When Hypocrites Attack: The Times and Free Speech

The New York Times' Sunday Book Review casts a condescending eye on Sherry Jones' 'The Jewel of Medina,' the novel that Random House bought, then dropped in the face of possible Islamic retaliation, and that got its European publisher firebombed.

Reviewer Lorraine Adams' conclusion:

[Another critic's] characterization of "The Jewel of Medina" as soft porn doesn't hold up, since the language describing A'isha and Muhammad's conjugal relations is always euphemistic and most often juvenile. 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.

Holy Ka'aba! Where to begin?

In fairness, the distaste Adams expresses in the first paragraph might be more or less warranted. Jones, by the looks of it, is hardly the literary world's greatest stylist. On the other hand, you can bet your bottom dollar that if the goat's-bladder metaphor had been employed by a Times-approved novelist like Annie Proulx (much of whose prose deserves a special award for being laughably contrived and overwrought), a Times reviewer would have either charitably ignored it, or praised it to the skies.

It's Adams' final graf, of course, that really gets my dander up.

1. There's nothing "intellectual" about the argument concerning A'isha and the so-called prophet who married her (when she was nine years old), any more than there's anything intellectual about debating whether Jonah really spent three days and nights in the belly of a whale and lived to preach about it. "Intellectual" implies the determined application of painstaking mental rigor. Squabbling about fairy-tale books, even fairy-tale books for purported grown-ups, is the opposite of intellectual.

2. Adams asks if free-speech advocates ought to champion Jones's book, and sullenly votes no. It's obviously the wrong question (and I suspect she knows it). The free-speech advocates I know haven't the slightest desire to be arbiters of taste — quite the contrary. They're not out to convince anyone that a particular book, play, or pamphlet must be read. They're out to convince people that, in a free society, said book, play, or pamphlet must be available.

3. Porn is "repugnant," Adams says (I have to assume that it isn't to the billion or so men and women who produce and consume it, but fine). What I find repugnant is the country's top newspaper gratuitously slamming consensual pornography in a throwaway line, without writing one word — one word — against the Islam-inspired threats, and the actual violence, that have dogged Jones's novel from the start.

4. Like PEN, Adams finds 'The Jewel of Medina' unworthy of even the most cursory free-speech defense because "it doesn't qualify as art." Well, fuck: 'The Diary of Anne Frank' arguably isn't art either, but PEN and Adams would almost certainly speak out against attempts to suppress that book, and rightly so. A double standard, maybe?

Setting aside the perennial eye-of-the-beholder obstacle, one problem with the art/non-art distinction is that it's the favorite refuge of despots and censors everywhere — see also degenerate art. Another is that "high" art (itself a malleable term that covers an ever-changing lineup of works) is rarely in need of free-speech protection. Standing tall for the Nightwatch and the Mona Lisa, or for 'Hamlet' and 'The Great Gatsby,' is meaningless and disingenuous unless you're also prepared, when necessary, to stick your neck out for 'The Book of Bunny Suicides' and, yes, for 'The Jewel of Medina.'

There can be little doubt that if Adams's own tender-hearted novel were to come under fire (ha!) from religious radicals, she'd invoke the free-speech defense in about a nano-second. Denying others the rights and protections you demand for yourself is the zenith of arrogance. Jones's book may be imperfect, even "lamentable"; but its treatment in a newspaper claiming to be committed to freedom of expression is miles beyond that. 'Ugly' and 'hypocritical' come to mind.

Comments

[McDuff]

There is a line that most people fail to draw between "art" and "stuff I like." Arts critics are notorious for this kind of nonsense. There are some fabulous critics writing at the moment but they are unfortunately few and far between, scattered between hair-brained ninnies who think that affectation and pomposity is a substitute for talent and taste.

Assuming that she's right about the quality, though, what a godsend this is! She'll make far more money from a mediocre writing ability than she ever would have if she hadn't pissed off the prophet! What I wouldn't give for that kind of publicity.

[SW]

A. Something doesn't have to qualify as art, or even arguably BE art in order to be protected by freedom of speech. Period. Adams is basically a moron for not realizing this.

B. The Da Vinci Code ruffled a few feathers of the more uptight Christian crowd for its musings on the romantic relationships of a certain prophet, but you didn't see any Christians throwing molatov cocktails over it. I think it would do Muslims a world of good to lighten up a little.

[Harry Latto]

Adams can't be so stupid that she doesn't know that a work doesn't have to have artistic merit to be entitled to protection. The implication of her remarks is that certain works, not because of their unworthiness as art, but because of their content, don't deserve protection. Guess which ones: those that portray Islam in an unfavorable light. This view comes about either through simple cowardice -- inasmuch as Islam's defenders respond to criticism by leaving fire bombs at publishers' offices -- or because of something else, which I don't understand.

[McDuff]

Roger:

Re your earlier statements about Islamic demonstrations against violence, particularly in the context of Mumbai etc, will you be commenting further in light of events such as those reported here?

http://goatmilk.wordpress.com/2008/12/16/indian-muslims-choose-loyalty-to-country/

Please note, this is not an "aha!" or an attempt to entrap.

[Rogier]

The protest rallies in India are encouraging, and they warm my heart. They really do.

The article is bizarrely vague, though, on how many rallies there were, and how many people took part -- it only mentions appr. 5,000 for the "big" march in Mumbai. Hmm. Not to seem ungrateful for small feats of progress, but on a population of 140 million Indian Muslims, those who came out to protest Islamist slaughter appear to total perhaps 1/100th of one percent.

For a mind's-eye view of how that looks, picture the largest football stadium in the world (capacity slightly over 100,000) and envision just 1/100th of one percent of seats being occupied. That's, um, ten seats -- twenty if I apply the numbers in the most charitable way possible. And only ONE OR TWO seats'd be filled if we said that a full stadium stood for the world's 1.3 billion Muslims.

Also, I don't recall similar demonstrations by concerned Muslims after Islamist mass murderers took 3,000 lives on 9/11, or when another set of devout Muslims performed their butchery in London in July 2005 (http://www.bakelblog.com/nobodys_business/2005/07/it_moaned.html), and so on, from Bali to Beslan and beyond). Maybe I just missed those reports every time. Were all the world's progressive-minded Mohammedans otherwise engaged in the days and weeks after all those attacks -- too busy to organize the paltriest public protest against their religion being so perversely hijacked and abused?

But draw a cartoon that some tight-arsed ayatollah declares insufficiently respectful of a guy with a God complex who lived 14 centuries ago (PBUH), and Muslims the world over come out of the woodwork in comparatively impressive numbers, vowing bloody revenge.

Why is that?

(At this point, our whole discussion can resume from the start. Rinse and repeat as needed.)

By the way, not that I'm particular or anything, but the name's Rogier. With a i.