The Bookseller.com

8th January 2009

Philip Jones is the managing editor of theBookseller.com. He will blog with links and comment about the book business.

A Jewel worth fighting over?

15.08.08

Profile managing director Andrew Frankin's response to the decision by Random House US to pull out of publishing a romantic work of fiction featuring the Prophet Mohammed and his child bride Aisha was an understandable gut-reaction. They are "such cowards", he told the Guardian. Later explaining to The Bookseller: "I just think publishers should uphold the principle of free speech . . . [it] is sacred, without it, we should give up and go home."

Franklin speaks as a former corporate publisher, and with some knowledge—he was at Penguin during publication of The Satanic Verses. But he also speaks as an independent publisher (at heart) and one happy to cock a snook at the corporates.

But Franklin is clearly not alone: Rushdie himself has told the Associated Press. "This is censorship by fear, and it sets a very bad precedent indeed." (Random House publishes Rushdie on both sides of the pond). While the web, and theBookseller.com, is now peppered with comments such as "Have we already become dhimmis to islam?", from people who seem as interested in criticising Islam (or Random) as defending free speech.

The full story is likely to be more nuanced than these comments allow. The facts behind the cancelled book have already shifted, and much of the detail that led to the decision being made has yet to be aired. For instance, the original story that broke the news (a couple of months after the book had been culled) suggested that it was all down to one academic (Denise Spellberg), and a Muslim colleague (who felt the need to warn other Muslims). But this later proved to be only half-true, with Random and Spellberg both insisting that more than one source warned the US publisher that the book would be offensive to Muslims.

Spellberg cannot be said to be entirely innocent, by many accounts railing to such an extent that Random House publishers could hardly ignore her warnings—she has called The Jewel of Medina a "very ugly, stupid piece of work",  and accused its author of  being the latest champion of "a long history of anti-Islamic polemic that uses sex and violence to attack the Prophet and his faith . . . first pioneered in medieval Christian writings".

Yet the number of "credible and unrelated sources" telling Random US the same thing does lend weight to what its spokesman described as a "difficult decision". Of course, the publisher has not helped its case by not disclosing more about the warnings, but commentators should perhaps at least give Random the benefit of the doubt that it would not take such a decision lightly.

It may be, as Julian Rivers argues in the comments published on this site that a "brave indie will outperform a corporate publisher in this regard every time" (and he points to one occasion when that certainly has happened), but even corporate publishers are not generally as weak-kneed as this suggests.

Of course publishers regularly cancel books, even at the eleventh hour, and not always because the lawyers or accountants have got involved. Sometimes they just cancel them because they are bad books. There is no suggestion that this is what happened in this case, but could it be true that Random just decided the book was not important enough to put itself or its staff at risk over? The Jewel of Medina is not The Satanic Verses, and lest we forget Random House remains the publisher of the more important work.