Woe unto the reporter who attempts to write about Islamic charities and the potential ties various groups might have to terrorism in the Islamic world. In a neglected story that could have some legs in the near future, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported a week ago that Cambridge University Press wants to destroy all unsold copies of the book Alms for Jihad: Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World (2006), after a libel claim was filed in England by a Saudi banker. The key word in this situation is “England.” It’s easier to sue people for libel in England than in the United States. Much easier.
Anyway, the book apparently suggests that charities and businesses that are tied to Mahfouz financed terrorism in Sudan in the 1990s. The New York Post’s opinion pages picked up the story, along with The Orange County Register’s op-ed pages and Diane Ravitch of The Huffington Post, but that’s about it.
Stanley Kurtz of The Corner, doing our job for us, has this to say:
Here’s a story with huge implications for freedom of speech (all negative), and it’s apparently gone almost entirely unreported in the mainstream press.
… Given MSM’s silence, this looks like one for the blogosphere.
The train seems to have left to the station for the “MSM,” as Kurtz so delicately puts it, but alas, there is hope for them yet. How long will it take for an American publisher to take up the manuscript and print the book? How hard will it be to generate a bit of publicity to make it worth their while?
The key here for freedom of speech is that there is plenty of it in the United States and less of it in Britain when it comes to libel laws.
That brings up another uncovered subject: what exactly are the supposed errors in this book? What made Cambridge cave? That ought to be part of the story, as we saw with The Washington Times’ coverage of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ declining membership rolls. Facts can be tricky things, especially when dealing with money and worldwide organizations.
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Comments (3) |
August 9, 2007, at 1:15 am
This ought to be a wake-up call for those academic presses, especially in England, working on controversial living subjects. From the Cambridge display of the Preface and Table of Contents, the authors appear to give attention both to the historical role of zakat and its transformation through Islamic banking and economics’s role in contemporary globalization. While there have been some works on the American financing of the early Afghan mujahaddid, and some attention paid to finances in specific quasi-state groups (like Hamas and Hizb Allah) this looks like an integrated attempt to tell the story of how money follows the agenda of multiple parties through the conduits of zakat.
While information on Western zakat and Islamic economics and investment tends to be sparse in the Anglo-scholarly world (with some notable exceptions, such as works by Mahmoud El-Gamal, Aly Khorshid and Samuel Hayes), this book looks like it would be valuable in understanding some important facets of political economy.
I must say, that this story has been picked up by sources such as the National Review, the NY Post, and the Orange County paper is not encouraging. That suggests that the story will acquire some “liberal appeasement” or Neville Chamberlain vs. “Islamofascism” tone, rather than a serious planning error on CUP’s part in publishing such a volatile work in a country with poor libel protections for scholars and journalists. It also suggests it will reverberate through the right-wing echo chamber because of its potential for spin.
Curiously speaking, a little digging shows a 2004 work published in Scotland that shares a great deal of thematic similarity, if not in method and approach. Yet there doesn’t seem to have been any outcry over this work. Perhaps the libel laws are not as weak in Scotland?
August 9, 2007, at 9:37 am
It’s a curious thing, freedom of speech. I wonder why a (potentially controversial) book by two US authors was printed in Britain by a British publisher? Particularly when they have used US publishers for previous collaborations on Darfur and Sudan.
August 10, 2007, at 10:20 pm
Every paranoid nut case and 9-11 truther can get their videos and books on line via Limewire and various torrent sites.
So all those complaining should get one of the copies of the books, scan it, make it into a PDF file and tell their friends where to download it.
Yes, it would be “illegal” but if the authors really wanted to make things “legal” they could self publish it in a country where libel laws and copyrights are not big deals.