Porquê? O livro conta a história de Aisha, desde o seu casamento com o Profeta Maomé, aos seis anos, até à sua morte. A opção da editora gerou polémica nos jornais e nos blogs em torno da auto-censura.
Salman Rushdie veio a público condenar a editora. “This is censorship by fear and it sets a very bad precedent indeed.”, disse o escritor.
E o livro, que não chegou às livrarias para evitar tumultos, deu, provavelmente, origem a mais posts e a mais artigos de opinião do que se tivesse sido publicado como planeado.
No Times Online, Mick Hume pergunta: “Who needs book burners if “offensive” books are not allowed to be published in the first place?”
“The threat to freedom here does not come from a few Islamic radicals, but from the invertebrate liberals of the cultural establishment who have so lost faith in themselves that they will surrender their freedoms before anybody starts a fight. The mere suggestion of causing offence to some mob of imagined stereotypes is enough to have them scurrying for a bomb shelter, their creative imaginations blowing up small protests into the threat of a big culture war.“
- ler aqui o artigo completo no Times Online.
Stanley Fish, em defesa dos critérios da editora: “Random House is free to publish or decline to publish whatever it likes, and its decision to do either has nothing whatsoever to do with the Western tradition of free speech or any other high-sounding abstraction.”
“So what Random House did was not censorship. (Some other press is perfectly free to publish Jones’s book, and one probably will.) It may have been cowardly or alarmist, or it may have been good business, or it may have been an attempt to avoid trouble that ended up buying trouble. But whatever it was, it doesn’t rise to the level of constitutional or philosophical concern.”
- ler aqui o artigo de opinião no New York Times.
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