Last weekend's firebomb attack on the house of an independent publisher which is about to publish a novel about the relationship between the prophet Muhammad and his first wife Aisha has rightly been condemned by leading British writers. The book, The Jewel of Medina, came to Gibson Square only after it was dropped by Random House. This mainstream publisher had sent the novel to academics for approval, and one of them, Denise Spellberg, accused the author Sherry Jones of turning a sacred history into soft-core pornography. Whether a historian should be the person to judge the literary merits of a work of fiction is an issue in itself. Shakespeare would have suffered horribly had his work been judged by historians. But Spellberg's...
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