The Jewel of Medina: Is This Any Way to Treat the Prophet's Wife?

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Is it worth risking your life for the sake of a bodice ripper? That was the question I asked myself last spring, when I first read Sherry Jones' novel The Jewel of Medina, a treacly romance starring the Prophet Mohammed and his favorite wife, Aisha. Now, The Jewel of Medina is at the center of an international controversy over issues from censorship and free speech to the idea of Islam versus Art.

In May, Jones' publisher, Random House, canceled its contract with the author, citing sources who had warned that the book could incite acts of violence. Two publishers, Beaufort books in America and Gibson Square in the United Kingdom, picked up the novel; the former sped up its release this month to avoid acts of violence, while the latter, having suffered an attempted fire bombing of its offices in early October, said this week it was postponing publication indefinitely. I had been sent an early copy to blurb by Ballantine, a division of Random House, the company that is also publishing my own forthcoming memoir. When my scribbled notes in the margins went from "likely to offend?" to "certain to offend" to "fatwa!" I realized I needed to demur from offering a comment.

Since Random House dropped the novel, a heated and familiar debate (one could insert The Satanic Verses, the film Submission, or those infamous Danish cartoons for every mention of The Jewel of Medina) has erupted over whether Western civilization is once again being endangered by philistine Muslims who just don't get the concept of free speech. As word about the novel spread across the Muslim internet, Salman Rushdie and a parade of commentators condemned Random House for sacrificing free expression to security concerns. Meanwhile, the most fierce judgment against the novel came last week from a radical Islamic organization in the United Kingdom, which called Jones an "enemy of Islam," her book "blasphemy," and warned of "deadly prospects for Jones and prospective publishers."

Some critics, like Alvaro Varga Llosa writing in The New Republic, argue that "the book's content is irrelevant to the discussion." But others — the curious, or potential victims caught up in the threat of "deadly prospects" — will want to know what is causing such offense. Most likely to trouble Muslims is the novel's overall lustiness, in particular the erotic encounters between Mohammed and Aisha, and the historically contrived sexual attraction between a married Aisha and a young, attractive Medinan. The book's earliest critic, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of Texas, called it "soft pornography." Of course, whether you would rate The Jewel of Medina's erotic passages as porn, run-of-the-mill cringe-inducing sex scenes of the contemporary fiction variety or blasphemy is a matter of perspective, and taste.

The erotic trouble with the novel doesn't end with its explicitness, however. For the sake of her racy narrative, Jones effectively rewrites Aisha's biography and casts her in the role of near adulterer. Interpreted in light of the author's modern, Western sensibility, this underscores Aisha's power; her fictional Aisha has sexual urges and isn't afraid to consider acting on them. She's a woman in the Sex and the City mold. To lead her Carrie Bradshaw/Aisha to the brink of temptation, Jones subverts one of the key events in early Islam's history, the incident of al-Ifk, or "The Slander." The historical version has Aisha falsely accused of adultery, and ultimately exonerated by a surah (a revealed verse from the Koran) that also outlines the moral foundation of Muslim society. In Jones's version, Aisha actually goes to first base.

In an interview published with the novel, Jones says that her objective was to "empower women, especially Muslim women." But again, empowerment is a matter of perspective. Given that her narrative strips Aisha of the purity for which she is called the "Mother of the Believers," and given the increasingly conservative social mores that hold sway among young Muslim women across the world, many would argue that the novel fails in this regard.

Jones's treatment of Ali, the key imam of Shia Islam, the Prophet's cousin and Aisha's eventual political rival, is another flashpoint. While it would be impossible to write a novel from Aisha's perspective without channeling her resentment of Ali, the problem is not Jones's reproduction of this historically attested antagonism, but her cartoonish portrait of Ali as the Jafar villain out of Disney's Aladdin. Jones undermines herself here with an astonishing insensitivity to Muslim sensibilities (the faith considers dogs ritually impure) by resorting to verbs usually reserved for dogs to describe Ali's disagreeableness to Aisha. He points his sharp nose, sniffs for lies, barks — a virtual canine companion to the Prophet — and that's all before the first chapter even starts.

To give The Jewel of Medina the full Edward Said treatment would take pages — for starters, Jones grafts foreign concepts (such as the Turkish notion of the hatun, or head of the harem) onto 7th century Arabia and conjures an atmosphere dense with exotic clichés ("I spread a smile thick as hummus across my lips"). Her Aisha is so thoroughly Western, indeed so thoroughly American, that she might as well have asked her father, upon being betrothed to the Prophet, "What am I, like, a sheep? Mohammed is old — ick. Can't I wait for someone more fabulous?" But regardless of the novel's literary deficiencies, the threat of violence that now stalks Jones underscores that the tensions that kept Salman Rushdie in hiding for nearly a decade have not faded — for writers and publishers wary of attack, and for aggrieved Muslims who feel their faith the target of perpetual insult.