Mick Hartley

The case of "The Jewel of Medina" is a tough one. Yes, it's obviously important to stand up for freedom of expression and against the threats of violence, but…..well, it's not exactly a work of art:

The novel is, in fact, an example of that subspecies of genre fiction, “historical romance.” Yet even judged by that standard, Jones’s prose is lamentable. Here’s A’isha as a girl, peeping at a couple in the throes of passion: “I stared at his behind, as big as my goat’s-bladder ball and covered with hair.” The Prophet isn’t spared either: “Desire? Muhammad was having so many of them at that moment, they clashed like lightning bolts on his face.”

An inexperienced, untalented author has naïvely stepped into an intense and deeply sensitive intellectual argument. She has conducted enough research to reimagine the accepted versions of Muhammad’s marriage to A’isha, thus offending the religious audience, but not nearly enough to enlighten the ordinary Western reader. Should free-speech advocates champion “The Jewel of Medina”? In the American context, the answer is unclear. The Constitution protects pornography and neo-Nazi T-shirts, but great writers don’t generally applaud them. If Jones’s work doesn’t reach those repugnant extremes, neither does it qualify as art. It is telling that PEN, the international association of writers that works to advance literature and defend free expression, has remained silent on the subject of this ­novel. Their stance seems just about right.

I'll stick with what I said when the case first became public, after Random House pulled out:

The principle's there, of course: fear of violence is the wrong reason for not publishing. But it's hard not to think that Random House's main mistake was to agree to publish The Jewel of Medina in the first place.