732 Arabian Nights

I bet you thought I was going to do another article on Muslim prudery and misogyny. Well, you'd be right. But this one's a little different. It's more like my libel tourism article, only overseas. And it's one of those stories that you know is true because nobody could make this stuff up. Poor Scheherezade was under attack, along with the entire 1001 Arabian Nights. Can Rimsky-Korsakov be far behind?

I'm sure you've all heard of Doctors Without Borders. But I'll bet you never heard of Lawyers Without Shackles. I have to admit, they're not exactly a household word. But I didn't make them up. They really exist. The group is comprised almost entirely of Egyptian Muslim lawyers and their stated agenda is to "delete salacious passages from contemporary literature and cherished classics." The group chose as its first victim 1001 Arabian Nights. They filed pleadings to completely ban the work in Egypt, or alternatively censor the hell out of it (hence, 732 Arabian Nights).

The common expression for this type of litigation is "lawfare." Unlike libel tourism which tries to squelch free speech in the United States by obtaining large monetary judgments overseas and attempting to collect them here, lawfare is the tactic of filing multiple frivolous or dubious lawsuits to promote an agenda which costs the defendants so much that they'll just give up and get out of the business. It's aimed at both authors and publishers. The lawyers and plaintiffs are well-funded Islamic extremists who have unlimited sources of money to pursue the lawsuits. Most defendants don't have those resources, and often cave in at the likelihood of being driven into bankruptcy by the legal costs.

This tactic has been used by unscrupulous plaintiffs and ambulance-chasing lawyers for years, both here and abroad. But the Islamists have raised it to high art. To paraphrase Clausewitz on diplomacy and war, Islamic lawfare is the continuation of jihad by other means. It's not personal. They just want everybody, anybody, who prints the slightest hint of criticism of Islam or the prophet Mohammed to shut up, crawl into a hole, and die. Ditto for any work that depicts human existence and activity in any manner not consistent with good Islamic fundamentalist thinking.


The Egyptian lawyers and their religious masters found many portions of the Arabian Nights to be salacious, and particularly Scheherazade's tricking of the king a very un-Islamic suggestion that a woman might out-think a man. Burn the infidels. Oops, I mean burn the books. This suit might have been successful in Iran or Saudi Arabia, if the works were allowed in the first place. But if the government stops publication before it begins, there's no need for Islamic shysters to go to court. But it did fail in the Egyptian court. Not the issue at all. The infidel-chasing Egyptian lawyers will just file another action, worded slightly differently or with slightly different contentions and the poor defendants will be back in court again soon. It's a recipe for the end of freedom of expression, which concludes with the instructions: "cook until done."

America already fought the obscenity battles in the 60s and 70s, and obscenity won. The recent anti-libel tourism act in the Senate bill would effectively shut down most of these obnoxious attacks on the First Amendment. But America is just one country. These insults to Allah in Muslim lands and hate speech statutes in the West will produce never-ending litigation until the defendants all simply give up or the western governments revise their speech and press statutes to protect thoughts and depictions which offend a segment of society which would rather kill than switch.

Lawyers Without Shackles does not understand that the shackling of the mind is as evil as shackling of the body. Or as the words of the poem say, "stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage." Now I'm left wondering what these misogynist homophobes would do if they knew that Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat, translated by non-traditional classicist scholars, reads: "A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and a comely youth beside me, singing in the wilderness."