Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the party is always right.
Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) removed from a new Dutch translation of Dante's Inferno
We're just beginning. ANYTHING offending us or our Muslim brothers will be purged. ANYTHING.
A new Dutch translation of the Divine Comedy has erased the name of Muhammad from the opus magnum of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri to prevent the epic poem from becoming "unnecessarily offensive" to Muslims.
Translator Lies Lavrijsen told Belgian Radio 1 that she expunged the founder of Islam from her translation to give it the "widest possible accessibility", particularly for "a younger audience".
"We knew that if we left this passage as it is, we would have unnecessarily hurt a large part of the readers", Lavrijsen said, noting that the decision was made "in the tense period which saw the death of teacher Samuel Paty in France".
Defending the deletion of Muhammad's name, publisher Myrthe Spiteri of Blossom Books explained that naming the prophet of Islam in the translation "is not necessary for the understanding of the literary text".
"Muhammad is subjected to a cruel and humiliating fate, just because he is the founder of Islam", Spiteri told De Standaard. "Thieves or murderers in Dante's Hell have made real mistakes, but founding a religion cannot be reprehensible".
"After all, the poet places homosexuals in Hell, but only because Christianity considered them sinners. And Dante still writes about this with a lot of respect", Spiteri added.
Speaking to Church Militant, Italian literary expert Elisabetta Sala criticized the "act of cultural vandalism".
"As for narrow-minded Puritans trying to contain genius, myriad-minded Shakespeare had a verb coined all to himself when, in the Victorian Age, he got 'bowdlerized' by two zealot siblings", Sala excoriated.
"Now, politically correct Puritans have 'Lavrijsen-ized' myriad-minded Dante. Well done! Dante, too, was badly in need of a verb all to himself", remarked Sala, author of Shakespeare's Riddle: Courtier or Dissident?
In 2002, a jihadi outfit linked to Al-Qaeda planned to blow up Bologna's biggest church in order to destroy Giovanni da Modena's 15th-century Gothic fresco "The Inferno", which portrays Muhammad being tormented by demons in Hell.
In 2006, police uncovered a second jihadi plot to bomb Bologna's basilica.
A new Dutch translation of the Divine Comedy has erased the name of Muhammad from the opus magnum of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri to prevent the epic poem from becoming "unnecessarily offensive" to Muslims.
