One-eyed Sympathy

​​ Sherry Jones was sure from the start that her novel "The Jewel of Medina" would be greeted with public attention when it suddenly burst into the public light last August. The book deals with the extremely sensitive issue of the life of Aisha bint Abu Bakr, Mohammed's favourite wife, who was married to him while still a child. Jones said it was her purpose to describe the early days of Islam in such a way that her story would offer a sensitive picture of a religion founded on equality and peacableness – and that was a picture which the West, she said, needed right now. The major US publisher Random House had been trailing the book for a year, and was ready to promote a reading tour. It had suggested the novel to the Book of the Month Club and was busy pushing it at the various promotional channels.

Just before the publication date, following a warning from the Islamic studies scholar Denise Spellberg, on whose work Jones had partly based her novel, the book was withdrawn; Spellberg pointed out that Muslims could feel insulted by the book, and she is said to have distanced herself from its "pornographic" content.

Sherry Jones and her agent were asked for comments. Their open and cooperative response was a stark contrast to the seemingly embarrassed blocking tactics used by Random House.

A combative wench

Sherry Jones's novel has now appeared in England and the USA with smaller publishers, and a German translation has been brought by Pendo almost simultaneously. That allows one to consider the behaviour of the various actors for oneself. The accusation that the book is pornography – indeed, as one German newspaper said child pornography – is without any foundation. There is certainly some eroticism each time a new beauty arrives in the Prophet's harem, but there's not much more than an occasional coquettish glance or titillating gesture.

In the Hadith, the traditional words and deeds of the Prophet as transmitted by those who were close to him, there is often a fairly unrestrained approach to his manly prowess, so there's no reason for Muslims to be offended at such passages. In addition, Jones uses a rarely heard tradition which does not conform to the Hadith, and transfers Mohammed's consummation of his marriage to Aisha from her ninth to her fourteenth birthday. Altogether, she shows Mohammed to be an extremely careful and loving husband.

Paradoxically, it is precisely the sympathy which the author has with her main character which locks her into a grid which is far too restrictive. The fact that Jones sometimes departs from her historical sources and portrays the complex early history of Islam only in the broadest brush-strokes can be justified by artistic freedom, as well as by her desire to attract as wide a readership as possible.

​​ But in the novel, Aisha, whom the tradition portrays initially as a spoilt, headstrong child who later becomes a jealous young woman with a sharp tongue, turns into a cross between Joan of Arc and Pippi Longstocking who often gets on the reader's nerves. From her earliest childhood until the moment when the dying prophet gives her his own weapon, Jones doesn't let Aisha miss an opportunity of waving a sword in the air. She crosses wooden sabres with her childhood friend Safwan, as the Prophet's wife she goes armed to market and is quickly involved in trading (we can leave aside that it's scarcely probably that such an episode could have occurred), and she pushes her way to fight at the front of every battle in which the faithful are involved.

In addition, she acts as Mohammed's strategist – the trench which saved the Muslims in Medina from the superior forces of the Quraishis was a product of Aisha's genius, and not, as tradition tells us, that of the Persian Salman.

We are given the chance to experience the protagonist's jealousy no less often than her fighting spirit. That perhaps is more plausible, since Aisha, who's just out of childhood, has to struggle for her position as Mohammed's favourite against women who are likely to have been more mature and unlikely to have been less attractive than she. She knows what awaits her if she fails: her own mother has to perform endless services for her husband's tyrannical main wife. The twelve wives whom Mohammed takes in the course of this novel are as different as the reasons for which he marries them. That provides a strong flavour to the novel, but it ends being to Aisha's disadvantage: her regular outbreaks of spite and jealousy seem increasingly like set pieces.

The appearances of Safwan, who changes from being Aisha's childhood companiion to being an attractive but feeble-hearted tempter who turns up at every crisis, also seem a bit like a deus ex machine. Sherry Jones takes a story from the Hadith and spins it out until it turns into a case of near-adultery, which could be one of the points in the novel at which faithful Muslims could take offence.

Questionable partisanship

What is most annoying, though, is where Sherry Jones – either out of sympathy for the protagonist or out of respect for the Prophet – is led to take a questionably partisan position or to put a favourable slant on something. Mohammed's nephew and son-in-law Ali, who is pushed out of the Prophet's succession after his death by Aisha's father, is portrayed from the start as an intriguing snoop, who undermines Aisha at every opportunity. Shiites, who see Ali as the only legitimate heir to Mohammed's authority and leadership, are likely to receive such a portrayal with disapproval.

Scarcely better is the ease with which Jones skates over the darker sides of early Muslim history. The fact that Mohammed got rid of critics and mockers is referred to in such a flowery way that only experts will know what the text is talking about. The expulsion of the first of two Jewish tribes from Medina is misused as an excuse for one of Aisha's sword-dances; in the second case, it's portrayed as an act of mercy by the Prophet, the traitorous Jews deserved the death penalty, but they are spared because of their holy book – of which much has gone into the Koran. The cruel fate of a third Jewish tribe – the massacre of the men of Bani Quraiza and the enslavement of their women and children – was evidently ordered by the Prophet, who is almost in tears, only under duress.

Sherry Jones's purpose – to lead the reader towards Islam in a spirit of reconciliation, in spite of the vilification with which it is usually portrayed, is one which deserves recognition – even if her book doesn't always live up to its literary aspirations, or goes a bit too far in stretching the historical facts. But with such well-meaning dishonesty she jeopardises her reader's trust in her portrayal in a manner which seems trivial and is hard to understand.

Angela Schader

© Neue Zürcher Zeitung 2008

Angela Schader is the literary editor of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

Translated from the German by Michael Lawton

Sherry Jones, Jewel of Medina: A Novel, Gibson Square/Beaufort Books 2008, 432 pages

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