Italy’s Schools Avoid Teaching Dante: ‘He Offends Islam’

Winfield Myers

Today the Divine Comedy could certainly no longer be written.

How long will we be able to read it?

Muslim middle school students are now exempt from taking lessons on the Divine Comedy. This is happening in Treviso, Italy.

In 1990, the English novelist Anthony Burgess said that Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, which earned him a death sentence, were nothing compared to Dante’s Divine Comedy. “Pure dynamite,” said Burgess.

Then, ten years ago, there was a request from “Gherush92", an organization of researchers consulting with the United Nations, for the Divine Comedy to be removed from school curricula due to its racism and “Islamophobia.”

The prestigious Yale University Press removed a famous reproduction of Muhammad in Hell by Gustave Doré.

And a new Dutch translation of the Divine Comedy eliminated Muhammad so as not to be “unnecessarily offensive.” The translator removed the words about Muhammad. “In Dante, Muhammad suffers a cruel and humiliating fate, only because he is the precursor of Islam,” says publisher Myrthe Spiteri. Dante depicted Muhammad in the circle of schismatics as a puppet split in half.

And given that in Italy we now include Ramadan among the holidays in a Milanese school, that the Koran is read in the schools of Piemonte, that a school in Modena has organized Islamic culture courses, that in Forlì a school has canceled a music lesson for the presence of Muslims, that schools in Carpi have exempted Muslim students from swimming lessons, that in Venice a school has canceled Jesus from a song, what should we expect?

Italy is full of statues dedicated to the supreme “Islamophobe": what to do? Deface them or break them down like the woke idiots did to Columbus and Lincoln in America? And what to do with the schools named after Dante? Bombing as the Taliban did in Afghanistan?

Progressives are very dangerous and the best allies of the Islamists. One day, they will regret it. If they are not cancelled earlier.

Giulio Meotti, cultural editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author and a Middle East Forum Writing Fellow.

Giulio Meotti is a Rome-based journalist for Il Foglio national newspaper. He is the author of twenty books, including A New Shoah: The Untold Story of Israel’s Victims of Terrorism, The Last Western Pope (translated into Spanish and Polish), The End of Europe (Prize Capri San Michele), and The Sweet Conquest (with a preface by Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal) about the creeping Islamization of Europe. He writes a weekly column for Arutz Sheva and has contributed to the Wall Street Journal, the Jerusalem Post, Gatestone Institute, and Die Weltwoche.
See more from this Author
After October 7, It Was Clear How Well Hamas Had Cultivated Public Relations in the West; The Same Goes for Hezbollah
See more on this Topic
I recently witnessed something I haven’t seen in a long time. On Friday, August 16, 2024, a group of pro-Hamas activists packed up their signs and went home in the face of spirited and non-violent opposition from a coalition of pro-American Iranians and American Jews. The last time I saw anything like that happen was in 2006 or 2007, when I led a crowd of Israel supporters in chants in order to silence a heckler standing on the sidewalk near the town common in Amherst, Massachusetts. The ridicule was enough to prompt him and his fellow anti-Israel activists to walk away, as we cheered their departure. It was glorious.