Turkish author Nedim Gursel, shown in Istanbul, June 2, has beat charges of insulting religion, but says such cases shouldn't be happening in secular Turkey. (Murad Sezer/Reuters)

A court in Istanbul has cleared Turkish novelist Nedim Gursel of insulting Islam with his book The Daughters of Allah.

Gursel, who lives in France and teaches at the Sorbonne, has been fighting charges for more than a year after a complaint was filed by a private citizen.

He was charged with insulting religious values under Article 216 of the Turkish penal code, which religious conservatives have used to try to block secular writing in Turkey.

Gursel describes The Daughters of Allah as a fictional history of Islam in the sixth century.

The Turkish religious directorate took the unusual step of supporting the prosecution, claiming that religion was denigrated by the actions of women in the book.

But Gursel argued the novel is a work of fiction and his lawyers uncovered errors in the filing that seemed to show the original complainant had not read the novel.

Faced years in jail

In dismissing the case, the Turkish court cited those errors in the original complaint. Gursel faced up to three years in jail if convicted.

Speaking to the Guardian newspaper, he said he was relieved by the verdict but believed such prosecutions are harming the image of Turkey in the eyes of the rest of the world.

"The offence of blasphemy shouldn't even exist in a secular republic, which is what Turkey considers itself to be," he said.

It is the second time Gursel has been prosecuted under Turkey's penal code.

His 1976 short-story collection, A Summer Without End, won Turkey's highest literary prize, but in 1980 a military tribunal charged him with slandering Turkey's army in one of the stories.

That book, and his later novel The First Woman, became unavailable in Turkey. He was acquitted by a Turkish court.

Gursel fled to France in 1980 to escape the political atmosphere in Turkey.

The French Ministry of Culture named him a Chevalier of arts and letters in 2004.

PEN, the international organization that fights for freedom of expression, has expressed concern about the large number of writers and publishers in Turkey facing prosecution in recent years.

PEN says it is monitoring more than 70 cases, including one against the Turkish publisher of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion.

"There have been no recent cases of writers being imprisoned, and many do not end with convictions, yet the very existence of legislation that penalizes commentary on religion acts as a deterrent," PEN said in a May report on Gursel's case.

"Whatever their outcome, the trials often take many months to conclude, and in some cases years, sapping financial and emotional resources. This is a price that some may not be willing to pay, choosing self-censorship instead."