Jewel of Medina - Father Frank's Rants

FATHER FRANK’S RANTS

Rant Number 321 30 September 2008

Jewel of Medina

“Deceit, superstition and fanaticism”: Voltaire’s considered opinion of the Catholic Church. Yet in 1741 the same scoffing French writer wrote an unctuous letter to Pope Benedict XIV. Addressing him as ‘most Blessed Father’ and grovelling ‘I kiss your sacred feet’, he dedicated to the Pontiff his Mahomet. A play in five acts and an unveiled attack on the Prophet of Islam. ‘A false and barbarous sect’…that is tenor of Voltaire’s letter. Benedict was a cultured man, in sympathy with the Enlightenment and keen on science and learning. His answer was courteous. I wonder whether he ever suspected Voltaire might be tongue in cheek. Indeed, there is a diatribe online which insinuates that Voltaire’s real target was not Muhammad but Christ. Anyone who has read Mahomet will judge that unlikely. Admittedly, it would have been just like the sort of low cunning the Frenchman delighted in…

Voltaire was poisonous but I would hesitate to put him in the same literary category as Sherry Jones. The American authoress of The Jewel of Medina. A book of which (groan…) we are bound to hear rather too much. A historical novel, apparently. About one of the Prophet’s wives, young Aysha. The initial publisher dropped it. Then a bomb was thrown at the home of The Jewel’s British publisher. Call me a cynic, I bet media folks are smacking their lips. We are in for much posturing and waffle. A modest re-run of the Rushdie affair. Freedom of expression versus obscurantism, that sort of guff. Antidote wanted. The priest discovers it in the greatest of all English poets. And a great Christian, too.

John Milton’s Aeropagitica is a speech he addressed to the Parliament of England in 1644. Puritan MPs had decided to censure or suppress opposition pamphlets. Milton, himself a Puritan, rose against that with passion: ‘Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye’. He observed that the most scurrilous invectives against Christianity, like those of Proclus, Celsus and Porphiry, had not been banned by Christian emperors. That the early Church Councils had declared books not acceptable but left it to people’s conscience whether to read them or not. That St Paul in his letters quotes pagan authors. That if you want to refute a book you first have to read it. That the Bible itself vividly reports many blasphemies and sins. That although Solomon warns that ‘of many books is weariness of the flesh’ he says nothing whether any book is unlawful. ‘For books are as meats and viands are; some of good, some of evil substance’, yet God, Milton wrote, has left the choice to each man’s discretion. Although the author of Paradise Lost took original sin seriously, he also believed that man has not lost the divine gift of free will. When God gave Adam reason ‘He gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing.” Otherwise Adam would have been an automaton, human only in name.

The poet waxed lyrical about the English and their vocation to uphold and spread Christian freedom: ‘Why else was this nation chosen before any other, that out of her, as out of Sion, should be proclaimed and sounded forth the first tidings and trumpet of the Reformation to all Europe?” Protestant England to him was a vast house of liberty, a mansion of refuge, a ‘Nation of Prophets, of Sages, of Worthies.” So he was out to show it is tyrants who are liable to gag the press and ban books. Keeping human beings under tutelage, like children, can only prevent and stifle their growth. His fierce Protestantism made him invoke comparisons with the Inquisition and the curtailing of freedom of thought in the Catholic nations of his time. And he warns you cannot hope to make people better by stopping them to read books, even bad books. “If the amendment of manners be aimed at, look into Italy and Spain”. Are those places better off in morals? Touché’…

The analogies are tempting. Muslims and the Islamic countries today like the ultramontane Catholicism of old. Hell-bent on stifling self-expression, art and free thought. Seeking to burn books and kill writers. Fatwa­-issuing Muslim scholars as Torquemada. The West as a beacon of liberty, America and England as havens of tolerance…and son on.

Actually, a bit less simple. Plenty of scientists, poets, architects and writers have flourished under Islam. The Inquisition did not prevent Cervantes, Calderon, Lopez de Vega, Gongora, Velasquez and Murillo from producing their masterpieces. Nor did the Counter Reformation Popes (Galileo notwithstanding) stop artists and writers like Michelangelo, Bernini, Caravaggio, Tasso, Marino and Vico from being creative. And of course the Puritans closed down theatres, hunted out witches and persecuted Catholics. Milton himself wrote the immortal Paradise Lost during the monarchist Restoration, a regime embodying the denial of all his hopes. Maybe tyranny even works as a stimulus to artistic creation, who knows? Solzhenitsyn’s example springs to mind.

I don’t know yet whether The Jewel of Medina is a cheap novelette or fine fiction. The extracts I have glanced at suggest the former. But that’s irrelevant. Nobody suggests only good novels should be printed, or the bookshops would be decimated. Bad literature often serves a useful purpose in telling about the tastes and mores of an epoch. Nor is historical accuracy the point. That hardly matters in fiction. Shelly Jones naturally swears she respects Islam’s Prophet. Well, she would, wouldn’t she?

Going back to Voltaire. And the idea that, under the guise of besmirching Muhammad, he was really out to hurt his own religion. I fear The Jewel will indirectly have a similar effect. Because in the eyes of many Muslims worldwide the West equals Christianity. Alas, that is no longer true, anymore than the England of Elizabeth II corresponds to that of Elizabeth I. The conspiracy-minded brigade will see this as another link in the chain of attempts by Christians to defame their Prophet. And so the smouldering embers of the bogus clash of civilisations will glow again. The innocent may suffer and die.

The priest can only wish and pray: la samaha Allah!

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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