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Christopher Hitchens has a useful piece in Vanity Fair. He recaps the fatwa on Rushdie and briefly works through the various outrages since then, Theo van Gogh, the Danish cartoons and the rest. His main points: that the problem for us now is self-censorship and that the multi-culti excuse-mongers need to reckon with the long lists of distinguished writers from the Muslim world who are as outraged as people in the West that their religion is invoked by hateful fanatics. I call it useful for latecomers to these debates – but it doesn’t hurt any of us to go over this ground regularly.

When Iran?s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on novelist Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses, it was the opening shot in a war on cultural freedom. Two decades later, the violence continues, and Muslim fundamentalists have gained a new advantage: media self-censorship. ? more

The admirers and followers of the Alcoran insist on the excellent moral precepts interspersed through that wild and absurd performance. But would we know, whether the pretended prophet had really attained a just sentiment of morals? Let us attend to his narration; and we shall soon find, that he bestows praise on such instances of treachery, inhumanity, cruelty, revenge, bigotry, as are utterly incompatible with civilized society. No steady rule of right seems there to be attended to; and every action is blamed or praised, so far only as it is beneficial or hurtful to the true believers.

_ David Hume, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, 1760.

The Jewel of Medina was written by a journalist called Sherry Jones. It recounts the life of Aisha, a girl who was married off at the age of six to a 50-year-old man called Mohamed ibn Abdallah. On her wedding day, Aisha was playing on a see-saw outside her home. Inside, she was being betrothed. The first she knew of it was when she was banned from playing out in the street with the other children. When she was nine, she was taken to live with her husband, now 53. He had sex with her. When she was 14, she was accused of adultery with a man closer to her own age. Not long after, Mohamed decreed that his wives must cover their faces and bodies, even though no other women in Arabia did.

You cannot read this story today – except in the Koran and the Hadith. The man Mohamed ibn Abdallah became known to Muslims as “the Prophet Mohamed”, so our ability to explore this story is stunted. The Jewel of Medina was bought by Random House and primed to be a best-seller before a University of Texas teacher saw proofs and declared it “a national security issue”. Random House had visions of a re-run of the Rushdie or the Danish cartoons affairs. Sherry Jones’s publisher has pulped the book. It’s gone.

In Europe, we are finally abolishing the lingering blasphemy laws that hinder criticism of Christianity. But they are being succeeded by a new blasphemy law preventing criticism of Islam.

Johann Hari, ‘We Should Never Pulp Books out of Fear of Fanatics” August 2008

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