You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (10 page)

Amanullah dashed off an email to his graduate students: ‘Just got a frantic call from a professor who got an advance copy of the forthcoming novel,
Jewel of Medina
– she said she found it incredibly offensive.’

The next day, a blogger posted Amanullah’s email on a website for Shia Muslims, Hussaini Youth, under the headline ‘Upcoming Book,
Jewel of Medina
: A New Attempt to Slander the Prophet of Islam’. His readers rallied to the new cause. ‘In the garb of Freedom of Speech enemies of Islam are attacking Islam,’ said one poster. ‘You have the freedom of throwing the stones in the sky. But you can be prosecuted if it injures or kills someone.’

The publishers soon heard the commotion. A manager at Random House told her colleagues, ‘There is a very real possibility of major danger for the building and staff and widespread violence. Denise says it is a declaration of war … explosive stuff … a national security issue … thinks the book should be withdrawn ASAP.’

In a letter she later wrote to the
Wall Street Journal
, Spellberg said that she was not alone in wanting to see the book stopped. ‘I never had this power [to cancel publication], nor did I single-handedly stop the book’s publication. Random House made its final decision based on the advice of other scholars, conveniently not named in the article, and based ultimately on its determination of corporate interests. I felt it my duty to warn the press of the novel’s potential to provoke anger among some Muslims.’

The good, old cause of freedom of speech was upheld not by editors in New York, still less by academics in American universities determined to defend their country’s Bill of Rights, but by American Muslims. Asra Q. Nomani wrote the
Wall Street Journal
’s story about the incident, and concluded her piece with a personal note: ‘This saga upsets me as a Muslim – and as a writer who believes that fiction can bring Islamic history to life in a uniquely captivating and humanizing way. For all those who believe the life of the Prophet Muhammad can’t include stories of lust, anger and doubt, we need only read the Quran (18:110) where, it’s said, God instructed Muhammad to tell others: “I am only a mortal like you.”’

Shahed Amanullah, Denise Spellberg’s colleague, met Sherry Jones and liked her. ‘Unlike so many other times in our recent history where we are struggling against people who are really out to vilify us, I sensed from the beginning that you were doing this out of appreciation or respect,’ he told her, and then found the words that ought to have been in the mouths of American professors and publishers. ‘The best response to free speech ought to be more speech in return. Anyone should have the right to publish whatever he or she wants about Islam or Muslims – even if their views are offensive – without fear of censorship or retribution. In an ideal world, both parties would open their minds enough to understand the other point of view.’

Even the protests on the Shia website were not as menacing as they appeared. Its readers’ action plan consisted of a letter-writing campaign.

Rival publishers realised that Random House had not just failed to defend free speech, but worse – much, much worse – had failed to think about the bottom line. Beaufort Books decided the fears of a violent attack were twaddle, and snapped up
The Jewel of Medina
. Sherry Jones had her bestseller, and foreign houses bought the overseas rights. Jones and everyone associated with her book seemed safe.

In her eerie poem ‘The Terrorist, He Watches’, the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska describes a terrorist looking at a bar in the minutes before his bomb will explode. Some people escape danger just in time, although they do not know it. Others walk into the bar and to their deaths. It is the terrorist’s detachment that gives the poem its power. Everyone in and around the bar is in his killing zone. Whether they live or die is down to luck. The terrorist sees a bald man leave, then turn back to collect his gloves. He will die. Another man gets on a scooter and rides off. He will live. The terrorist does not mind who his targets are, as long as he has targets.

The publishers who bought
The Jewel of Medina
did not realise that they were now in the zone. It did not matter that Jones had avoided the issue of sex with children in an admiring account of Muhammad’s life, and that American Muslims had praised her work. However briefly, her name had been associated with an ‘insult to Islam’. Whether someone would respond by targeting her or her publishers was now down to chance.

Ali Beheshti was an admirer of Omar Bakri Muhammad, a Syrian-born militant living in London, and founder of the British extremist group al-Muhajiroun. ‘We don’t make a distinction between civilians and non-civilians, innocents and non-innocents,’ Bakri said as he explained the group’s ideology, ‘only between Muslims and unbelievers.’ Beheshti was not a sleeper, hiding from the police until the moment came to strike. He made no effort to play the undercover agent. He embraced radical Islam and thrust himself in front of the police. He gained international notoriety in 2006 when he took his twenty-month-old daughter on a demonstration outside the Danish embassy against cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad which had appeared in the Danish newspaper
Jyllands-Posten
. He made her wear a hat carrying the slogan ‘I ♥ Al Qaeda’. Around her, furious men chanted ‘Bomb, bomb the UK’ and ‘Europe, you will pay with your blood.’

Beheshti had the motive. The opportunity was there for the taking. The owner of the Gibson Square publishing house, which bought the British rights to
The Jewel of Medina
, ran his business from his home, and his promotional literature carried its address. Beheshti found the means on the night of 27 September 2008, when he and two accomplices put a barrel of diesel into the boot of a Honda Accord. The police had bugged the car, and heard Beheshti ask his co-conspirator, ‘You wanna be the emir [leader], yeah?’

‘That would be you.’

‘You know what we gotta do, anyway, innit?’ Beheshti added.

They poured the diesel through the letterbox in the publisher’s front door and set it on fire. They failed to kill anyone, and the police picked them up. Iraqis or Pakistanis looking at the terrorist slaughters that were taking place in their countries would have thought the failed firebombing a lame effort. But in the Western democracies the attack on Gibson Square reinforced the message that capricious violence might strike anyone, anywhere. All it needed was for someone to denounce an author, and for that denunciation to spread on the Net. In the 1980s, mullahs in Tehran and clerical reactionaries in Pakistan ignited violence. By the 2000s, anyone could deliberately or inadvertently set off a panic – a blogger, a reviewer, an academic or indeed a reporter.

The muscling in of my trade of journalism into the business of manufacturing offence was an ominous development, because journalists are skilled at making news out of nothing. We come across a fact we suspect will outrage a pressure group/political party/guardian of the nation’s morals. We call the pressure group/political party/guardian of the nation’s morals and ask, ‘Are you outraged?’ ‘Yes we are,’ the pressure group/political party/guardian of the nation’s morals replies, allowing us to generate the headline ‘Pressure Group/Political Party/Guardian of the Nation’s Morals Outraged by …’

In 2009, Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom published
Does God Hate Women?
, which criticised the soothing story about Aisha’s life that Karen Armstrong, Sherry Jones and others promoted, and presented evidence that contradicted it. The
Sunday Times
greeted the book’s arrival with the headline ‘Fears of Muslim Anger Over Religious Book’. The report explained that it ‘could cause a backlash among Muslims because it criticises the Prophet Muhammad for taking a nine-year-old girl as his third wife’.

The word to concentrate on in that sentence is ‘
could
’.

Religious militants were not in fact preparing a ‘backlash’, because they did not know of the book’s existence. The journalist who wrote the piece phoned Anjem Choudary, a self-styled Sharia judge from al-Muhajiroun, the group Ali Beheshti was associated with when he had targeted Sherry Jones’s British publishers. The obliging ‘judge’ told the
Sunday Times
that as well as targeting Sherry Jones’s book, Islamists could also target the critics of Sherry Jones’s version of history. ‘Talk of Aisha as a child when she married is not true,’ he said. ‘At nine, she reached her menses and in those days a girl was considered to be mature when that happened. No one will swallow talk about child brides. It would lead to a huge backlash, as we saw with
The Jewel of Medina
.’

The journalist phoned the publisher of
Does God Hate Women?
, and told him he was being ‘brave’. The poor man had not appreciated that he was being brave, and called on the services of an ‘ecumenical adviser’, a religious censor modern Europe thought it had seen the last of. The ecumenical adviser said that although he did not like the book, the authors had substantiated their claims, and that in his opinion the publisher should allow the public to read their work.

Because of an inoffensive sketch he drew in the 1970s, Hindu fanatics drive an Indian artist from his country in the 1990s. Because an academic from Texas denounces an American romantic novelist, terrorists firebomb a publisher’s home in north London. Because two intellectuals write a study of feminism and religion, and a journalist invites extremists to find offence, an editor calls in a religious adviser to rule if he can publish a book in a country that was once proud to number John Milton, John Stuart Mill and George Orwell among its greatest writers.

Imagine a dictatorship. Let us call it Authoritania. It could be a gulf sheikhdom, an African nationalist kleptocracy, a relic of pan-Arabism, a post-Soviet republic or a communist ‘people’s democracy’.

Our imaginary dictator has learned from the twentieth century that cooperating with crony capitalists is more profitable than spouting slogans about proletarian revolution. He pushes most of his subject country’s earnings through a sovereign wealth fund, and forms alliances with oligarchs in the private sector. Public and private enterprises – the distinction between the two is fine – provide jobs that bring maximum reward for minimal effort to the dictator’s supporters, relatives and mistresses. In return, he harries free trade unions and allows both state and private companies to operate without restraint. Corruption and exploitation follow. The state’s medical service publishes no official records of industrial injuries, or of the high rates of depression, for fear of what they may reveal about the state’s luckless subjects. Doctors play down the Aids epidemic, because they know that honest reporting would show how many desperate women have become prostitutes. The secret police arrest opposition leaders and deny them access to the state-controlled television channels. The state’s prosecutors harass the few opposition newspapers and radio stations. Although Authoritania’s constitution declares its commitment to freedom of speech and of the press, its ‘Law of Social Responsibility’ allows the courts to impose hefty fines on journalists and editors found guilty of ‘offending’ or ‘denigrating’ the authorities. The official ‘Press Law’ goes further, and imposes prison terms on writers who criticise the president or incite actions that ‘undermine state security’. The police arrest journalists who cover ‘illegal’ strikes – legal strikes are impossible – or protests by the owners of small businesses, who face continuous demands for bribes from bureaucrats. With considerable initiative, prosecutors charge reporters with organising the demonstrations they had gone to observe.

Authoritania seems sewn up. But it remains a dictatorial, not a totalitarian state. Opposition parties can stand in elections, although the bureaucracy ensures that they can never win. Writers and journalists face intimidating restrictions, but because the government casts the restrictions as laws, dissidents can work round them and subvert the apparently rigorous censorship. The bureaucracy is not a monolith, but contains competing interests and rival factions. Many in authority are happy to see mild criticism of the leader, and give journalists the leeway to target their enemies in the state apparatus.

Like Andrzej Wajda in post-Stalinist Poland, or the writers and directors of the Iranian new wave, the country’s film-makers produce haunting tales of fear and disillusionment, which are far better than the offerings of Hollywood. Their films are not explicitly political, but the audience finds the political message just below the surface. Theatres produce surrealist and absurdist dramas to avoid the laws banning direct criticism of the regime. Their favourite play, however, is a traditional story. They keep staging an apparently innocuous folk tale about an official who stands up to a tyrannical king. Everyone knows why it interests them so.

The small opposition press uses similar tactics. It does not tackle the fraud of the kleptomaniac state head-on, for a direct assault would be too dangerous. It focuses on small cases of corruption instead, and uses them to hint at the sickness of the wider society.

To the president’s fury, his power and pomp mean nothing to visiting foreign journalists and human-rights groups. In their eyes, it is the marginal artists, writers and trade unionists who speak for his country, rather than his ministers in their air-conditioned offices and bulletproof cars.

He summons the chief of the secret police.

‘How can I silence these shits?’

‘Go postal!’

‘What?’

‘It’s a phrase from neo-con America, Excellency. A man with a gun, often a postal worker for reasons no one understands, walks into an office or school where he thinks he was once humiliated and kills people at random.’

‘You mean I should kill the leaders of the opposition?’

‘I will happily do so, Excellency, if you command it. But that’s not the idea. You need to pick on slights and humiliations that are so small they seem not to be humiliations at all, and punish them with unreasonable ferocity. Random violence creates the necessary conditions for order. A leader of the opposition expects us to arrest him from time to time, but a writer making a veiled criticism of your rule, or a man who grumbles about you in a shop queue, does not. By randomly attacking a few people who speak sedition, we tell many people that the only safe option is to avoid all talk about politics. The aim is to create a state where everyone knows it is best to say nothing, and the bastards shut up.’

A story from Mao’s China illustrates the hopelessness engendered by a truly random terror. Mao imitated Stalin by purging the Communist Party of anyone who might defy or threaten him. He prepared the ground by turning society upside down, so that it would be in no position to resist. Mao changed the balance of power between the old and the young by telling schoolchildren that they could torture and murder their teachers for filling their minds with ‘bourgeois ideology’. However bestially they behaved, the police would not intervene. The students killed their first recorded victim on 5 August 1966, when pupils at a Peking girls’ school seized their headmistress. The girls kicked and trampled the fifty-year-old mother of four, and poured boiling water over her. They ordered her to carry heavy bricks back and forth, and thrashed her with leather belts with brass buckles until she collapsed and died. If the teacher had seen her life flash by her in her dying moments, she would have realised that nothing she might have done could have spared her. She had obeyed the communists, spouted their dogmas, taught Mao’s own daughters … but Mao still killed her. There had never been a smart move to make, no moment when she might have chosen a safer course, and escaped her execution.

Most modern dictators are not like communist totalitarians. They do not kill loyalists as well as enemies. When they slip towards terror, they use disproportionate violence against minor critics instead. Just as the relatives of the victims of a mass murderer who goes berserk in a school because he felt its teachers humiliated him can find reasons for the deaths, so the victims of dictatorial violence can understand the reasons for their suffering. It is just that the ‘offence’ is out of all proportion to the retribution visited on the offenders.

Robert Mugabe was not the equivalent of Saddam Hussein or the organisers of the genocide in Darfur. After taking power in 1980, he presided over one act of mass terror, when he sent the 5th Brigade of the Zimbabwean Army to Matabeleland and the Zimbabwean Midlands to murder three thousand of his opponents. After that atrocity, he practised cruelty at a lower level. He wrecked the economy by seizing white-owned farms and handing them over to cronies, and failed to tackle the Aids epidemic. But although parliament was neutered, the judiciary subverted and the country reduced to beggary, Mugabe allowed some opposition – at the time of writing there are opposition politicians in his government. Wilf Mbanga, the editor of the
Zimbabwean
, told me that outsiders would be surprised at how much journalists and artists can get away with – when the security services relax.

In 1999, Oliver ‘Tuku’ Mtukudzi’s song ‘Wasakara’ was the hit of the year. The chorus ran:

As Mtukudzi sang, helpful members of the concert crew beamed a spotlight onto a portrait of the wizened Mugabe. When the police questioned him, Mtukudzi told them that his lyrics came from observing his family and acquaintances, and criticism of the geriatric despot could not have been further from his mind.

Such small acts of resistance are typical of stable times in dictatorships. In Burma, an official in the national bank protested against the arrest by the military junta of Aung San Suu Kyi, whose National League for Democracy had been the legitimate winner of a free general election in 1990, by enhancing rather than debasing the national currency. His superiors had asked him to design a new one-kyat note. It had to include a picture of Aung San Suu Kyi’s father General Aung San, who in 1945 had led Burma to independence. The designer used light strokes to soften the jawline as he gently transformed the face of the father into that of the daughter. Around the portrait he drew four circles of eight petals to mark the date of Burma’s democratic uprising on 8 August 1988 – 8/8/88. For months the portrait of ‘the lady’, as Aung San Suu Kyi was known, was admired by the citizenry, until the generals realised their mistake, withdrew the ‘democracy note’ from circulation, and made possessing it a criminal offence.

Like the Burmese generals, Mugabe did not tolerate veiled criticism for long. He retained power because he mixed periods of relative quiet with outbreaks of capricious repression. The courts sent an unemployed man to prison for asking two boys with Mugabe’s face emblazoned on their T-shirts, ‘Why would you want to wear a wrinkly old man on your clothes?’ The police arrested a human-rights campaigner who exposed the brutal conditions in an army-controlled diamond mine. ‘That kind of behaviour, if proved, is treacherous and abominable, particularly in these times of national economic strife,’ the judge said as he denied him bail. Such inflated rhetoric is characteristic of dictatorships on the rampage. To justify censorship their lackeys magnify the offence, as the judge did when he turned a criticism of the working conditions of miners into an act of economic treason.

Neither the campaigner for workers’ rights nor the man talking to the boys in the Mugabe T-shirts was a direct threat to the regime. But as Wilf Mbanga said, ‘Every now and again he wants to send a message to all and sundry. He wants to keep journalists and activists on their toes, so we don’t know what we can get away with from one day to the next.’

The prudent Mr Mbanga edits the
Zimbabwean
from a seaside town in southern England.

A Cartoon Crisis

Modern religious violence, even in its most barbaric forms, is not comparable to the absolute terror of communist totalitarianism. In Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, men can stay alive if they do not cross the Taliban or al Qaeda (women, obviously, face additional dangers). Like the Nazis, Islamists do not slaughter their own supporters. In the democracies, the fear spread by religious violence is closer to the fear of excessive punishments for inconsequential slights that modern dictatorships generate.

To put the same thought another way, we are living through a Mugabification of religious argument.

Even conscious acts of anti-clericalism, an essential part of any campaign to cut down over-mighty religions, bring a response as disproportionate as the assault on Sherry Jones’s unconscious ‘insult’.

The Danish cartoon crisis of 2005 – and it tells you everything about the overwrought state of democratic opinion that policy-makers and pundits could talk about a ‘cartoon crisis’ with a straight face – was almost as phoney as any manufactured act of outrage. The religious censorship it engendered met the criteria of dictators engaged in random retaliation:

• A modest critique produced an excessive reaction.
  

• Legitimate criticism of terrorist murder and the oppression of women was turned into something it was not, in this instance a prejudiced hatred of all Muslims.
  

• The threat of violent punishment hung in the air.
  

• Critics learned that the safe course was to say nothing, because they did not know where fanatics would draw their lines.
  

Intellectuals discuss freedom of speech in the abstract. But it always arises as a political issue in response to changes in society. The Danish press did not commission cartoons of Muhammad for a laugh, but because they could see new forces at work in their country. A group of Muslim fundamentalists had attacked a lecturer at Copenhagen University because he had quoted from the Koran to non-Muslims. Sunni traditionalists had threatened Sufi Muslims for staging a concert, because they claimed that music was unIslamic. The most disturbing story came in press reports about how a writer called Kåre Bluitgen could not find an artist prepared to illustrate a guide to Muhammad and the Koran for schoolchildren. The artists he approached muttered about the murder of Theo van Gogh, and the assaults on the lecturer at Copenhagen University. They maintained that Islam proscribed representations of Muhammad, although that was not true, as the portraits of Muhammad from the golden age of medieval Islam demonstrate. More probably, the wavering Danish illustrators reasoned that certain sects in modern Islam denounce images of Muhammad as idolatry, and that those sects were, as it happens, the sects most likely to kill them.

Flemming Rose, the editor of
Jyllands-Posten
, a Danish daily with a circulation of about 150,000, invited cartoonists to treat Islam as they treated other religions, and show that demands for censorship were incompatible with contemporary democracy and freedom of speech. ‘One must be ready to put up with insults, mockery and ridicule,’ Rose said in an article accompanying the cartoons. Reject that idea and ‘we are on our way to a slippery slope where no one can tell how the self-censorship will end’. Despite his defiant words, his blasphemy fell short of being a full-frontal satirical assault on religious conviction. The twelve cartoons that were to provoke such fury were a tame collection.

Among them was an image of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. The drawing suggested that extremists had used Islam as an excuse for terrorism, a view that was hard to argue with. It caused the most offence, because it could also be interpreted as suggesting that all Muslims supported terrorism, an argument which was not true, although the protesters against the newspaper undermined their case when they resorted to violence. The tender-minded found three other drawings offensive. An ambiguous portrait of Muhammad may or may not have been insulting. The artist drew him with a glowing object above his head. Readers could interpret it as a halo, a pair of devil’s horns or Viking’s horns, or the Islamic crescent. You had to work hard to find the ‘devil’ insult, although, as always, that did not stop those determined to be offended from putting in the effort. Next was a cartoon which showed a Muhammad in heaven, greeting suicide bombers with the words, ‘Stop, stop, we’ve run out of virgins!’ Of all the cartoons, it came closest to making a joke that was actually funny. Complainants also decried a picture of an aggressive Muhammad, in which the artist had blocked out his eyes with a black line to prevent his identification. The line paralleled the eyeholes in the hijabs of two women with frightened expressions behind him, the rest of whose bodies were draped in black robes.