You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (9 page)

It did not sound much of an improvement. But the gay Pentecostalists were undaunted. ‘Rather than forbidding male homosexuality’, they decided, Leviticus simply restricts where lovemaking may occur. According to their reading, if a bisexual man takes a gay lover into the bedroom he shares with his wife, he is committing an abomination in the eyes of the Lord. But if he sneaks him into the spare bedroom, then everything will be fine with God, although not, I imagine, with his wife.

An ingenious American rabbi by the name of Arthur Waskow decided that Leviticus could have meant:

Once more, there seemed to be no substantial change to the rules of engagement. But the rabbi decided that Leviticus was saying that men must make love like men, not women. If two men have sex, neither should be the passive, womanly partner, he explained. They must come out of the closet and revel in their masculine sexuality when they get down to business. As the authors of Leviticus issued prohibitions against everything from bestiality to sacrificing donkeys, it is improbable that they wanted men to be out, loud and proud when they made love. But you can see why a liberal rabbi wanted to twist the Torah’s words.

These arguments are casuistic, because if a conservative theologian could prove that Leviticus or St Paul had an unswerving opposition to homosexuality, liberal believers would not shrug and accept defeat, but would try to reconcile religion and liberalism by another tortuous method. However, the liberals’ bad faith is not complete. They may be trying to get round inhumane prohibitions of homosexual love with arguments that are close to being ridiculous, but they never pretend that the inhumane verses do not exist. If they did, their conservative opponents would rout them. They would simply point to the relevant passages in the Torah or the New Testament and win the argument.

Muslim feminist reformers try a third and braver tactic when they confront Koranic justifications for sexism or the endorsement of child marriage. They tell believers ‘to reject literal reads of the Koran and recognise that these verses were communicated during specific moments of war, and they aren’t edicts for all time. We, as Muslims, must reject the notion that we read these words literally.’ The reformers want to persuade the faithful that not every verse is true. Again, they do not wish away the difficulties of the enterprise by talking as if there is no conflict between modernity and tradition.

The task of pretending that a fundamental schism between liberalism and religious authoritarianism does not exist has fallen to the generation of post-Rushdie apologists. They do not say that believers should ignore the hadiths that describe Muhammad’s consummation of a marriage to a nine-year-old girl. Nor do they reinterpret them, or argue that the hadiths do not constitute reliable evidence as their collectors did not find them and write them down until long after Muhammad’s death. (Bukhari lived two hundred years after the Prophet died.) Instead, they write as if the uncomfortable passages are not there.

Sherry Jones strikes me as less culpable than others who self-censor to avoid offence.
The Jewel of Medina
is a novel. She is not offering readers a factual account, but telling a story. She ignores unpleasant evidence because she is a warm woman, with a heart throbbing to the passionate rhythms of sentimental fiction, and a soul brimming over with love for humankind.

Why would anyone want to hurt her for that?

The Rise of the Religious Informer

Random House was delighted with
The Jewel of Medina
. It set a publication date for August 2008, and told Sherry Jones it would send her on a nationwide tour.

Days later, it pulled the book. Random House explained that ‘credible and unrelated sources’ had given it ‘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’. For ‘the safety of the author, employees of Random House, booksellers and anyone else who would be involved in the distribution and sale of the novel’, it had to abandon its planned publication of
The Jewel of Medina
.

Jones was devastated. She could not understand how anyone in the Muslim community could have found her book offensive.
The Jewel of Medina
was her first novel. Random House had told her it would be a bestseller. Her chance to become a novelist, her hopes of a big break, had been snatched from her. There is no record of her reaction when she found that one of the ‘credible sources’ who had damned the book was not a Jamaat activist in the Indian subcontinent or an ayatollah in Tehran, but a Western academic.

One of the creepy consequences of living in an age of religious extremism is that readers start thinking like police spies. ‘She can’t expect to get away with that,’ we mutter as we put down the book and wait for the inevitable protests. ‘She must know she’s asking for trouble.’

Usually, demands for censorship and retribution come from members of the confessional group that has been insulted, or can simulate an offended manner, but not always. In an atmosphere of cultural tension, the small-minded discover that they cannot allow debates to be won on their merits. They must take it upon themselves to play the informer and point the finger at offenders.

Of all people, academics ought to have a professional interest in unconstrained intellectual freedom. If an American president were to demand the dismissal of leftish professors on US campuses for criticising American foreign policy, his targets would cry ‘McCarthyism’. Liberal opinion would rally behind them and defend their right to speak their minds. Yet academics who depend on freedom of thought are among the first to deny its benefits to others. The twisted legacy of the 1968 generation carries much of the blame. The original attempts of the baby-boomer ‘New Left’ to promote equality were honourable, and conservatives who sneered at political correctness revealed nothing more than their own brutishness. Those who spoke up for black, Hispanic, female and gay students were asking for fair treatment. They wanted universities to ensure that no man or woman was refused the education they deserved to receive.

Treating people as equals means treating them as adults who can handle robust argument, not as children who need to be told fairy stories and tucked up in bed. But as the culture wars raged, fairy stories were what the universities delivered. Topics and arguments were ruled off-limits; real and imagined heresies denounced with phlegm-spitting vehemence; and comforting histories promulgated on how black Egypt was responsible for the philosophies of ancient Athens, or how Amazonian tribes were noble savages living in a state of prelapsarian harmony until wicked whitey came along.

Islamism came into universities whose academics had the good liberal motive that they should not discriminate against students because of their race or religion, but whose intellectual defences had been weakened by the hysterical attitudes the culture wars fostered. By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, academia had acquired a further bias. In general, academics hated George W. Bush and Tony Blair’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and worried about illiberal restrictions on human rights that the post-9/11 anti-terrorism legislation imposed. Many academics went on to find justifications for terror. An interventionist foreign policy and an authoritarian criminal justice policy were ‘recruiting sergeants’ for terrorism, they said. When they met students and preachers who promoted hate-filled ideologies, they could not argue against them with the vigour with which they argued against the hatreds of the white far right, because they thought Islamist hatred was justified in part.

Fear caught their tongues, too: the fear of accusations of ‘racism’, ‘neo-conservatism’, ‘Islamophobia’ or ‘orientalism’; the fear of having to admit that their vague commitments to anti-imperialist solidarity were feeding reactionary movements; and the fear of violence. At City University, London, an investigation by liberal Muslims found students who preached, ‘When they say to us the Islamic state teaches to cut off the hand of the thief, yes it does! And it also teaches us to stone the adulterer … When they tell us that the Islamic state tells us and teaches us to kill the apostate, yes it does! Because this is what Allah and his messenger have taught us, and this is the religion of Allah and it is Allah who legislates and only Allah has the right to legislate.’ Lesbian, gay and Jewish students reported feeling intimidated, while journalists on the independent student newspaper received threats after they covered the story.

They were not alone in that. ‘A couple of years ago, UCL allowed the Islamic Society to put on a show of Islamic art,’ recalled Professor John Sutherland of University College, London, in 2010. ‘A friend of mine, an eminent scientist, strolled in to take a look. Was he a believer, asked an obviously Muslim student. No, replied my friend, he didn’t believe in any god, as it happened. “Then,” the young man confidently informed him, “we shall have to execute you.” He wasn’t joking; he was predicting. He wasn’t going to draw a scimitar that minute and lop off the godless one’s head, but he implied that at some future point such things would happen.’ Sutherland was dragging up his memories of this old confrontation because on Christmas Day 2009 a graduate of University College, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, tried to detonate plastic explosives hidden in his underwear and murder the 289 passengers and crew on a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.

Abdulmutallab had come to Britain from a good home – his father had been chairman of the First Bank of Nigeria. He was radicalised in the Dostoyevskian world of London extremism where the white far left meets the Islamist far right. Lonely and sexually frustrated – ‘The hair of a woman can easily arouse a man. The Prophet advised young men to fast if they can’t get married but it has not been helping me,’ he wrote on a Web forum for young Muslims – he drifted towards his university’s Islamic society.

He found himself in a religious atmosphere saturated with conspiracy theory. Speakers at the UCL Islamic Society had advocated anti-Semitic hatred. Jews are ‘all the same’, said one. ‘They’ve monopolised everything: the Holocaust, God, money, interest, usury, the world economy, the media, political institutions … they monopolised tyranny and oppression as well.’

A TV crew caught another on camera saying that homosexuals should be thrown off cliffs and that the testimony of a woman was worth half that of a man. A common theme was that although Westerners were murderous, tyrannical, corrupt and licentious, they were also perilously seductive. ‘Today, the culture of Coke and the Big Mac, the culture of the Americans, the culture of the Europeans, these cultures are dominant and they are all-pervasive,’ a third guest was on record as saying. ‘We stand in awe of their culture and we are imitating them in everything. This culture, this evil influence, this imitation of the kuffar.’

After Abdulmutallab became president of the UCL Islamic Society in 2005, he organised martial-arts training and an ‘anti-terror week’, which featured a video of clips of violence, accompanied by a hypnotic soundtrack. The film-maker included footage of British left-wing politicians saying that the West believed that Palestinian blood was cheaper than Israeli blood, and of a former prisoner of war alleging that the Americans tortured him at Guantánamo Bay.

‘When we sat down, they played a video that opened with shots of the twin towers after they’d been hit, then moved on to images of mujahedeen fighting, firing rockets in Afghanistan,’ one member of the audience said. ‘It was quite tense in the theatre, because I think lots of people were shocked by how extreme it was. It seemed to me like it was brainwashing, like they were trying to indoctrinate people.’

When the FBI arrested Abdulmutallab, journalists wanted to know why the university had not done more to fight extremism. The response of the university authorities was an education in itself. They denounced the ‘quite disturbing level of Islamophobia’ the case had aroused. Their inquiry decided that Abdulmutallab’s radicalisation had happened after he left university, despite the evidence to the contrary. At a meeting at UCL to discuss the controversy, I watched academics and student leaders abuse the university’s critics. They were the real racists and bigots, not the guests of the Islamic Society. They were the ones who needed ‘de-radicalising’, not the religious reactionaries.

It is less surprising than it ought to be that academics were on the side of repression when censors came for a harmless novel by a well-meaning writer.

Among those who received advance copies of
The Jewel of Medina
was Denise Spellberg, an associate professor of Islamic history at the University of Texas in Austin. Jones had read Spellberg’s
Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of ’A’isha Bint Abi Bakr
while researching her novel, and the publishers might have hoped that Spellberg would supply a puff quote.

If they did, they were disappointed. Spellberg phoned Shahed Amanullah, a lecturer at her university, and the editor of altmuslim.com, a popular site for American Muslims. ‘She was upset,’ Amanullah told the
Wall Street Journal
. She asked him to ‘warn Muslims’ that a novel that ‘made fun of Muslims and their history’ was on its way. Spellberg confirmed to the paper that she hated the book. It was a ‘very ugly, stupid piece of work’, she said and quoted a scene which takes place on the night when Muhammad consummates his marriage with Aisha. Spellberg said that Jones was guilty of a ‘deliberate misinterpretation of history’, and of producing soft porn. She did not seem to grasp that novelists are not historians, and in any case, if
The Jewel of Medina
was misinterpreting history, it was misinterpreting it in Muhammad’s favour.