Saudi Kingdom bans the Arabic equivalent of Twilight

You can’t blame them for banning it. Just look at how smutty that smoke is.

December 5, 2013 - Melville House

by Dustin Kurtz

The fantasy novel HWJN has been pulled from bookstores in Saudi Arabia this month—not for its hot, wet jinni romance, but rather for its mentions of Ouija boards and other spiritualist paraphernalia.
As reported by M Lynx Qualey on the already-essential Arablit blog, the book—a bestseller in Saudi Arabia with a vocal fanbase online—has been ordered pulled from bookstores. Qualey writes,

No one wants to answer questions officially, although it was apparently last Tuesday — such is the date on the letter — that Saudi’s Hayaa (the committee for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue) delivered a handwritten letter to bookstores, informing them that they had to stop selling copies of HWJN.

This is, it should be noted, something of a haphazard ban: the book has not been pulled from all stores and is still more broadly available in the English edition. The book’s authors Ibraheem Abbas and Yasser Bahjatt released a statement on twitter, and a rallying cry around the book has gone out, triggering a healthy case of the Streisand Effect.

The book is narrated by a young jinn who falls in love with a human woman whose family moves into the house they occupy. The conceit of the book is that jinn have an entire contemporary society in parallel to the human world. If this sounds familiar, that may be because you’ve read any major bestselling fantasy book of the past thirty years.
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