Earlier this week, The Sunday Times ran a lengthy interview with novelist Sebastian Faulks in which he had this to say about the Koran:

“It’s a depressing book. It really is. It’s just the rantings of a schizophrenic. It’s very one-dimensional, and people talk about the beauty of the Arabic and so on, but the English translation I read was, from a literary point of view, very disappointing.

“There is also the barrenness of the message. I mean, there are some bits about diet, you know, the equivalent of the Old Testament, which is also crazy. If you look again at those books of the law, Leviticus or Deuteronomy, there’s a lot about who you are allowed to sleep with, and if a man had lost his testicles he wouldn’t enter into the presence of God, that is just terrible. But the great thing about the Old Testament is that it does have these incredible stories. Of the 100 greatest stories ever told, 99 are probably in the Old Testament and the other is in Homer.

“With the Koran there are no stories. And it has no ethical dimension like the New Testament, no new plan for life. It says ‘the Jews and the Christians were along the right tracks, but actually, they were wrong and I’m right, and if you don’t believe me, tough — you’ll burn for ever.’ That’s basically the message of the book.”

For some odd reason, people felt this might be a tad controversial, so Faulks has now written a slightly more conciliatory essay in The Telegraph:

While we Judaeo-Christians can take a lot of verbal rough-and-tumble about our human-written scriptures, I know that to Muslims the Koran is different; it is by definition beyond criticism. And if anything I said or was quoted as saying (not always the same thing) offended any Muslim sensibility, I do apologise – and without reservation.

It was never my intention to offend my Muslim friends or readers, and if you read my novel I think you will see how I have shown the positive effects of the Koran on a kind and typical Muslim family.

Awww…

Meanwhile, Riazat Butt, the Guardian’s religious affairs correspondent, writes that Faulks had it wrong to begin with:

The Qur’an is neither a bedside read nor a Booker entry – I won’t be packing it in my hand luggage before I go to Tunisia this weekend. It is, for Muslims, a blueprint for everyday life, with guidance on subjects such as divorce, the day of judgment and everything in between. So if it reads like a rulebook, that’s because it is.

The Qur’an was not written in English, nor is it normally read in English, so of course the scriptures lose something in translation. Should Faulks want to fully appreciate and experience the Qur’an, he should brush up on his classical Arabic. Most, but not all, of the Qur’an’s stories are based on tales from the Old Testament, so if he thinks the Qur’an is a bit rubbish at capturing the imagination, then it follows the Bible is a bit of a let-down too.

With the latest film adaptation of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, set to hit theatres at midnight tonight, a review in L’Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper, has given the movie two thumbs up. This stance is a complete about face from previous comments made by the Pope (then Cardinal Ratzinger) in 2003, in which he criticized the series’ “subtle seductions” that could “corrupt the Christian faith” in young children. Additionally, an article in the Vatican paper last year further condemned the series’ emphasis on the occult, calling Harry himself “the wrong kind of hero.” From The Telegraph:

L’Osservatore Romano said the movie was the best adaptation yet of the J.K. Rowling books, describing it as “a mixture of supernatural suspense and romance which reaches the right balance.”

“There is a clear line of demarcation between good and evil and [the film] makes clear that good is right. One understands as well that sometimes this requires hard work and sacrifice,” the newspaper judged.

From CBC.ca:

A judge in Britain has sentenced three Muslim men to 4½ years in prison each for an arson attack on the home of a publisher of a novel about the child bride of the Prophet Muhammad.

Ali Beheshti, Abrar Mirza and Abbas Taj were convicted of conspiracy to commit arson at the Royal Courts of Justice in London on Tuesday in the firebombing of the home of Martin Rynja on Sept. 27 last year.

The trio spilled diesel on the front door or Rynja’s house in the Islington area of north London and set it on fire, just days before Rynja’s Gibson Square company was scheduled to publish The Jewel of the Medina by Sherry Jones.

One of the firebombers, whose lawyer argued at sentencing that his actions were justified, now “considers his conduct to have been misguided, disproportionate and counter-productive.” Ya think?

(We should note that both this post and the previous involve the intersection of politics, religion, books, and fire. What can we say? It’s hump day.)

Well, she sure does know her target audience. In a profile in the August 2009 of Vanity Fair, Alaska governor Sarah Palin revealed that her forthcoming memoir will be published both by HarperCollins (as previously announced), and also by HarperCollins’ Christian publishing imprint Zondervan in a separate, special edition. From the Vanity Fair profile:

Soon Palin will take a crack at her own story: she has signed a book contract for an undisclosed but presumably substantial sum, and has chosen Lynn Vincent, a senior writer at the Christian-conservative World magazine, as co-author of the memoir, which is to be published next year not only by HarperCollins but also in a special edition by Zondervan, the Bible-publishing house, that may include supplemental material on faith.

(Thanks to Publishers Weekly for the tip.)

A blog post on Torontoist yesterday looked at Toronto printer Harmony Printing, and its refusal to produce author Adam Bourret’s autobiographical graphic novel I’m Crazy, a story that deals with “histories, secrets, obsessive compulsive disorder, drugs, gay romance, hallucinations, and insanity.” Although Bourret is serializing the novel online, he wanted to do a small run of print copies, and approached Harmony for an estimate, to which he received this reply:

Unfortunately due to the content I am going to have to respectfully decline. The reason is we have a lot of long standing clients who are religious organizations. They are in our facilities all of the time and [we] cannot risk having this content out in the open during production. Please understand that this is not a slight against your artwork or the message that you are trying to convey to your audience. I wish you all the best and I hope you can understand our position.

The biggest unanswered question from Harmony’s reply is what dubious “content” they are referring to, since it is not explicitly mentioned. When the Torontoist contacted Harmony, they clarified that the issue was not the sexual orientation of the writer/main character, but rather the images of people having sex. Either way, is Harmony’s refusal of services legal? The Torontoist sums up the details on both sides of the debate:

A good place to start any discussion about the legality of refusing services is the Ontario Human Rights Code, which guarantees the right to equal treatment with respect to services, goods, and facilities without discrimination because of certain characteristics. After much struggle, sexual orientation was added as a characteristic in 1986.

The flip side, however, is that equal treatment isn’t guaranteed if the characteristic isn’t listed. (Exception: a court may choose to “read in” a new characteristic that has been unconstitutionally omitted, but this is rare.) So a magazine can refuse to print ads for escort services, and a club can have a style code, because the Code doesn’t prohibit discrimination in the provision of services against prostitutes or the unstylish.

If you accept Harmony’s defence–that it feared a backlash from religious clients who would object to images of people having sex–then Harmony is probably in the clear. The characteristic of “having sex” is not listed in the Code, and it is (highly) unlikely to be read in.

This is, as the quote above notes, if you accept Harmony’s defence, and that you don’t instead believe that Harmony feared a backlash from religious clients who would object specifically to images of two men having sex.

New York Times columnist Ross Douhat (who does not look at all like David Brent … well, maybe just a little) believes that Dan Brown’s novels are successful not just because the books are cheesy page-turners, or because the notion that the Vatican conceals nasty little secrets is inherently interesting (especially to many Catholics), or even because, well, corny thrillers often sell huge, but because The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons (the film of which just opened to big numbers) present an alternative vision of faith, one more attuned to modern life:

Brown is explicit about this mission. He isn’t a serious novelist, but he’s a deadly serious writer: His thrilling plots, he’s said, are there to make the books’ didacticism go down easy, so that readers don’t realize till the end “how much they are learning along the way.” He’s working in the same genre as Harlan Coben and James Patterson, but his real competitors are ideologues like Ayn Rand, and spiritual gurus like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra. He’s writing thrillers, but he’s selling a theology.

[...]

For millions of readers, Brown’s novels have helped smooth over the tension between ancient Christianity and modern American faith. But the tension endures. You can have Jesus or Dan Brown. But you can’t have both.

Jesus and Dan Brown, then, are kind of like cake and cookies – you can only pick one.

The winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, which is partially funded by the Booker foundation, has been announced. The majority of titles on the shortlist – Hunger, The Unfaithful Translator, The American Granddaughter, Time of White Horses, The Scents of Marie-Claire – read like standard lit-prize material.

Then there’s the winner, Egyptian author Youssef Ziedan’s Beelzebub, a work of historical fiction that “features a 5th century Egyptian monk in Alexandria and delves into the history of divisions among fathers of the church over the nature of Christ,” according to The L.A. Times. The title refers to the Devil, who “unlike in classical religious thought . . . is not cursed as the voice of evil but implicitly hailed as the voice of human reason, which pushes the protagonist throughout the novel to question the universe around him.” As The L.A. Times puts it:

[Ziedan's] critique goes beyond the role of religious institutions to the essence of monotheistic religions: “The substance is the same; it is based on the superiority of oneself over others under the pretext of possessing a god who owns the truth. This element of superiority is the same in all three religions, which gives rise to violence. As long as religions last, violence will persist.”

[...] The work sympathizes with sects that challenged the divine nature of Christ, and it quickly ignited fury within the Coptic Church, which has about 10 million followers in Egypt.

In the manner of all good journalism, this Quillblogger will refrain from commentary; however, he looks forward to the inevitable English translation and Da Vinci Code-like storm of protest.