This has got to be one of the stupidest things I've heard about lately. There's a moment in Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great where Tamburlaine burns the Koran. Well, there's a theater in London that cut that scene and others in the belief that the scenes would offend Muslims. Get this:
Simon Reade, artistic director of the Bristol Old Vic, said that if they had not altered the original it “would have unnecessarily raised the hackles of a significant proportion of one of the world’s great religions”.
The burning of the Koran was “smoothed over”, he said, so that it became just the destruction of “a load of books” relating to any culture or religion. That made it more powerful, they claimed.
More powerful, huh? Only if there were books by L. Ron Hubbard. There's more...
Members of the audience also reported that key references to Muhammad had been dropped, particularly in the passage where Tamburlaine says that he is “not worthy to be worshipped”. In the original Marlowe writes that Muhammad “remains in hell”.
If they were so concerned about how Muslims would react to all this, why didn't they, you know, perform something else?
Read more here.
