I searched it...and it has a picture of a girl on the cover who I'm presuming is meant to look like our beloved Sayyida Aysha (Radiallahu Anha). <_< And Asra Nomani has defended the book when Random House cancelled on publishing because they feared a similar outrage that was displayed during the Satanic Verses publication, which says a lot right there. lol.
"I'm devastated," Ms. Jones told me after the book got spiked, adding, "I wanted to honor Aisha and all the wives of Muhammad by giving voice to them, remarkable women whose crucial roles in the shaping of Islam have so often been ignored -- silenced -- by historians."
^ Wow, I had no clue that they were silenced and finally 1429 years years later they are getting the respect they deserved...through a novel about love and lust?! Uh, ok...
Apparently, according to some non Muslims who read it, it was poorly written anyway. Go figure.
UT professor's complaints lead to cancellation of book about Muhammad's wife
Author defends her book as historical fiction, says it has minor deviations from facts
By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
A University of Texas professor alerted Ballantine Books this spring that a novel it planned to publish about a wife of the Prophet Muhammad contained historical inaccuracies, and she said the book might spark violent protests.
Weeks later, Ballantine decided to cancel the book, which was scheduled to be published this week. Now the professor, Denise Spellberg, is at the center of a publishing controversy that has brought her a flood of hate mail.
In April, Spellberg, an associate professor in the Department of History and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, was asked by Ballantine, a division of Random House, to write a promotional blurb for a forthcoming historical novel, "The Jewel of Medina," by Sherry Jones. The book is based on the life of Muhammad's young wife Aisha.
Spellberg is an expert on Aisha; her 1994 scholarly work, "Politics, Gender, & the Islamic Past: The Legacy of A'isha bint Abi Bakr," was cited as a source by Jones on her Web site.
But Spellberg was appalled by Jones' book.
"The characterization of Aisha as a sexualized being, swinging a sword around and who taught others to use a weapon, was an egregious abuse of her life," she told the American-Statesman. (Spellberg allowed a Statesman editor to sit in her office and skim the manuscript.)
Spellberg, coincidentally, has a contract with Random House to write a nonfiction book titled "Thomas Jefferson's Quran." On April 30, she called her editor and recommended that "The Jewel of Medina" not be published. "Not just because of its potential to provoke violence," said Spellberg, who worried that a small minority of Muslims might respond violently to the book. "
But also because, as a historian, I objected to the fact that it was a deliberately distorted view of an important female religious figure."
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