansas Democrat Gazette, author Mark Steyn informs us that author Oriana Fallaci of Italy was, at her death, in the process of being sued all over Europe by groups who claimed that her writings on “the contradiction between Islam and the Western tradition of liberty” were “not merely offensive, but criminal.” Michel Houellebecq of France “was sued by Muslim and other ‘anti-racist groups’ who believed the opinions of a fictional character in one of his novels was likewise criminal” (my emphasis). Steyn himself is being sued by the Canadian Islamic Congress because of his “flagrant Islamaphobia.” This charge stems from the simple act of citing plot twists in his review of a novel by another author, Robert Ferrigno. “These days,” he laments, these people “apparently . . . believe that describing the plot of a novel should be illegal.” Steyn takes these literary challenges very seriously: “I would argue,” he says, “that these incremental concessions to Islam are ultimately a bigger threat than terrorism.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in her memoir Infidel, argues that blind multiculturalism does not work. People, and governments, try "to be tolerant for the sake of consensus, but the consensus [is] empty," she explains. In fact, she concludes that, in the name of "tolerance," certain groups are allowed to oppress others and deprive them of basic human rights. She, too, received death threats for expressing her observations.
There’s an often repeated saying that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Appeasement didn’t work with Hitler; why do we think it will work today? And what do we risk by trying it?
“It's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.” —Judy Blume
5 comments:
I thought the Jewel of Medina cancellation was particularly interesting, too, because Random House had not actually been threatened by any Muslims. As happens all the time in the publishing industry, they'd sent the galleys to some of their other authors who write about similar topics to get blurb endorsements. One of those authors was Denise Spellberg, an Aisha specialist at U of Texas. It was Spellberg who decided she was offended by the "soft core pornography" in the book. She told Random House to pull it and then informed as many people in the Muslim community as she could about the offensive book -- none of whom contacted Random House. Those Muslims then reacted in their own communities -- as happened with the Jyllands-Posten cartoons in Denmark -- without having seen the actual "offensive" material, and decided to be angry about it. So one of the questions I keep asking myself is the role academics has played in this. What happens when people think they are the authority in a field and should act as gatekeepers, and do so in perfidious ways?
Something else that struck me as I followed the media reactions in Eruope and the Middle East was the odd unwillingness among even the most liberal Muslims to differentiate between a work of fiction and a historical claim (not unique to Muslims, that, but with Christians its usually not the really educated ones). If you read the widely available first chapter of the novel, it's pretty clear that it's a historical romance novel set in the fantasy world of an early time in a religious tradition, not unlike the scores of romance novels of the sort that clog the Christian book section in bookstores -- about Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and Rachel, Hosea and his wife, etc. or about non-Biblical characters that run into the apostles a lot in the book. Those books don't play in a world much like those the biblical characters live it; they're definitely fantasies more inspired by Sunday school than by research. They're not religious tracts. They're odd daydreams. To judge from the excerpt, the book is poorly written by any standards -- and that would've been a good reason to pull it. But for religious reasons? Hardly.
I have the feeling that at the root of this for Random House was just panic. But at the root of this sort of thing for the Muslim world is their teaching against representational art, which sometimes includes novels: That is already bad, so even worse if it includes the Prophet, and even worse if it includes the Prophet in non-orthodox ways. And maybe there really is a little touchiness about his pedophilia.
So I agree with you on principle, but I wonder how we would react if a more powerful culture than ours publicly mocked some of the touchiest issues surrounding Jesus, and if we hadn't first done so ourselves as a culture so that we've been desensitized to that? Not that the novel was doing that, but I think it's how the Muslim community feels. That, and they like to have an excuse to feel persecuted. Much like certain evangelical groups I could mention...
You're right, J. It's one thing to be "offended," but when you throw religion into the mixture, the stakes are definitely higher--and much harder to sort out.
I didn't see it before I wrote this post, but in yesterday's Daily Citizen, there's an article by Diana West, a columnist for The Washington Times, titled "We Are Losing Europe to Islam," and she talks about some really disturbing events, especially the fact that there are now Sharia courts in full standing in Britain. (You might be able to get this article on-line; I don't know.) I'm not sure where all this is heading, but it doesn't bode well.
Changing the subject, but one thing I find interesting about so-called "Christian" censorship is how haphazard it is. Lots of parents who want to ban Harry Potter because of magical elements read Lewis's Narnia Chronicles aloud to their children and buy Disney DVD's to use as babysitters.
I know... and it would make so much more sense to explain to young readers how to differentiate between the world of the imagination and the real world. And how to become critical readers who can see characters for what they are, even the good ones. But then, I guess most parents have a hard time with that... especially the ones who are afraid it might make them think about how to read the Bible differently. Oh well.
About the Europe thing... it's complicated. For one, countries like Britain, Germany, France, and Spain have populations that are around 10-15% Muslim -- equivalent to the percentage of African Americans in this country. It's not so easy to integrate those Muslims quickly and efficiently. Also, Europe has been exposed (both in good and bad ways) to Islam since its inception. In some ways it's considered more threatening than in the U.S. (witness the headscarf ban in French public schools) and in some ways less so (Europe has dealt with the modern sort of Muslim terror since the 1950s and with Muslims terrorizing Europeans in their own countries since the 1500s... did you know that the line in "Britannia, Rule the Waves" that proclaims "Britons never will be slaves!" was a response to Muslim corsairs raiding coastal villages on the western coast of England and Wales?).
Europeans also have a long memory of Muslim invasions through the Balkans and Spain, so they keep a very sharp eye on what goes on in their own mosques and those of the Middle East. In some ways, they've figured some things out the U.S. still needs to learn. For instance, one of the main tool that took the fangs off militant Christianity was the advent of the Enlightenment and the scientific study of the Bible (I don't agree with the scholars on all that, but still). The main research for that went on in places like Berlin. Where there is now the world's leading research institute on the Qur'an. I think the more people learn that they need to see their faith in context, the easier it is to turn away from fundamentalist violence. And as a Christian, perhaps with a little bit of Schadenfreude, I can only appreciate the historical critical method being applied to some other groups who think they are above that sort of rational inquiry.
I did not know that about Thompson's poem. Actually, I just read it again this week in comps prep, and just assumed that it fit in with the colonizing mindset of the 18th century, sort of a "we will rule but never be ruled" kind of thing. The Muslim connection is really interesting.
I know... fascinating to me, too. Also, it puts the "colonizing mindset" into perspective a bit to remember that Europe didn't really emerge from being battered by Turkish invasions and having their own carted off into slavery by the thousands until the beginning of the Renaissance. In fact, they could not put an end to it until the early 1800s - for example, the first U.S. naval engagement was against Algerian corsairs off the coast of Barbary who were capturing Americans to sell as slaves into the Mideast.
There were some moments in the 1400s-1700s when it seriously looked like Christendom might topple and be wiped off the earth. The reason we don't remember that is that, as we've been told our own history, those little embarrassments were just small setbacks along the road to a foregone conclusion of victory. People don't like to remember their weaknesses in retrospect.
That's not an excuse for European colonial excesses, of course, but a lot of colonists everywhere really did think until the 1950s that bringing Christianity and Enlightenment values to the world was the fruit of a long struggle against a very real darkness, the results of which were not a foregone conclusion so certain for a very long time. So some of the rhetoric comes from trying to boost their own against real threats, not from a retrospective jingoism. I think that doesn't hit the full-blown fan until the 1800s and the emergence of social/racial Darwinism, which is really what a lot of post-colonial theory is still reacting to, in my opinion.
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