I feel sorry for the country that has to put up with asshole stupidity like this...
The publisher, Erol Karaaslan, said today that he expected to be questioned on Thursday by an Istanbul prosecutor as part of an official investigation, and faces prosecution both as its publisher and translator. The book has sold some 6,000 copies in Turkey since it was published by his Kuzey publishing house in June. The inquiry apparently began after one reader complained that passages in the book were an assault on "sacred values".
The investigation comes in the wake of controversy over the issue of freedom of speech in Turkey after Orhan Pamuk's prosecution in 2005. The Nobel prize-winner was tried under Article 301 of the Turkish criminal code for "insulting Turkishness" following comments he made to a Swiss magazine to the effect that a million Armenians had died in Turkey during the first world war - "and nobody but me dares to talk about it". The charges were eventually dropped. The author Elif Shafak, too, was last year acquitted of similar charges brought over remarks made by a character in her latest novel, The Bastard of Istanbul.
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