...are not bothered by cheap romance books. The Catholic church has had far worse lobbed at it over the last fifty or sixty years, and you don't generally see massive street protests about it. Sure, occasionally you'll have some small scale demonstrations (like over the Davinci Code move, or Dogma, etc.), but never to the point that anyone fears for there lives or that you see book contracts being canceled. One argument that I hear often is that it's not really about the religion itself, but rather about the discontent Muslims feel in general vis a vis the West, which just happens to be expressed through religion. I might buy this more if it wasn't for that fact that both rich and poor Muslims (& Muslim countries) seem to get worked up over these things. I also might buy it more if poor Christians were forming militant groups to attack their decadent Western brethren. The fact is undeniable - there's something about Islam & Muslim culture today that, as it stands, makes an unusually large percentage of its adherents prone to violence, hateful towards anyone that critiques their culture, and unwilling to adapt to or integrate into modern life. How to deal with this problem is the question for civil libertarians as we move into the 21st century, I think - how do you give religious freedom to a religious group that is absolutely opposed on most major points to all the values you hold dear?

She's an academic in Austin, Texas and somehow she receives a draft of the book to review.  For what, one wonders?  The book is a piece of historical fiction, an imagining of the life of Mohammed's child bride by someone who has never even visited the Middle East.  Yet, Spellman, whose initial professional piece of scholarship has to do with A'isha's menstrual cycle and its impact on Middle Eastern history reads Jones' magnum opus and sets her hair afire because she's reminded of the way some Christian whackjobs reacted to The Last Temptation of Christ well over a decade ago?  What could explain these unlikely players becoming intertwined in this piece of business.  Two possibilities:

1. As implied in one of the poll answers, Spellman was slipped a copy of the draft with some sort of agreement to make its publication a raging controversy in the hopes that more copies of the book would be purchased once it's been published.  Possible culprits in this might be Jones' agent (would be nice to know if he's also Spellman's agent) or a rival publisher looking to get Random House to back out so they could reap the notoriety.  Hell, cynic that I am, it wouldn't be out of the question that Random House engineered this, knowing it would pull the book off the presses.  Then they think things over and do a courageous act for freedom of the press by publishing it.

2. Spellman came by a copy and became jealous that someone managed to patch together a readable novel out of the story.

Discuss.

Illegitimi non carborundum.