I wanted to honor Aisha and all the wives of Muhammad by giving voice to them, remarkable women whose crucial roles in the shaping of Islam have so often been ignored — silenced — by historians. I guess maybe someone will give them a voice next year or something. — Sherry Jones, You Still Can’t Write About Muhammad
This quote may not be entirely accurate.
Asra Q. Nomani has an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal talking about Random House’s decision not to release The Jewel of Medina, Jones’ novel about Aisha, the youngest wife of Muhammad.
Their reasoning?
[Random House deputy publisher Thomas Perry] said that after sending out advance copies of the novel, the company received “from credible and unrelated sources, cautionary advice not only that the publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community, but also that it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment.” … After consulting security experts and Islam scholars, Mr. Perry said the company decided “to postpone publication for the safety of the author, employees of Random House, booksellers and anyone else who would be involved in distribution and sale of the novel.”
So that’s… interesting. Random House has taken to avoiding the publication of books because brown people”sorry, a small, radical segment of brown people—might do something dangerous if they’re provoked. And, of course, the thing that’s meant to be doing the provoking is a fictionalized (perhaps highly fictionalized) account of a woman’s life.
For some reason, I wanted to write: “I’m torn,” but actually, I’m not torn, I’m with Asra. This is stupid, and it’s sad, and it’s more-than-slightly racist. It’s stupid on multiple levels, in fact. It’s stupid that writing about the women of early Islam as if they were actual people provokes such a chillingly negative response. It’s stupid that a western publisher reacts to fear of violence from vague, scary Muslims (who assuredly are just waiting for this book to come out as an excuse to blow up, I dunno, Los Angeles). And it’s an icy blend of stupid and colonialist that the author, the professor who took issue with the book, and—I’ll hazard—everyone handling this case at Random House is white, and not Muslim.
And that last point is why I felt maybe a bit ambivalent about this particular instance of corporate insanity. Unlike Nomani, I haven’t read the book. I don’t know if it’s shite or if it’s ridiculously offensive, and in any case I’m not particularly well-positioned to determine the latter. I do absolutely believe that misogyny—some of it particular to Islam, some of it not—is driving some of the outrage against the text and the publisher’s fear of promoting it. At the same time, this is one work of historical fiction by one white author, highlighted against a background of millions of living Muslim women—artists who are alive right now and whose voices are not silent but rather conspicuously muffled. I want Jones’ work to be published, I do, but I think there’s danger in letting it define the discourse, or become the extent of the Islamic feminist canon.
I’m not going to defend the decision, or the book. It sounds like the kind of book that’d make me roll my eyes, and as an editor, I’d have had to have found the author’s writing, research, and … cultural sensitivity creds, I guess … impeccable, to consider publishing a work of historical fiction about Muhammed’s wives.
That said,
I would be rather surprised if the editor at RH had not sent the book to at least one Muslim reviewer for a sensitivity read. I really would.
I work in an entirely different segment of the book publishing world, in Canada, so I’m not an authority on how trade publishers, especially fiction publishers, do business, but I know that in my segment of the publishing world, if we’re doing a book on a sensitive topic, and we think it might be so offensive to a significant enough number of people that it would do the book and the publisher harm to publish it, we send it to a cultural reviewer—more than one, if we have the time and budget, but at least one person who seems to be tied into that culture. Publishers don’t like to pull books. Controversy is good for sales.
Ideally, of course, they’d send review copies to a number of Muslim reviewers. And it looks, from the section you quoted, violet, as though the publisher did something very like that—as though they sought second and third opinions about the potential for offense from Muslim scholars (it’s unclear whether “Muslim scholars” refers to [possibly white] scholars who study things Muslim or to scholars who are Muslim [and therefore less likely to be white], to be sure. I could wish they’d been more precise in their diction.) So I’m less inclined to believe this is an all-white cast.
I read the article, and I have to say, I agree with the publisher’s decision. Theo van Gogh was murdered for his work, and this book depicts the private life of Muhammad, including the consummation of his marriage with Aisha (off topic but considering she was nine at the time, that does have somewhat of “ugh” factor). I hate that books have to be censored but I’d rather this book just not be published than have someone murdered over it, or the author having to be on 24 hr security detail like Rushdie or Hirsi Ali.
zing, you’re right. I don’t know who all Random House sent the book to, and it’s presumptive of me to assume they didn’t find any Muslim scholars (maybe Muslim feminist scholars? gasp! but perhaps—they were soliciting blurbs, after all).