Just in case you’d forgotten about those Muhammad cartoons that the Yale University Press decided to omit from its book about the Muhammad cartoons, here they come again.
Muhammad: The “Banned” Images stands as a direct response to Jytte Klausen’s image-purged The Cartoons That Shook the World. Its introduction describes Banned as “the errata to the bowdlerized version of Klausen’s book,” as well as “a statement of defiance against censors, terror-mongers, and their Western appeasers.”
The book is spearheaded by Gary Hull, who directs Duke University’sProgram on Values and Ethics in the Marketplace,and one blogger triumphantly reported, “Duke Beats Yale.” But Hull hastens to clarify that the newly formed Voltaire Press is independent: “We consciously avoided working with any university presses because we did not want to risk a repeat of the debacle at Yale University Press. . . . Neither Duke University nor any of its faculty (other than me) or administrators were involved in the publication of this book.”
Muhammad carries a “Statement of Principle” whose signatories include Sarah Ruden, identified as a professor at the Yale Divinity School. Rudent — a poet whose translation of The Aeneid was published last year by the Yale Press — publicly severed ties with the Press in October, labeling it a “non-publisher” and comparing it to “a doctor who prostitutes a patient.”
