The Current Discussion: A London publishing house was firebombed for agreeing to publish 'The Jewel of Medina', a controversial novel about Muhammad's wife, which Random House dropped earlier this year because it feared terrorist threats. In hindsight, was Random House in the right? Does this justify censorship of this kind in the future?

I am totally for free speech and have always spoken for it, and yet there are times when I have to use my conscience as a humanist to question when free speech is deliberately aimed at offending the sensitivities of communities and religious people. I would agree that religious people should be calm and not be too offended, especially by attacks that are clearly inconsequential to the essence of their faith, there must still be a measure of responsibility when we deal with historical elements and facts and their subsequent treatment into literary fiction. To argue that only Muslims are offended by blasphemy would be wrong, considering that even Christian nations have banned so-called literary works that have offended their faith. The recent controversy over the book on Aisha the favorite wife of Prophet Muhammad is a case in point. I have not read the book, so I have to rely on what various commentators who have read it has said thus far. When Prof Denise Spellberg made the point that the book is distorting historical fact to the point of creating soft pornography, I am tempted then to argue that free speech has gone too far. In the first place such distortion does us no good in understanding someone's, and secondly one has to question the motives of the writer and the publisher.

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