By ROBERTA FEDELE
Considered an emblem of the Christian Middle Ages and a central author of the Western tradition, Italian writer Dante Alighieri unintentionally reveals a lot about the influence of Islamic thought and models on Christian Europe. This is especially true of his masterpiece, “The Divine Comedy”, regarded as a prodigy of Italian literature and one of the most refined Christian and European literary works.
In the 1920s, Spanish historian Miguel Asín Palacios raised an animated diatribe in the European cultural and academic milieu with the publication of the book “Islamic Eschatology in the Divine Comedy”, an attempt to read “The Divine Comedy” noncanonically while underlining its Islamic sources and Dante’s attraction to Arab culture. Comparing Dante’s poem to Arab manuscripts narrating the Night Journey, known as Isra and Miraj, Palacios noticed relevant similarities at a symbolic and formal level.
“The Divine Comedy” describes Dante’s journey in the realms of the afterlife and represents allegorically the soul’s journey toward God. On the other hand, the Isra and Miraj describes the Night Journey from Makkah to Jerusalem and the Ascension to Heaven that Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) took, both physically and spiritually, during a single night around the year 621. Mentioned in the Qur’an, the Isra and Miraj became a source of inspiration for several Muslim authors who gave their own interpretations of the argument in their literary works.
The controversy regarding the Islamic sources of the most cherished Christian poem lessened when experts found out that in the second half of the 13th century a manuscript narrating the Ascension to Heaven had been translated into Latin, as “Liber Schalae Machometi”, and also into Spanish and old French, making almost certain Dante’s knowledge about the manuscript. Besides, Arabic culture was well known and widespread in Tuscany in the 14th century, and Brunetto Latini, the Florentine ambassador to Toledo in 1260, can be theoretically considered the intermediary between Dante and “Liber Schalae Machometi”.
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