Inside Higher Ed
January 15th, 2015
Last week’s terrorist attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo thrust a six-year-old battle between a scholar and publisher back into the spotlight. Now some are calling for Yale University Press to make good on an alleged promise to print a paperback edition of a book from which it pulled images – some controversial – of Muhammad. Some free speech advocates, not to mention the author, want the images included in the paperback.
“I’m really quite tired of readjudicating this – I’d sort of thrown up my hands and given up hope of ever having these images in my book,” said Jytte Klausen, Lawrence A. Wien Professor of International Cooperation at Brandeis University and author of The Cartoons That Shook the World, which Yale published in 2009 without several originally included depictions of Muhammad, citing concerns about possible retaliation. One set of cartoons, published in Denmark's Jyllan-Posten newspaper in 2005, and which set off violent protests in the Middle East that were the subject of the Klausen book, were of particular concern.