No my book has not been banned!

Posted on 26 February 2009 with no comments from readers

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It now emerges that two book authors have been claiming that their books have been banned in Dubai to publicize sales. It can also be no coincidence that these books also seem to be deliberately salacious in content in order to court controversy.

But I would like to clear up a misperception that my book ‘Opportunity Dubai’ might have been banned. True it was published in the UK on November 2 and only appeared in Dubai last week.

However, the censor was not at fault. When it had not appeared in Dubai bookshops by the middle of January I went to see him.

Open government

Contrary to the impression some might have, Dubai has a very open bureaucracy. I simply walked into the National Media Council and asked politely to see the censor, and was shown straight into his office.

He finished his telephone call and then immediately took up my enquiry. It turned out he had passed the book a month earlier, and he kindly phoned the booksellers to find out what might be the reason for the delay. He did not want to be blamed.

My publishers eventually received an order for ‘Opportunity Dubai’ on January 23, and clearly delivery and circulation to bookshops then took a little longer. Unfortunately the bookstores underestimated demand and the book sold out in a couple of days. Re-orders have been placed.

It is all too easy for a supply-chain delay over a holiday period to be misconstrued as some kind of a conspiracy by the censor, especially by authors anxious to see their work on sale.

Liberal values

But in my experience the UAE censor is now relatively liberal, although the values of more conservative members of society still inhibit the sale of a very few books.

However, even in the more liberal Western countries there are limits on what can be published or seen on television, and the West can also be repressive in its media. War reporting, for example, shows a sanitized version of reality rather than the blood-and-guts portrayed on some Arab media.

Cultural values should be tolerated, and it is not for somebody sitting in Dubai to tell a UK television censor what to allow on the screen, even if they might think them wrong, or perhaps they should.

As a local magistrate my father used to censor books sold in local bookshops many years ago, and he told me then how difficult it was to draw the correct boundaries. But of course there do need to be limits set, otherwise liberalism becomes a charter for irresponsible and untrue literature.