Sherry Jones emailed me the prologue of her book The Jewel of Medina to share with you all. I’ve read it, and I sent it to shewhohashope to gain her perspective, as she and I are of different faiths and cultures, and have differing views of the prologue and the book that it introduces. Obviously, sweeping judgments based on the prologue are as frail as sweeping judgments based on not having read the book at all, but hey, what is our site without some randomly sweeping judgments, right?
If you’d like to download the prologue and read it for yourself, a PDF is available here (please right click and download, thanks). All contents of the prologue are copyright Sherry Jones.
My reactions are from the perspective of a reader, and someone who is, due to this controversy, very curious about Islam, Aisha, Mohammed, and this book itself. Shewhohashope, a 22 year-old student of Anthropology living in London, England, is a Sunni Muslim and rabid Heyer fan.
My reaction: would this prologue make me continue reading? Yup. It’s half dishy and half history (which therein lies a problem, yo) and almost reads as a hybrid of YA, historical fiction, and historical romance. Aisha, in the prologue, is 14, and is returning to her caravan after they traveled without her. She arrives in camp with a man named Safwan ibn Al-Muattal, and upon her return is accused of adultery with Safwan. Muhammad later receives a vision or revelation that Aisha was not unfaithful to him, and her accusers were punished.
My initial impressions were that the tone was melodramatic, and that the heroine seemed very, very young, more like a modern 14 year old than what I would presume at 14 year old would be like at that time. Nowadays, a 14 year old is in middle school, and, if it’s a 14 year old girl, likely given to impulsive behavior and, in some instances, a hormonal overdrive that causes them to act like pubescent minions of evil. 14 year old girls can be MEAN like DAMN.
The biggest contention from those who would read this and be upset would be the depiction of Aisha as possibly having been tempted, and certainly having taken deliberate steps to sneak behind Mohammed’s back. Aisha is very, very human and young-acting, since she’s 14 and driven by some impulse in the prologue. A 14 year old then might have more presence of mind to resist impulse than a 14 year old today. I would figure a 14 year old at that time, who was married to a leader, who genuinely cared for him, who had been married for awhile, and who had, in context, a much shorter lifespan than we have now, would be in some ways more mature and less impulsive. But then, this is a supposition that could easily be flawed on my part, or addressed by the rest of the narrative.
However, the prologue sets up the narrative tension very quickly: what is Aisha feeling guilty about? She mentions that she and Safwan crafted a story on the ride to the caravan so that their stories would match, but she also mentions that she remained faithful to Mohammed. She has something about which she is ashamed, and there is a deliberate reason she allowed the caravan to leave her behind, but that tension and guilt betray her to those who accuse her of much, much worse, so she’s defending herself while she feels guilty and ashamed.
As I wrote to shewhohashope, the conflict about this book is as much about faith as it is understanding what someone of another culture and another faith holds sacred and what is, frankly, a “big deal.” It is, I’ve learned, a big deal to humanize and portray as tempted and flawed one of the four matriarchs within Islam. It’s a very big deal to hint at adultery for Aisha. And it’s a huge honking big hopping deal to portray as human the prophet Mohammed.
So that’s why it’s offensive to the part of alarming and upsetting people. I completely understand that. I still want to read the rest of the book.
However, in my mind that does not give any one person the right to make such a big stink that a publisher decides for the rest of us that reading the book is too dangerous for all involved. I’m disappointed that I won’t get the opportunity to read the entire book and decide for myself, and I’m disappointed that more people won’t have the opportunity to read something that’s become salacious and notorious, because if other readers are like me, they’d be curious about Mohammed, his wives, and their role in shaping the future of Islam and do more research (like I did – hello, internet! mwah!) to learn more.
When I asked shewhohashope if she’d be willing to read the prologue and share her reaction, she agreed. She writes:
Just from the prologue, the part I could see becoming contentious is that Jones’ Aisha ran away with another man with the intent to commit adultery, when this is specifically denied in the Qur’an. And the depiction of several of the sahaba in their treatment of Aisha, although that has basis within Islamic historical records (and within the Qur’an).
I don’t know. Considering that this is a fictionalised account of the Prophet’s (saws) [wife’s] life, offence-wise anything else is icing on the cake, so it’s not as important.
But I wouldn’t want to give the impression that there aren’t differences of opinion between Muslims as well, there is definitely a difference between how Aisha is perceived within the Muslim community. She is revered by Sunni Muslims and following the political incidents that caused the split between Sunni and Shia, Aisha is regarded as a much less reliable source within the Shiah tradition of Islamic scholarship.
I am no Islamic scholar (please add this disclaimer to everything I’ve said) but I assume that they would be better than the average woman (say me) and I can’t quite countenance the thought of committing adultery.
It’s mentioned in the Quran right after ‘don’t kill your children’, and right before ‘life is sacred’.
Kill not your children for fear of want: We shall provide sustenance for them as well as for you. Verily the killing of them is a great sin.
Nor come nigh to adultery: for it is a shameful (deed) and an evil, opening the road (to other evils)
Nor take life – which Allah has made sacred – except for just cause. And if anyone is slain wrongfully, we have given his heir authority (to demand qisas or to forgive): but let him not exceed bounds in the matter of taking life; for he is helped (by the Law).
[17:33]
It’s not so much the humanising of the Prophet either. There are plenty of biographies and hadith about the Prophet’s (saws) daily life. It’s the fictionalisation aspect that is worrying, not so much because of this particular book, this is something that has built up from when the hadith themselves were an oral tradition. Consider the danger of having historical fiction someone wrote about Mohamed (saws) floating about when our main sources for what the Prophet’s (saws) life was like are based on what people said about him. And for Sunni’s at least this makes up the second highest religious authority we have.
I’d have to read more to be able to anything substantial about it as a literary work, but it’s more controversial than I though it’d be already. [Aisha] seems younger than I think she’d be for her age, but that’s not an important issue within context. And it’s not even how she was tempted towards adultery as much as it’s that fact that that goes directly against something that is in the Qu’ran. Not to mention that Aisha in Islamic tradition (or sunni tradition) is one of the four perfect women who are held up as what all Muslim women should aim to be as wel as one of the Mothers of the Faith (along with Khadijah, Mary, and Asiya (ra)). Plus, it strikes me personally as a misrepresentation of who she was. Adultery in general is just a huge deal (even more so then, and even more so for a public figure, and even more so for her) it doesn’t strike me as plausible that she’d have a moment of weakness in this manner unless she was having a crisis of faith as well as whatever personal issues she’s supposed to be dealing with, because it is such a huge, huge thing to slip up on.
There are a slew of ways to evaluate the prologue: does it tease you to read more? Does the writing style please your readerly brain? Do the contents shock you? Does the characterization offend you deeply? Does the fiction make the idea of Mohammed and his life more or less accessible to you as a reader? Did you like it? And what about Brett Farve going to the Jets? No, sorry, that’s a different discussion.
I’m curious what you think of the prologue, so please share your thoughts. Thank you to Sherry Jones for sharing her work, and to shewhohashope for sharing her opinion and her time.
Which comes back to needless offense.
I don’t see it as caving in. I see it as trying to stop two of the worlds great civilizations from destroying each other in one big oil fianced, bomb laden, meltdown. It may be comfortable for you to sit back and say you are not responsible for the ongoing conflict, that the Islamic world is overly sensative.
I am of the opinion that Americans and the American media (to include people like Random House) are far too willing to disclaim all responsiblity any offense directed at Islam and Arabs in favor of casting protests in the Arab Street as inherently irrational.
It’s comforting to say we are right and we should have our freedoms be damned who it offense. Me… I’d like the world not to implode in the next 50 years.
Because we live in a world where the response by a lot of people to this controversy is to equate a single academic and a listserv of grad students with a power point presentation and a petition to a mob of terrorists.
Because we keep telling the world we are not in a cultural war with Islam while we throw hand grenades over the wall at them.
Uhhh… color me stupid, but that makes absolutely no sense.
So, a non-Muslim writer of fiction giving the Prophet more consideration than their own chosen Deity is going to stop people from making knee-jerk reactions?
Or are you saying that it will stop the supposed cultural war that we are supposedly having with Islam?
I don’t see how writing a book of fiction can be equated with throwing a hand grenade at them. That to me is a knee-jerk reaction right there.
I can turn your words around and say that we live in a world where the response by a group of people to a controversy surrounding a Pagan teacher who showed his class a magic trick (as in a stage illusion) led to his being branded a Satanist and fired from his position for teaching witchcraft.
Are you going to speak out against those Christian writers who portray anybody of a Pagan faith as evil baby-eating Satanists in an effort to stop a supposed cultural war between the two?
Granted, Pagans don’t have as scary a reputation as Muslims have. People don’t worry that a group of Pagans are going to bomb their city or send suicide bombers into their schools. (Again please note that I am not saying that Muslims are going to do this or that all Muslims are evil scary terrorists)
You don’t think the fact that she also has a book deal with an imprint within the same publishing house might have perhaps constituted a wee bit of conflict of interest?
The more that emerges about this situation, the more my focus narrows to the academic. As a writer, someone messes with my career that way? Wouldn’t be pretty. Sherry Jones spent five years working on this book. What we think of it, as a work of fiction, should have been left up to us, as readers to decide. Not up to some academic who decides she wants to play God.
Actually I think it gives her more right to comment not less. I find it easy to believe that some marketing guy at Random House already had ideas of marketing her non-fiction book with this one. The fact that she was concerned that her name would be associated with this book is not irrational.
But, in a way it is caving in. It is saying that Islamic sensibilities are more important than our own and that they have every right to tell us how to act and how to believe so that we don’t “needlessly” offend them.
I’m pretty sure that just about everything about me and my life would offend a devout Muslim’s sensibilities. Should I change my life so that I don’t needlessly offend them?
I mean, I don’t have to walk around with my head uncovered. I don’t need to wear short skirts and skimpy tops. And since I believe that all Gods that have ever been worshiped exist then I should just go ahead and worship Allah since me worshiping other deities is causing a needless offense.
Where does trying not to needlessly offend anybody end? And what is a needless offense? What might seem like a needless offense to one person might seem like a perfectly rational act to another.
I refuse to give up any of my rights and liberties just because there is the possibility that the world might get nuked out of existence at some unspecified point in the future.
Not likely. Different imprints, working within different arms of a giant publishing conglomerates. They might even have differing PR & marketing departments. She was sent an ARC off a list provided by the author (if I’m recalling correctly) to provide a blurb if she so desired. It’s a big moment—we all have our dream authors who we hope will like our books enough to blurb them. And once we’re on the other end, most of us, we’re sent books for blurbing, we either blurb, or we decline politely.
Was Spellberg within her rights to tell her editor that she had strong objections to the book? Absolutely. Rock on. Her methods, however? By the standards of academia or commercial publishing? SUCKED.
snarkhunter
Actually, I don’t think that there is a very wide, significant movement to ensure people gain accurate depictions of various Arabs nationally or individually, or the Muslim religion as a global faith. Co-orporations may stay far, far away from products that might even carry the *whiff* of controversy in relation to them, but that doesn’t mean they’re compensating by scooping up or scouting for a bunch of general reader books on Sunni matriarchs, for example.
I will say that the Muslim issue definitely gets more attention. But in addition to your reasons I do think that’s in no small part due to the fact that the rhetoric immediately preceding 9/11 and the actions thereafter encouraged very much an East vs. West slant which helped to unify Muslims worldwide in feeling they were being attacked even though all these different groups and individuals shared diverse views much as any other group. It’s a support system (of sorts) that the various indigenous nations across the globe don’t have. Neither do those of African descent. Why? Well, it’s a harsh answer—their populations (esp. in the West) were decimated or controlled for far longer and far more effectively than the comparatively newer Muslim immigrants. Muslim Westerners have never been controlled on reservations and have stronger ties to their other cultural homes (America + [insert country here]) unlike African-Americans who are left with the vague “Africa” prefix because most of them have little to no idea which country they came from only, at best, the port from which they were exported.
Anaquana I’m just gonna go there and ask right now if you’ve been following this discussion so far? Because your response reads as though you came out of the middle of no where—maybe from just reading about the Guatanamo trial on Bin Laden’s driver?—read Katherine’s comment and leaped to the most hare-brained, quack assumptions possible. I can’t begin to list all of your huge misinterpretations (I hope someone else helps me out here) but just to get this one out of the way.
No. No one here has commented anything of the kind. Katherine’s only suggestion has been that the book should have been sent to an expert earlier in the book deal process to prevent “needless offence”.
Yes, this is what she meant, absolutely. (By which, I obviously mean, NO.)
*head on desk* I need a break. I’ll come back a bit later to clarify if Katherine hasn’t done it herself by this point. All I can suggest is to read this thread from the top…maybe skim through the first comment thread on this book two posts down?
It’s about your life, nor is about a book about your life. It’s about the life of the leading figure in the worlds second largest religion.
And this would be a bad thing why? Seems that being more culturally sensitive, not less, should be what we argue for. Yes, I really do think mass entertainment material – including books – should be checked for the potential to offend and to spread misinformation or reinforce negative stereotypes. I see no virtue in declaring ‘no one has the right not to be offended’ and not taking basic precautions not to cause offend. That’s not pandering to terrorism – it’s common courtesy. It’s also recognising that people not part of the dominant culture also deserve respect.
Random House should not have pulled this book, because they did so not because they believed the book was poor or unnecessarily offensive, but because they caved into manipulation by an unscrupulous academic. At the very least, they made a cynical decision that it was cheaper to yank the book now, than withdraw it from stores later. The book deserves a proper assessment from the reading public, Muslim and non-Muslim. The whole business is shabby.
Oh, and the non-fiction book for which Spellberg has the contract with Knopf is on Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an, not A’isha.
Absolutely. It’s been so frustrating to me to see this discussion be all about those horrible Muslims and their uncomfortable sensitivities, when this is at its heart, nothing to do with Muslim sensitivities or opinions at all. It’s an nasty, blatant academic hatchet job and Spellberg should be facing calls for her dismissal or at the very least, having to answer to a disciplinary committee or the like for her behaviour. What’s going on is a classic case of misdirection – hey, don’t look at me feathering my own nest at the cost of a fellow writer’s career, watch out for the terrorists!
Ann, to be fair I don’t think snark hunter is arguing against cultural sensitivity—only lodging protest at a certain group getting more attention than others. Like I said, though, global politics shapes this more than anything else. There is a war going on in two predominantly Muslim countries and agitations about the probability of starting another. And both are primarily supported by a leader who has not shunned the use of religious terminology in describing the two conflicts and who rose to power by catering to a particular religious base.
I’m afraid African-Americans and Native issues just aren’t as sexy right now. I also think my apparently self-appointed role as mediator and all-round interpreter is about to get annoying so I’ll try to stop. Fair warning though—I love to argue. 🙁
I have no idea how savvy Spellberg is when it comes to the ways of commercial publishing. And I agree that a lot of the action in this seems to revolve around her and around the way Random House acted as a result of her comments/concerns.
BUT, I would caution against concluding as to her motives or her sympathies, because I could see numerous scenarios in which she would be acting entirely in good faith and still inadvertently open up an enormous controversy. She could, for example, have been truly alarmed at what she thought would stir up some in the Muslim community and acted to forestall what she believed would be worse trouble. She could have believed that once she disassociated her name from the project that her influence would be moot. As I said in the other thread, academics have notoriously low self-esteem when it comes to believing that they have any cultural influence.
What I would hate to see happen here is that Spellberg becomes the fall person for a huge publisher with huge resources at its disposal, a publisher with enough power and influence that it had all sorts of options to exercise regarding this book. Including, as I said in the other thread, trying to reach out to the Muslim community if there was a real belief that things were going to get hot. Not only was it Random House who made the decision to withdraw the book, but it seems to me that they have taken an incredibly small amount of heat, even in these threads. Whatever Spellberg said or did, there’s no way you’re going to convince me that Random House was clueless about the potential controversy when they signed Jones.
Also, there is a concern—that non-academics may not be aware of—that Spellberg could be targeted as anti-awholebunchofstuff based on this publicity, a targeting that can result in much more than a few critical comments on SBTB. The casual, unsubstantiated targeting of academics as anti-American, anti-Semitic, and anti-Islamic has become a real problem in the aftermath of 9/11, and the pressures exerted because of these labels is not insignificant (there’s my understatement of the day).
Robin, you’re so smart. What’s your secret?
One last thing, then I’m taking a break myself.
From an article from one of our own favorites around here, Hillel Italie:
NEW YORK — At a time when government reports ask whether Americans care about reading anymore, the legacy of Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn reminds us that books can matter as much as life and death.
Solzhenitsyn, who died Sunday at age 89, never stood before a tank in Tiananmen Square, but novels such as “Cancer Ward” and “The First Circle” landed like roadblocks before Soviet might, their power confirmed and magnified by his government’s determination to stop them.
“Writers are a problem, they are a great problem, thank God,” says Jason Epstein, a longtime editor at Random House who worked with Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and others. “Without them we would be lost.”
Kinda love that they quoted a Random House editor.
His books were were seen as a danger and a menace to an entire society and government and way of life that many people held, if not necessarily sacred, then at least as the ideal that all should aspire to, but he saw it differently and he wrote his take on what he saw.
He was willing to take his punches and God knows, the man took them. Sherry Jones appears prepared to do the same. Who is Denise Spellberg to attempt to stifle Sherry Jones’ voice?
Since, as has been said a hundred times in the two threads dealing with this, the terrorists and extremist Muslims are a very vocal minority and the vast majority of Muslims are decent people who would sooner slam their heads into their desks than perpetuate violence as a form of protest then we should have no fears that the world will end in “one big oil fianced, bomb laden, meltdown. “
This idea that we shouldn’t offend the Muslim community because it will cause a massive world ending war is just another form of bigotry IMO.
And, I should have added that the thing that will cause a massive world-ending war is our moron of a president who doesn’t know how to keep his nose out of the rest of the world’s affairs, not a book or even a hundred books.
Possibly so. I’m just saying that being sensitive to any group who gets as raw a deal as Muslims or the other groups she mentions, isn’t a bad thing. At the moment, Muslims/Arabs are the default bad guys in any story telling, so balancing that with more attention to the real issues, is only fair, IMO.
Robin, wise words of course, but I can’t cut Spellberg much of a break when she’s the one acting as the mouthpiece for the supposed threats. That’s when she crossed a line from outraged innocent to deliberate fomentor of hatred – at least, so far as I’m concerned. Is it improper that her role in this should be examined properly?
But no, it doesn’t let RH off the hook in the slightest. They’ve behaved appallingly. They should be forced to tell the truth about the threat they perceived and why they weren’t prepared to stand by their author and their contract.
QFT. Thank you.
That didn’t help the Iraqis, did it? May not help the Iranians either although most of the world is crossing fingers over that one I’m sure.
One question though: why is that obviously exaggerated scenario provided by Katherine dependent on whether Muslims are peace loving or not? Is there something you’d like to share? 🙂 Seriously, though I have no idea what this comment of yours is related to. Someone else help me out here.
Edit: Oh, I get it! You’re being fatuous here, right?
No one wrote that.
Anything else?
My response was in regards to this post by Katherine:
This comment of hers came from the discussion on needlessly offending Muslims. So, again I ask, why would needlessly offending Muslims result in a world ending war if Muslims are for the most part peaceful people?
This discussion has nothing to do with American politics and the stupidity of a certain power-mad Commander In Chief. It is about a book and the offense that Muslims feel about it.
And, yes I have read every single comment in both threads. And, my reading comprehension skills are such that I understand 99.9% of them.
My difference of opinion here may be traced to that divide on the subject of reader pressure—that authors can interpret reader comments as pressure, whereas readers just think they’re offering an opinion. Academics are used to making strong statements of opinion, even though to non-academics they might appear as pressure or as pronouncements. I know from personal experience how difficult it sometimes is to modulate a strong opinion so it does not sound like an order. And I could most definitely see Spellberg in a position where she believed that she was simply delivering a word of caution, because we still don’t know what was said and what ultimately made Random House pull the book.
So I can absolutely see a scenario under which Spellberg did not see herself as trying to shut the book down, even though that’s what happened. I am not, however, defending what Spellberg did or her motives (both of which we don’t completely know at this point). I wish she had handled the situation differently, and perhaps in hindsight would have. I believe that no matter what her motives and intentions she helped set an unfortunate series of events in motion that go against what academics, as a rule, value (unfettered intellectual debate). However, I am not, on the basis of existing evidence, willing to convict her of trying to shut Jones down out of some professional competition or whatever.
I’m all for knowing what happened and talking about it, but I’m nervous about some of the conclusions that are being drawn on so little evidence. After all, what we know is that she appeared to be concerned about violence and made that complaint to at least one source, Amunullah, and perhaps Random House. But I don’t think that *necessarily* makes her an opportunistic fear monger. Perhaps her actions were the product of inexperience, or naivete, or heaven knows what based on her own experience. After all, she’s an Islamic Studies scholar, so it wasn’t like she was trying to sully the reputation of Muslims. I would simply like to see more pressure exerted on Random House for their decision before we take the torches to Spellberg.
Arethusa: LOL; I just spit water all over my computer screen!
Katherine: What does QFT mean?
Quoted for truth.
True, and I don’t have direct evidence of what she said, only second and third hand reports. Has anyone thought to contact her and ask her to join this discussion?
I would point out, however, that Shahed Amunullah called Ms Jones to apologise for what had happened and express his dismay – he, at least, was unaware the book could be pulled as a result of anything he was involved in. Has anyone seen or heard a report of Spellberg expressing any like dismay or regret?
What we have, apparently (according to the WSJ), is an academic expressing revulsion at a book’s content, expressing that revulsion to someone in charge of a Muslim website and “asked him to warn Muslims”, warning the publisher at least twice of the risk of violent reprisal, and threatening to sue if her name was associated with the book. You can assign benign motives to each action individually, but as a collection of actions, they can’t be seen as anything less than a deliberate attempt to stop publication. Regardless of motive, that’s really poor from an ethical standpoint.
Someone needs to ask her about it.
Really, this needs a whole bunch of discussion. This is FICTION. It’s not REAL. Isn’t their something real to get your panties in a wad about?
Examples:
The whole Sudan thing
Did you know Equatorial Guinea is a crazy-assed dictatorship?
Plummeting economy, etc. in U.S.A.
I’m all for escapism in books, but this kind of discussion totally kills that for me. I don’t even want to read the book now that I know everybody is being all fussybritches about it.
You came over a romance reading and critique blog looking for political analysis?
Are you new to the internet or something?
It’s jihad of the heart (jihad bil qalb) and of the mind.
“The goal of true jihad is to attain a harmony between islam (submission), iman (faith), and ihsan (righteous living).” ~ Mahmoud Ayoub
Just running that up the flagpole, not to start a debate on jihad, just to add to the discussion and to further the notion of what it is to struggle (jihad) in Islam.
Aquanana But the book and how it offends Muslims, frankly the fact that anyone in the USA would even *care* about offending Muslims, springs directly from “American politics” (I’d say global). In fact the two issues have been closely intertwined in both of these discussions. That particular comment of Katherine’s was part of one with snarkhunter that covered, at one point, the different ways Christianity and Islam revolved in their respective countries and how that shapes our current reactions to art relating to their respective deities. And this is why I can’t help but see your comments as willful misinterpretation at worst and selective reading at best, when you cherry pick Katherine’s comment like that, tie it directly to Sherry Jones book and summarise Katherine’s argument as “Publish this book -> WWIII”. You simplify the entire discussion situation to “a book and the offense that Muslims feel about it” when in the first thread the initial reactions to the information that some grad student group had put together a bullet point list was “OMG TEH TERRORISTS WILL NEVAH TAKE MY FREEDOM”. It’s about the book and, judging from the first thread’s argument, about a lot more, wouldn’t you say?
I guess it just seems to me that for a while the conversation had taken on some nuance and you came in with a lot of blunt, rough points. But maybe what for me is nuance and (perhaps arguably) off-topic convo because we just don’t have the book in front of us you see as irrelevant topics.
And I guess my reading comprehension skills are shot because your question about peaceful Muslim people makes no sense to me unless peaceful is a synonym for pacifist. (Actually the entire question confuses me. Again it’s if you’re reading her remarks without any context—in this case the current political situation. Surely, we’ve seen how a mixture of ignorance, fear and willful deceit has led to chaos in two countries now?)
Personally, I’m just disappointed that we’ve fallen into the “violent Muslims” image. Curse you, Katherine, and your WWIII!
Ann
Actually, I think she’s pissed off *because* there is political talk on this blog and it’s caused by a lowly fiction book rather the latest NYT non-fiction bestseller.
Smart Bitches—where we’re not afraid to take fiction seriously. Plakate you may not be new to the internet but you certainly seem to be new to Smart Bitches. Shall I link you to all the deep deep discussion that our favourite frothy romances have started or try to find you some cover art mockery?
Robin then my work here is done ;).
Someone give me an internet slap the next time I re-interpret a poster’s comment to someone else.
Just a comment on Spellberg and then I’m not saying anything else about her, because I only know her via her scholarship, which I am quite excited about in American Islamic Studies: the woman is tenured and frankly, no one in Middle East Women’s Studies has mentioned this controversy at all. It is a blip if it is anything at all. I was just blindsided with it yesterday and frankly, with the school year starting in three weeks (I am not a great example of this, but other people are), there are far more important things going on besides chasing Denise Spellberg around and tearing her down. More than likely, no one will even remember this fiasco by the start of classes. It may come-up here and there, but it’s certainly not going to be like the Rushdie Affair.
Further, just to clarify, a fatwa is a religious ruling, it is not a death sentence, so be careful sort of flinging that word around. I know that it has been conflated with Rushie to mean a death sentence, but in his case it is more that he was ruled to have committed apostasy and thus subject to death. The easiest way to contextualise that or express it was to just call it a fatwa as opposed to trying to untangle the Shari’a for the masses.
Shame because it raises important questions about academic integrity and independence, and deserves more than to be swept under the carpet as a ‘blip’.
Arethusa, all the really big arguments in my marriage have been about penises (monkeys, but still) so it doesn’t surprise me that heavy stuff comes out of a devotion to mantitty 🙂
It really does deserve more discussion in the classroom, unfortunately at the moment we have a larger body of issues to deal with when it comes to America’s college students, chiefly their inability to remove themselves completely from the womb and to think outside of a textbook. This is particularly profound in Islamic Studies and under the umbrella of Religious Studies.
There may be discussions at MESA or amongst colleagues, however if it isn’t ruled important enough by the matriarchs, it doesn’t fly. Sad but true.
That’s pretty much the point I was making. But many people perceive such accounts to be factual (especially if they’re accepted as such by a majority) and, therefore, take umbrage when the accounts are “altered” by writers! I’m only bothered when incontrovertible fact is violated . . . in terms of, say, archeological or photographic evidence. But that doesn’t seem to be the case with Ms. Jones’s novel.
My apologies for being “blunt and rough”, but that is just the type of person I am.
No, I am not reading her comments out of context. I am well aware of the current political situation. Yes, I jumped into the middle of a conversation, with my own comments and questions regarding what was being said by her and what she meant by her comments. Does that make me “fatuous”? Or cherry picking comments? No, I took it all into account and thought it through when I asked the questions.
Katherine’s comments came across, to me, as saying that anybody writing about the Prophet should give him more consideration than they would normally give to even their own religious figures so as not to needlessly offend Muslims.
I asked why that was necessary and was told
I then asked (in a roundabout way admittedly) how a non-Muslim giving the Prophet more consideration would change that. At which point you added some snide comments to a post you had made previously which I missed initially because there had already been several comments made before your edit.
Snarkhunter replied to the above quoted post and made a comment about caving in which Katherine replied to by saying
And that post says to me that the sensibilities of Muslims should be protected else the world is going to go kerflooey. Which comes across as bigoted and hypocritical to me because it places the blame on Muslims for needing their sensibilities protected.
I understand your point, but I completely disagree. I know you have said this is not a “romance” it is historical fiction… but let’s take a look at some of the historical romances (my personal favorite) that are sloppily written/ researched. There are some where the author takes extreme liberties and has the characters behave in such a manner that never would have happened, or they would not have gotten away with it if they did. Or they wear things that were not real during certain time periods(tartan plaids anyone?), Or use inventions that did not exist yet, or make someone random friends with William the Conquer and completely change the invasion of Saxon England.
For me those books become wall-bangers, despite the fact that they are “fiction”. Sure you can press the bounds, but there has to be a really good explanation for it to make it plausible. Unless there is an explanation later in this book, I do not find the situation plausible (though I will admit I liked your voice).
So yeah, I see how this could become a wall-banger for someone who KNOWS that the “character” never acted in that manner. Still, I don’t think it should have been yanked off the publishing schedule. I find several authors offensive for various reasons… I simply will not read them, and if a friend asks, I make my objections very clear.
YAY, Snarkhunter! I knew as soon as I saw the name Montag that you’d resurrected Bradbury to carve this issue to its core:
Where the bloody hell does this kind of thing END?
Nearly every human being on the face of the planet finds something offensive or upsetting. So who will become the ultimate arbiter of what material is “acceptable” and what isn’t? Who? (I sure as shit don’t want that job. Do any of you? Maybe we should dust off Orwell and drag Big Brother into the discussion.) Must we all ultimately become brainless, cat-pawed androids, devoid of tastes, predilections, opinions, affinities, aversions, and convictions?
Fahrenheit 451, indeed.
If your president was assassinated? No. If your child was murdered? No. If the fundamental tenets and truth and sanctity of your religion were sullied by a fiction writer?
That’s the type of grenades that are being thrown over the wall ( this book, the Danish cartoon scandal and there are really too many too count. But they can be seen as acts of war.)
Exactly!!!! You hold that sacred and you think that is an inviolable right. Many Americans and Europeans think so too. But its not. Western hegemony would like to try to make it so. But everyone on this earth doesn’t think that is a universal truth. In fact many someones think that there are somethings that are so precious and so sacred that affronts to sanctity can, should and must be suppressed.
oops fucked up my own post let me retry.
Is there something you hold so sacred that if it was sullied you would go to war for it? That’s what you need to ask yourself?
If your president was assassinated? No. If your child was murdered? No. Murdering babies in the womb??? If the fundamental tenets and truth and sanctity of your religion were sullied by a fiction writer?
That’s the type of grenades that are being thrown over the wall ( this book, the Danish cartoon scandal and there are really too many too count. But they can be seen as acts of war- cultural or othwerwise. Or at least fighting words.)
Exactly!!!! You hold that sacred and you think that is an inviolable right. Many Americans and Europeans think so too. But its not. Western hegemony would like to try to make it so. But everyone on this earth doesn’t think that is a universal truth. In fact many someones think that there are somethings that are so precious and so sacred that affronts to sanctity can, should and must be suppressed.
Okay, this is GRIPPING stuff, people, and I’m still processing the situation (clearly need to go back to read the previous posts on the matter) and trying to work my way through what I think is right here.
The ethical point about the professor’s actions and Random House’s reactions is one thing, but for the moment I want to concentrate on a different part of this situation – namely the very notion of writing and publishing this particular book in the first place, and what it means, and what it IS SEEN to mean.
And here we come to a collision of paradigms. For a non-Muslim, a Westerner, not only does this choice of subject matter seem pretty innocuous (within the context of ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’, ‘The Da Vinci Code’, Anne Rice’s recent ‘Christ the Lord’ etc – ie a context in which [even unflattering] fictionalizations of key religious figures are fairly commonplace), but a book like this actually looks like a *positive* thing. It doesn’t seem (from a Westerner’s pov) to be mocking Aisha or the Prophet Mohamed, (in the manner of Jesus Christ on ‘South Park’), so what’s the big deal? If it makes the Prophet and his people feel real, and sympathetic, and interesting, then that’s giving us a new perspective on Islam (something about which the vast majority of Westerners know precious little, and which is now inextricably linked in the public consciousness with 911 et al). The writer is trying to make us empathise with these people, rendering them more human, familiar, understandable, sympathetic, rather than leaving them as vague, frightening strangers. Moreover, this is an American writer and an American publisher – surely in America one should be upholding freedom of speech? Defending to the death a person’s right to be a jackass/racist/misogynist if they so wish? So even if it WERE a character assassination, they’re still allowed to write such a thing. And anyway, it’s FICTION, for crying out loud! It’s not purporting to be be reality!
I can see that side of it.
But then there’s the way this plays out if you’re Muslim.
In Christianity, we’ve abandoned that whole ‘no graven images’ thing and made Christ’s humanity and accessibility a touchstone. Artists’ representations of his tortured body hang from millions and millions of crosses all over the world. Artists’ representations of his trials and tribulations glitter in stained glass windows in millions of churches. Even God Himself is depicted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Our Holy Texts are retellings of events and teachings – the New Testament comprising accounts of Christ’s life and teachings told at second, third, fourth hand, mostly written hundreds of years after he’d died – and then translated from the original language, and perhaps retranslated, so that our English-language bible is already a palimpsest even before the various different sects of Christianity start differing on interpretation. We sing songs about Christ and about God the Father. We watch movies about his life.
This whole idea of fictionalising, of retelling, of reimagining is PIVOTAL to how Christianity functions. Mystery plays, murals, Mel Gibson’s ‘Passion of the Christ’ – this is what we do. Our connection with God is via Jesus Christ – ie the physical form He translated Himself into. Our connection with Jesus Christ is via the writings of his followers, penned long after his death – and then translated again (and again) into our own languages.
In Islam, it’s a whole different kettle of fish.
In Islam, the key holy text is not a mixture of different voices from different times, is not a collection of poems and oral histories translated and re-translated.
Pause for a moment and consider the implications of this: The Qu’ran is THE WORD OF GOD brought into the world by the Prophet Mohamed. End of story. It is read in the original Arabic, and the very language of the Qu’ran is lyrical, beautiful, moving, poetic, profound. There are no hymns in Islam, no songs of praise. The Qu’ran itself is that, and many people choose to listen to it on the radio as they drive around, as they study, as they cook, losing themselves in the beauty and cadence of the words given DIRECTLY to them by God, in their own language.
(The other main texts – the Hadith – come with built-in attributions [‘told by The Prophet Mohamed to A, who told B, who told C, who told me’]. If there is uncertainty as to their provenance or authenticity, that is made clear. Again, the focus is upon NOT having poetic license.)
Mosques are designed to focus one’s attention directly on God with the beauty coming from mathematical designs – patterns, abstract expressions of platonic purity. There are no murals, no statues, no stained glass windows telling stories of the life of the Prophet, because this is a very different paradigm of faith.
This is NOT a faith where narrative and artistic interpretation plays the kind of facilitating role it does in Christianity. Instead, that very device is seen as profoundly disrespectful, because it’s not considered truthful.
So then we have a first-person piece of historical fiction about the wife of the Prophet Mohamed, in which it is/may be implied that she was (or wanted to be) promiscuous. Poetic license to Ms Jones; something else entirely if you’re Muslim.
What we are talking about here is something offensive and provocative in the gut-level way that taking a sh*t on the American flag is offensive, or that promoting paedophilia is offensive and provocative.
Now we’ve seen how incendiary the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed were, and what happened to the school teacher who let her children name the class mascot teddy bear Mohamed (after one of the kids in the class). Although educated Muslims with personal experience of how Western culture works can see these incidents as the misunderstandings they were, for a huge number of uneducated people in the Middle East this kind of thing is an incomprehensible attack. It’s a “Yo’ Mama sucks donkey dick”-style slur on the grandest of scales.
And this feeds in to all the terrible sense of frustration, fear and anger at injustice that’s already so rife in the Middle East, where people are seeing neighbouring countries like Afghanistan and Iraq and, of course, Palestine, being invaded and occupied by rich, well-armed, powerful Westerners imposing unfamiliar philosophies and systems, and followed by Western companies hungry for profit.
This book, as and when it’s published (and I’m pretty damn sure that it will be published) is going to be, as Katherine so incisively put it up above, a hand grenade lobbed over the wall in the ongoing cultural war with Islam.
I don’t think it’s INTENDED to be a hand grenade – in fact it may look very much like a bunch of flowers as we throw it from this side of the wall, but when it reaches the other side, it’s going to be a hand grenade.
Am I saying it shouldn’t be published? No. No, I don’t think I am. And actually, I have a lot of sympathy for Richard Dawkins’ feeling that we shouldn’t pander to religious sensibilities at all, that we shouldn’t worry about offending people by pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes on. Intellectually, I agree with him.
But I was living in the Middle East when the Danish cartoons thing happened, and I have a pretty clear sense of how baffled and angry people are likely to feel about this. And how THAT can be manipulated and increased by articulate people in positions of power. There is already more than enough resentment and frustration and powerlessness being felt in the Middle East, as a result of our foreign policies.
Do I think that this book, however lovingly researched, however well written, is likely to be worth the pain, confusion, anger and backlash it’s liable to engender? Frankly, no. I love books, and I understand that within the context of US writer and readers this book is just a story, but within the context of the world stage, it’s a hand grenade. Perhaps worse. And I’m going to have to live with the consequences. And so are you.
I just can’t agree with that. Those aren’t grenades, and to call them that trivializes people who are actually killed by violence. That Danish cartoon didn’t kill anyone.
And they’re not acts of war. They are actions performed by individuals, not countries, no matter how distasteful you or anyone else finds them.
It’s not a universal truth, but it’s true under the law in this country.
I’m not trying to say that authors shouldn’t try to be more sensitive of cultural and/ or religious boundaries, Muslim or otherwise. But conflating a creative act with one that destroys lives is incendiary. A novel is not an act of war.