Religious Censorship: Muslim Threats Prevent Publication of “Jewel of Medina”
Thanks to the panicky reactions of University of Texas professor Denise Spellberg, outrage about a novel depicting the life of Mohammed’s child bride Aisha has led Random House to nix its publication. I’m so pleased to see that Texas can now claim to be home to idiotic religious zealots of more than one stripe.
As reported in the Wall Street Journal today, Spellberg was asked to read the book for a possible endorsement. But:
But Ms. Spellberg wasn’t a fan of Ms. Jones’s book. On
April 30, Shahed Amanullah, a guest lecturer in Ms. Spellberg’s classes
and the editor of a popular Muslim Web site, got a frantic call from
her. “She was upset,” Mr. Amanullah recalls. He says Ms. Spellberg told
him the novel “made fun of Muslims and their history,” and asked him to
warn Muslims.
In an interview, Ms. Spellberg told me the novel is a
“very ugly, stupid piece of work.” The novel, for example, includes a
scene on the night when Muhammad consummated his marriage with Aisha:
“the pain of consummation soon melted away. Muhammad was so gentle. I
hardly felt the scorpion’s sting. To be in his arms, skin to skin, was
the bliss I had longed for all my life.” Says Ms. Spellberg: “I walked
through a metal detector to see ‘Last Temptation of Christ,’” the
controversial 1980s film adaptation of a novel that depicted a
relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. “I don’t have a problem
with historical fiction. I do have a problem with the deliberate
misinterpretation of history. You can’t play with a sacred history and
turn it into soft core pornography.”
This is absurd. It is a little hard to tell whether the quoted section of the novel was cited by Spellberg as one of the offensive parts or not, but it hardly matters. This is an example of an academic betraying the very intellectual freedoms the academy stands for. I’m sickened.