Just after the first vinyl pressing in 1981, the record company received a serious letter from the World Council of Islam in the UK stating that they considered the recording offensive. "We consider this blasphemy that you put grooves to the chanting of the Holy Book.” Without any explanation, ‘Qu'ran’ was removed from later re-releases of 'My Life in the Bush of Ghosts'.
“ There was an op-ed piece in The New York Times by an evolutionary biologist or somebody - which was a curious place for the opinion to come from - and he said that there's no such thing as a completely free, uncensored medium, that people censor themselves all the time, in deference to hurting other people’s feelings, or offending other groups, or in their own, not to provoke a fight. It is a form of censorship, but that’s also the way people are as animals - that you don’t unnecessarily provoke people unless you really are looking for a fight. And we thought, "Okay, in deference to somebody's religion, we'll take it off. And you do self-censor certain things, and it's not necessarily a bad thing. That’s just the way human social interaction works. "
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