“…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.” …Now , however, as Random House hides in the closet over offending Muslims, the deal has been squashed. What is was the name of the book? “The Jewel of Medina”
Random House evidently has been clued in pronto by an email prarie fire and now feels ” there is a very real possibility of major danger for the building and staff and widespread violence… [it is] a declaration of war . . . explosive stuff . . . a national security issue….will be far more controversial than the satanic verses and the Danish cartoons. …the book should be withdrawn ASAP.”
Continue reading this article in The Wall Street Journal. Here’s another link to this story (here too…wait, also here). Ah, just what we need: here.
UPDATE: The Serbian connection
[...] Compare this with the cowardly Random House decision to cancel publication of the Jewel of Medina (”a tale of love, lust, and intrigue in the prophet’s harem”). See previous post, Could provoke widespread “violence and death”–hey, but it’s only a novel [...]
[...] of the “apostate” Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the withdrawal of publication of Sherry Jones book The Jewel of Medina, “a tale of lust, love and intrigue in the prophet’s harem” plus a host of other [...]