Sherry Jones Has The Right To Offend Me

August 14

By now those of you with your ears to the ground will have heard the following: publication of The Jewel of Medina, a historical novel by Sherry Jones, has been indefinitely postponed by its publisher, Random House. The reason? The novel, which chronicles the life of Aisha, a wife of the Prophet Muhammad, could provoke violent backlash from conservative Muslims. One excerpt, in which Aisha recalls her first sexual encounter with Muhammad, has been making its way around the internet, and has become the subject of much debate.

There is a fundamental misunderstanding between secular people and people of faith about religious figures. It boils down to this: to a person of faith, reading about the private lives of religious figures is like reading about the private lives of your parents. Even if there’s only one sex scene, done in the most tasteful manner imaginable, it’s still a sex scene about your parents. No one in their right mind wants to see that. True to form, I read the excerpt and wanted to call my therapist. Faith is irrational. That is part of its beauty, but also part of what makes it dangerous.

Yes, I was offended. By a single paragraph of an unpublished book. Even though it was clear the author did not intend to be offensive, and had in fact attempted to handle the subject in a delicate manner. (Albeit with some rather purple language.) But that doesn’t matter. Sherry Jones has the right to speak her mind whether I am offended or not. She has the right to be published whether I am offended or not. The true measure of our moral courage is whether we defend the art we can’t stand with the same vigor with which we defend the art we love. So I am willing to go to bat for this.

There is another reason I feel this particular book is worth fighting for: The Jewel might be purple, but it is not hate speech. That much is also immediately clear. During the Danish cartoon fiasco I said I refused to defend hate speech as free speech, even though I realize the two cannot be uncoupled. I said I wished someone would write a provocative but genuinely exploratory book about the life of the Prophet Muhammad, so we could at least have a conversation about real ideas. Well, here we are.

The refusal to publish The Jewel of Medina cedes valuable ground to the fundamentalists. Is there a danger of violence if it is published? Yes, I’m afraid there probably is. But Sherry Jones wants her rights back, and I want my religion back. We’ve all got skin in the game now. At some point, we’re going to have to act like it.