Last week, an Italian news outlet reported that two Muslim high school students had been exempted from the required study of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Why? Because they were offended by Dante’s treatment of the Prophet Muhammad, whom Dante places in Hell as a sower of discord. The school allowed the students to study Boccaccio instead.
This is infuriating. If you wish to live in Italy—or anywhere in the West—you should study Dante, a poet of almost peerless stature. The poet T.S. Eliot said, “Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.”
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