For fear of offending some loony Muslim, somewhere

Journalist Sherry Jones, 46, had worked for a decade at the Montana Missoulian when she went back to school to earn her 2006 bachelor’s in English and creative writing from the University of Montana.

She began reading about women in the Middle East while preparing her honors thesis.

Jones decided the story of Aisha, child bride of the Prophet Muhammad in 7th century Arabia, would make a good novel.

She spent five years and seven drafts perfecting her “exciting tale of love, war, spiritual awakening and redemption.” Although Jones has never been to the Middle East, she took two years of Arabic language classes, and gathered every book she could find to make her novel historically accurate.

Her hard work seemed to have paid off. Random House, largest English-language publisher in the world, liked the book enough to give Jones a $100,000 contract not just for the one book, but also for a sequel. “The Jewel of Medina” also was destined to be a Book of the Month selection, followed by distribution through the Quality Paperback Book Club. Lots of folks seemed to like it. Foreign rights sales were coming in from Europe.

Then the publicity folks at Random House sent a galley of the book to Denise Spellberg, an associate professor of history and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Texas at Austin, also under contract with Random House’s Knopf subsidiary — hoping for a positive blurb.

Instead, Spellberg went ballistic.

“Denise says it is ‘declaration of war … explosive stuff … a national security issue,’” an editor at Knopf wrote in an e-mail that made the rounds at Random House. “She thinks there is a very real possibility of major danger for the buildings and staff and widespread violence. Thinks it will be far more controversial than the satanic verses and the Danish cartoons … thinks the book should be withdrawn ASAP.”

So that’s just what Random House did.

Mind you, there have been no threats or protests from any actual Muslims, who seem singularly unconcerned, given that they certainly can’t deny Muhammad had a child bride named Aisha, “a remarkable figure in the history of the world, not just the Middle East,” as Jones explains. “She was instrumental in the formation of Islam as an early religion. She was an adviser to Muhammad at a young age. She was a political adviser to the successors of Muhammad, and led troops in the first Islamic civil war.”

But because the editors at Random House are afraid some Muslim, somewhere, MIGHT be offended by the book, they’ve told Jones to keep her $100,000 — and her manuscript.

“My book doesn’t have sex scenes,’ Jones says. “I deliberately wrote the book very sensitively. But now I get hate mail,” because Spellberg branded the book “soft-core pornography.”

Plenty of Christians were upset when “The Da Vinci Code” speculated that Jesus fathered children on Mary Magdalene, who later emigrated to France and founded that nation’s ruling line — a considerably more far-fetched theory that Jones’ assertion that Aisha lived in a harem before becoming Muhammad’s bride, as would have been typical for her time.

Though admittedly Christians are less likely to bomb embassies, these days, no fear of offending Christian radicals disrupted Doubleday’s plan to publish — and make millions from — Dan Brown’s potboiler.

But Random House says in a recent statement it first decided to postpone publication, and then reached a termination agreement with Jones, because of “ … 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.”

Last week Salman Rushdie, author of the controversial “The Satanic Verses,” came to Jones’ defense.

Mr. Rushdie’s book caused an uproar among Muslims around the world, who contended the novel insulted Islam. It led to a death decree in 1989 from Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and forced the author for years to live under police protection.

In an e-mail to The Associated Press, Rushdie said, “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.”

Random House is a private company. It has a right to publish or not publish whatever it pleases, of course.

Is it significant, here, that Random House has been owned since 1998 by the large German media corporation Bertelsmann? Quite possibly. This cowardice, this reluctance to stand up for free-speech rights against even the remote possibility of offending some benighted and ululating Muslim with a rusty sword to wave, somewhere, certainly seems more European than American.

One wonders if Random House will soon order all female employees to start wearing burqas, “just in case.”

As Neville Chamberlain proved at Munich, nothing more emboldens a would-be tyrant than to knuckle under to his whims and demands, rather then standing up and calling his bluff.

There’s no sign Ms. Jones’ book portrays her heroine as some homicidal slut. Though even if she wished to do so, it IS fiction … … the final test in a free market is whether anyone chooses to buy it … right?

“The Jewel of Medina” will doubtless be published by someone, at which point the controversy generated by the current cowardly stance of the bed-wetters at Random House will probably generate a few tens of thousands of additional sales.

Probably some mullah, somewhere, will condemn another work he hasn’t even read. Big deal.

But do remember this profile in courage the next time the spokesgeek for some Bertelsmann affiliate gets on his or her high horse, asserting their latest publication of some smarmy collection of Hollywood gossip proves they’re “fighting the good fight for everyone’s free speech rights.”

Not for those of Sherry Jones, evidently.

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