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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

Regarding the spirit of author censorship, and books on trial:

I think it was John Barth that I was reading, perhaps his non-fiction collection "Further Fridays", where he quoted one Islamic scholar as saying, "If a writing expresses something which is found in the Qur'an, then it is superfluous, and if a writing expresses something not in the Qur'an, then it is blasphemous" (paraphrasing from memory).

Islam boasts that not one word of the Qur'an has ever been changed, whereas the scriptures of other religions are somehow corrupt. Yet, the great irony is that the 1st Caliph had all variant copies of the Qur'an destroyed. Why did variant copies exist if the virtue of the Qur'an is its invariance?

Certainly, such beliefs and attitudes fuel the banning of certain authors and books, both in Islamic and Christian societies.

There is one irony in the Qur'an which I may perhaps be the first to point out. The convenience of search engines reveals many things. A search on "psalm" in the Qur'an reveals five passage in which the Jewish Psalms are greatly praised. One such passage states that even the birds chant the Psalms. And yet, not one Psalm is quoted in the Qur'an or recited in Mosques. And Islamic scholars claim that Biblical text is so corrupted that it is not worth studying. And yet, we know from archeological findings such as the Qumran texts that the Psalms that were accessible to Mohammed are essentially unchanged from what we have today.

Then there is the one about the fundamentalist pastor who insists that God created dinosaur fossils (not dinosaurs mind you, but just the fossil remains) in order to test the truly faithful, to see if they reject evolution. (This is not a joke! One fundamentalist actually made a statement to this effect.)

Then, there was some French bureaucrat who said, "That works well in theory, but not in practice."

One scholar has a plausible theory that certain banned books from Switzerland were partly the cause of the French Revolution. In those days, in France, no book could be published without the King's approval. People were eager to read banned books which fictionalized the affairs and debauchery of the nobility. That scholar feels that such banned fiction helped fuel the hatred for the nobility.

At the end of Cyrano De Bergerac, we see that Cyrano meets weekly with his beloved to tell her precisely of such court gossip.

We imprison authors and ban books because we are afraid to look at something critically which we hold to be unquestionable. There is something which we fear in the books that we ban.

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