My fight to stop the Chinese censors sanitising Dante

My book on Dante Alighieri was due to come out in Chinese translation later this year, but first I had to consent to sizeable cuts. Even by the standards of other authoritarian states the Beijing censors struck me as overzealous. It seems odd that the medieval Italian poet could cause such unease among modern-day totalitarians. A sanitised Chinese communist version of my book did not sit well with the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death in 1321, and in the end I withheld permission.

The cuts were the work of Beijing’s blandly named Institute for World Religions. The institute undertakes ‘book cleansing’ operations on behalf of the state. No book can be published legally in China today without being vetted. In their solemn appraisal the censors insisted that all references to Islam be removed. Why?

Dante inflicts a punishment so grotesque on the Prophet Muhammad in Canto 28 of the Inferno that Muslims might well protest. The Prophet’s body is split from end to end so that his entrails dangle out amid excrement; he is punished as a ‘sower of discord’. Beijing is not known to be tolerant of China’s 22 million-strong Muslim minority; why then were the censors so unhappy with my 20 pages on Dante’s less than flattering portrayal of Islam?

The reason is that even hostile interpretations of Islam are discouraged today in Xi Jinping’s China. Thus the censors removed from my book a colour-plate illustration of Giovanni da Modena’s 15th-century fresco depicting Muhammad’s graphic mortification by a bat-winged devil creature. The Last Judgment fresco, inspired by Dante, continues a tradition of medieval allegorical books and poems which portrayed Muslims as renegades from Christianity. (In 2002, alarmingly, there was an Islamist plot to blow up the Bologna cathedral where the fresco is displayed.)