Romancing the Other: The Jewel of the Medina and the Ethics of Genre

Abstract

The controversy, in 2008, surrounding the (non-)publication of a novel, The Jewel of the Medina (hereafter Jewel), about Aisha bint Abi Bakr, ‘favourite’ wife of the Prophet Muhammad, played itself out on a scale very different to the global protests over The Satanic Verses and the Jyllands-Posten cartoons, and the Dutch national trauma over Submission and the murder of Theo van Gogh.¹ Largely confined to Anglo-American literary and journalistic circles, it was one that barely left its mark on the wider public sphere on either side of the Atlantic. This was not the only difference for it was a Muslim-related controversy in which Muslims hardly figure, and to which Muslims have been almost unanimously indifferent (when, that is, they are even aware of it). It was, in fact, a controversy conducted almost entirely amongst those left-liberals and liberal-conservatives who constitute the social commen-tariat in the US and United Kingdom, and the debate focused on the issue of self-censorship and the putative fear of ‘giving offence’ that liberals now assume to be the dominant feature of ‘politically correct’ multiculturalist liberal-democracies (notwithstanding the fact that the ubiquity of such discussions over offensiveness, as discussed in Chapter 1, suggests otherwise). Muslims — in the form of a little-known extremist group seeing a chance to attain some publicity and notoriety, and perhaps even some recognition amongst fellow Islamists — only became involved after the initial controversy over the novel had become more generally known.