Islam: The Religion of Obfuscation

Via GetReligion, a captivating look at the suppression of a historical novel chronicling the marriage of Muhammad and a 9 year old:

Earlier this month, former Wall Street Journal reporter Asra Nomani, penned a fascinating, newsbreaking op-ed for the paper:

Starting in 2002, Spokane, Wash., journalist Sherry Jones toiled weekends on a racy historical novel about Aisha, the young wife of the prophet Muhammad. Ms. Jones learned Arabic, studied scholarly works about Aisha’s life, and came to admire her protagonist as a woman of courage. When Random House bought her novel last year in a $100,000, two-book deal, she was ecstatic. This past spring, she began plans for an eight-city book tour after the Aug. 12 publication date of “The Jewel of Medina” — a tale of lust, love and intrigue in the prophet’s harem.

It’s not going to happen: In May, Random House abruptly called off publication of the book. The series of events that torpedoed this novel are a window into how quickly fear stunts intelligent discourse about the Muslim world.

Random House feared the book would become a new “Satanic Verses,” the Salman Rushdie novel of 1988 that led to death threats, riots and the murder of the book’s Japanese translator, among other horrors. In an interview about Ms. Jones’s novel, Thomas Perry, deputy publisher at Random House Publishing Group, said that it “disturbs us that we feel we cannot publish it right now.” He said that after sending out advance copies of the novel, the company received “from credible and unrelated sources, cautionary advice not only that the publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community, but also that it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment.”

Though Aisha, who was married at age nine, was Muhammad’s favorite wife, very little has been written about her. Nomani writes that the saga upsets her as a Muslim. (She is the author of Standing Alone in Mecca: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam, among other books.) She interviews Jones, who is devastated by what is happening to her novel. She also finds out exactly who the instigated the book’s demise — and it’s somewhat surprising. Random House sent out galleys of the book to writers and professors in the hope of getting favorable blurbs for marketing. One of the recipients was an associate professor of Islamic history at the University of Texas at Austin and expert on Aisha named Denise Spellberg. Jones had read one of Spellberg’s books for research. Instead of an endorsement, she sent out warnings to Muslims about the book.

It's amazing to think of the efforts underway to reinvent what Islam is and to juxtapose that invention with what lengths those undertaking that effort will go to also reinvent Christianity.

The same people attempting to soft-pedal the backwardness that is the Muslim faith and her proponents are usually the same people hell bent on deconstructing the Christian faith and her followers and you can't help but wonder why that might be.

I'll go so far as to suggest that it centers on what is or isn't True and the reaction that comes with attempting to mask Truth while at the same time selling as truth that which isn't.

Whether we believe it or not, whether it's tangible or it isn't, whether we embrace it or we keep it at arm's length, there is good and there is evil and the battle between the two is real and that battle is being fought before our very eyes.

This will be dismissed by many but it does, for me certainly, form the basis for which I can rationalize what seems to me to otherwise be so irrational.

At some gut level, if we face this with brute honesty and courage, we'll have to choose a side.  We'll have to.  And when we do, we better have thought this thing through. 

There's lots at stake.