Cambridge University Press has just banned a book. Alms for Jihad has been withdrawn from sale by CUP, which is also writing to libraries asking for it to be pulled from their bookshelves.
The book’s authors, Robert Collins and J. Millard Burr have seen their publisher abandon them completely after the extremely wealthy (to the tune of some $3.1 billion) Saudi Sheikh Mahfouz claimed that the book linked him with terrorism.
CUP backed down, has settled, and written an apology to Mr Mahfouz.
Mahfouz has some form here, having chased down Rachel Ehrenfeld in 2003 over her book Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed – and How to Stop It. In that case Ehrenfeld managed to persuade the US courts that the case should not be heard in Britain. The book is available in the States, but not allowed to be sold in the UK.
A number of experts have reflected in the New York Sun on what this latest decision, by CUP, means. Deborah Lipstadt, who famously triumphed over the holocaust-denier David Irving in the British courts in 2000, says that the Saudis are ‘systematically, case by case, book by book’, challenging critics accusing them of links with terror. ‘This affects not only authors but readers,’ she says. ‘Ideas are being chased out of the marketplace.’