A production of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great has been censored for fear of upsetting Muslim sensibilities. As the Times reports, the play tells the story of a shepherd-robber who defeats the king of Persia, the emperor of Turkey and, seeing himself as the ‘scourge of God’, burns the Koran. Audiences at the Barbican, however, did not see the Koran being burnt; nor did they hear disobliging lines Marlowe wrote about the prophet Mohamed. According to one of the producers, this would have been ‘unnecessarily inflammatory’. He said:

Marlowe was not challenging Muslims, he was attacking theism, saying, ‘I’m God, there isn’t a God’. If he had been in a Christian country, a Judaic country or a Hindu country, it would be their gods he’d be attacking.’ He said more people would be insulted by broadening the attack.

Eh? What a wally. Here’s that apostle of moderation, Inayat Bunglawala, the media secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, playing clever politics by saying:

In the context of a fictional play, I don’t think it will have offended many people.

Another own goal for western civilisation. However, in another part of the beleaguered British forest, Imperial College London appears to have had a rare fit of courage and common-sense. It has banned students from wearing either Islamic headscarves or hooded tops on the grounds that obscuring the face poses a security threat in the wake of the London bombings. Naturally, students have attacked this threat to their personal freedom. And here is the busy Mr Bunglawala (one of the Prime Minister’s advisers on combating Muslim extremism) being slightly less moderate:

In today’s world, we understand there has to be security, but measures should not be so drastic as to prevent Muslim women taking up higher education, especially as they are being encouraged to do so.

Hello? Did anyone say anything about stopping them? Imperial has been very brave. It is so obviously right. It will now come under intense pressure to abandon this policy. One can hear the human rights lawyers rubbing their hands already.