What do Galileo Galilei, Salman Rushdie and Harry Potter have in common? Books by or about them have been banned or challenged for diverse reasons.
Image: Frank Rumpenhorst/dpa/picture alliance
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Famous banned books over the decades
What do Galileo Galilei, Salman Rushdie and Harry Potter have in common? Books by or about them have been banned or challenged for diverse reasons.
Image: Simon & Schuster
Accused of blasphemy
Salman Rushdie has faced death threats for "The Satanic Verses," banned in several countries for its blasphemous portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad. On August 12, 2022, 24-year-old suspect Hadi Matar stabbed Rushdie multiple times just before he gave a public lecture in New York. Matar, who said Rushdie "was someone who attacked Islam," has pleaded not guilty for assault and attempted murder.
Image: Viking Press
Germany's Oscar nominee
"All Quiet on the Western Front" by Erich Maria Remarque is an unvarnished look at life on the German front during World War I, as told by 20-year-old protagonist, Paul Baumer. Seen by many critics as a key anti-war book, it was banned and burned under the Nazi regime in Germany. The first German-language film adaptation of the book is now a best international film contender for the 2023 Oscars.
Image: Ballantine Books
A book about book burning
This 1953 dystopian novel by Ray Bradbury tells of an American society of the future where books are outlawed — and burnt if discovered. In the 1990s one US school district refused for the use of the word "goddamn." It has also been challenged on the basis of "questionable themes" like censorship, repression and religion. It is often regarded as one of Bradbury's best works.
Image: Simon & Schuster
When animals shouldn't speak
George Orwell's "Animal Farm" features a group of farm animals who rebel against their human farmer, hoping to create a society where they can be equal, free, and happy. It was a swipe at corruption in the former Soviet Union, and was banned there until the 1980s. Schools in the United Arab Emirates also banned it in 2002 for depicting a talking pig, an animal considered unclean in Islam.
Image: Mary Evans Picture Library/picture alliance
'The Book That Should Not Be Read'
Despite its global acclaim and success that saw both children and adults devouring the entire "Harry Potter" series written by British author J.K.Rowling, the books have been targeted for removal from American school libraries as they dealt with ghosts, cults and witchcraft.
Image: United Archives/Impress/picture alliance
An anti-family children's book
"And Tango makes Three" is based on the true story of two male penguins in a New York zoo who raise a chick together. Pro-family organisations and individuals in the US criticized it and called for its censorship for being "anti-ethnic" and "anti-family" to "unsuited to age group." In Singapore, where homosexuality is illegal, it was first pulled from libraries but later moved to 'adult' sections.
Image: Little Simon
Not banned in the US
In Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 novel "Lolita" is about a middle-aged college professor who is obsessed with a twelve-year-old daughter whom he sexually exploits. In today's plain language, he's a pedophile. Unsurprisingly, it was banned as obscene over different periods in France, England, Argentina and New Zealand. Shockingly, it wasn't banned in the United States, though it was challenged.
Image: Rowohlt Taschenbuch;
A blanket ban
His debut, the 1987 short-story collection "Stick Out Your Tongue," highlighted the brutal Chinese occupation of Tibet. The government condemned the book as “spiritual pollution” and permanently banned Ma's books from the country. Ma himself was banned from China after the publication of his 2013 novel, "The Dark Road," about the impact of the nation’s one-child policy.
Image: Picador
Airing inconvenient truths
Said to be the most-challenged book in the US from 2010 to 2019, Publishers Weekly described this YA novel as the “Native American equivalent of 'Angela’s Ashes,' a coming-of-age story so well observed that its very rootedness in one specific culture is also what lends it universality, and so emotionally honest that the humor almost always proves painful.”
Image: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Nobel laureate who will not be silenced
Lawyer Shirin Ebadi was one of Iran's first female judges. After the 1979 revolution, she was dismissed from her position. Ebadi opened a legal practice and began defending people who were being persecuted by the authorities. Despite being the first female peace prize laureate from the Islamic world, her memoir "Iran Awakening" is banned in her native country for its political content.
Image: Rider
Enforcing racial stereotypes
Despite being acknowledged as one of the best American novels ever written, Mark Twain's 1884 novel "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is frequently challenged in the US over its depiction of racial stereotypes. The N-word is used 242 times in the novel, leading one administrator to brand it the “most grotesque example of racism I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Image: Gemeinfrei
(In)famous ban backtrack
Famed Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei's “Dialogue on the Two World Systems” published in 1632 was originally banned by the Catholic Church for suggesting that the earth orbited the sun, and he was accused of heresy back then. It wasn't until 1822 that this ban was lifted and finally in 1992, Pope John Paul II and the the Pontifical Academy of Sciences officially declared that Galileo was right.
Image: Basiletti/zumapress/picture alliance
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Forty years ago, in September 1982, the first "Banned Books Week" took place in the United States.
According to bannedbooksweek.org, this annual awareness campaign was first launched "in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries."
This refers to the case of Island Trees School District versus Pico, where a slim majority of the US Supreme Court held that the First Amendment limits the power of junior high and high school officials from removing books from school libraries because of their content. In this case, the school had removed nine books from its library in 1976 — including Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" — citing that the books were collectively "anti-American, anti-Christian, antisemitic, and just plain filthy."
The court found that "the local school boards may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books."
It was Judith Krug, a prominent American First Amendment and library activist who first conceptualized this week together with the American Library Association's (ALA) Intellectual Freedom Committee.
Often held during the latter half of September — this year between September 18 and 24 — this event focuses on the value of free and open access to information as guaranteed under the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
During this week the American book community of librarians, booksellers, publishers, journalists, teachers and readers get involved in activities "to support the freedom to seek and to express ideas, even those some consider unorthodox or unpopular," as stated on the Banned Books Week website.
Meanwhile Amnesty International, as a member of the Banned Books Week Coalition, uses this week to focus on people worldwide who have been imprisoned, threatened, or murdered because of their writing, art, or other published work.
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Unfit for reading
Over the years, notable titles have time and again been the subject of court cases after being deemed unfit for young readers either by school boards, parents or citizen's advocacy groups in the US.
Among others, American poet laureate Maya Angelou's "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings" has been described as "deviant" for its references to lesbianism, premarital sex and profanity. Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" has been challenged for being racially offensive for the use of slurs. In 2001, J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye" (1951) was removed by one school board member who believed it was a "filthy, filthy book." All three are considered American classics.
International books have also been targeted: Some American school libraries have called to remove the globally successful "Harry Potter" books by British author J.K. Rowling from their shelves, as they deal with ghosts, cults and witchcraft.
Meanwhile, Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" is perhaps the most notable example of a book that has been banned in many countries and infuriated many Muslims for its blasphemous portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad.
The novelist, who was forced into hiding for nearly 10 years after his book was published in 1988, following the fatwa or decree of then-Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who called for Rushdie's assassination against a $3 million bounty on the author's head.
On August 12, 2022, 24-year-old suspect Hadi Matar stabbed Rushdie multiple times as the latter was about to give a public lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in the state of New York. Matar was arrested at the scene and has since pleaded not guilty to the charges of assault and attempted murder. Matar reportedly said he has only read two pages of the author's controversial novel. Speaking to the New York Post from jail, Matar said Rushdie was "someone who attacked Islam."
Ban or challenge?
It must be noted that the word "ban" itself remains moot. Critics argue that books are not "banned" per se in the US — unlike in other parts of the world where governments prohibit their sales or availability for diverse reasons. The books in American school syllabi or school and public libraries are more often "challenged" by parents, advocacy groups or private citizens for their perceived sexual, violent, offensive or age-inappropriate content.
Supporters argue that semantics aside, observing "Banned Books Week" raises people's awareness of their freedom to information, and in the long run prevents challenges from turning into outright bans.
