Bookkake launched on an inauspicious day for publishers: on the same morning, the home of Martin Rynja, director of independent publisher Gibson Square, was the subject of an attempted arson attack, apparently in connection with an upcoming novel. It would be nice to think these were just opportunists, but the presence of police officers already tailing the group suggests otherwise. This was a planned attack, and for obvious reasons.
Gibson Square specialises in political and current topics. Books such as Londonistan by Melanie Phillips and Blowing Up Russia by Yuri Felshtinsky and the late Alexander Litvinenko have stirred up controversy for different reasons, but it is the publication of Sherry Jones’ The Jewel of Medina which is believed to be the spur for recent events.
The Jewel of Medina was originally acquired - for the reported and substantial sum of $100,000, by Ballantyne, a division of Random House USA, before being dropped amid fears of just this sort of thing, and only then to be acquired by Gibson Square in the UK, Beaufort Books in the US, and at least 18 other countries around the world.
The novel itself is by all accounts maudlin and purple, and underwhelming, but this probably matters little to those more interested in fire-bombing than critical appreciation. This morning, the author has attacked those who have inflamed the debate this far, notably Denise Spellberg, an associate professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas, who was quoted in the US media as saying it took “sacred history” and turned it into “softcore pornography”. Last week, she also took her former publisher to task for their self-serving self-censorship: “I don’t think there would have been any trouble. The real problem is not that Muslims are offended but that people think they will be. I was disgusted by the inflammatory language Random House used to describe the potential Muslim reaction.”
As Slate Magazine points out, books about Aisha, the wife of Mohammed and the focus of The Jewel of Medina, and their ensuing debate, are nothing new, and nor are the presence of extremists who’ll queer it. More worrying, as Kenan Malik writes in The Times, is the attitude of publishers who withdraw works from publication at the hint of religious scandal. The attack on Martin Rynja comes almost exactly twenty years after the publication of The Satanic Verses, a book which survived a fatwah and a crisis in attitudes to free speech to win through to publication, but Malik writes, in the long run we’ve lost the battle on free speech.
The right to freedom of speech includes not only the right to say and publish what you want, but to do so free of the fear of attack or retribution. The response to this attack will determine whether British attitudes have changed in the last twenty years, or if we are now too scared to print what we really think.
P.S. Is anyone else surprised that all the newspapers and websites printed Martin’s home address, and a picture of his house? We’re all for fearless publishers, but there’s no need to make it quite so easy for those who wish to do harm.
