Lebanon has banned Dan Brown's bestselling novel "The Da Vinci Code" after Catholic leaders complained it was offensive to Christianity.
Bookstores said on Thursday that security authorities had told them to pull French, English and Arabic copies off their shelves and had banned local publishers from distributing more.
"It was definitely one of our most popular books," said Roger Haddad, assistant manager at Virgin Megastore's bookshop in downtown Beirut.
"This is censorship, people should be allowed to read what they want ... This book is fiction, everyone knows it's fiction. It is not political or propaganda or history."
In "The Da Vinci Code," an academic uncovers riddles hidden in the religious works of the famous painter.
For Lebanon's Catholic Information Center, whose criticism apparently led to the ban, it struck too deeply against Christianity for a country with a history of sectarian conflict.
"There are paragraphs that touch the very roots of the Christian religion ... They say Jesus Christ had a sexual relationship with Mary Magdalene, that they had children," the center's president, Father Abdou Abu Kasm, told Reuters.
"Those things are difficult for us to accept, even if it's supposed to be fiction. Lebanon is a country with many different religious communities and there are still laws that ban articles that offend different communities."
The 2003 book's Arab publishers, Beirut-based Arab Scientific Publishers, said the Arabic version had only been released about 10 days ago but was already proving popular.
"You can understand the Lebanese (cultural) mosaic, but that doesn't really allow us to condone such a ban," company president Bassam Chebaro said.
A security source said Lebanon, home to Muslims, Christians and Druze, had asked religious authorities for advice on potentially sensitive books for years.
"We have to work for public interest, banning anything that could worsen sectarian prejudices or offend religions," he said.