Dante and Islam

The wording "Dante and Islam" has existed for nearly a century, but it can be jarring to juxtapose the poet most emblematic of medieval Christianity with the name of a rival monotheism. Controversy has raged recurrently for many decades about what the Divine Comedy can tell about perspectives of Christians in the Middle Ages on Muslims. The artistic tradition associated with the poem has kindled powerful reactions within Islam even recently.

Two extremes in approaches to Dante's views on Islam emphasize on the one hand the hostility proclaimed by the twentieth-century conception of "clash of civilizations," and the peaceful cohabitation associated with the modern Spanish term convivencia. Where does Dante's great poem fit within the framework of orientalism that has been debated since Edward W. Said's 1978 book?

Portions of present-day Italy were ruled by Muslims for two hundred years, and afterward a sort of concentration camp for them on the Italian mainland was not forcibly dispersed until 1300. For centuries Christians and Muslims lived cheek by jowl, and in Sicily they achieved a remarkable multicultural symbiosis associated under the polyglot Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II.

To look at matters from a more literary perspective, the Spanish Arabist Miguel Asin Palacios contended in 1919 that for much of the basic framework of the Divine Comedy Dante was indebted to apocryphal traditions about a "night journey" taken by Muhammad. Texts that may support his hypothesis were brought to light in the years around World War II.

Making sense of the issues requires investigating what was known of the Qur'an and of Islamic philosophy and science in Dante's day; it necessitates exploring the bases for Dante's images of Muhammad and Ali; and it compels us to look at the key instances of engagement among Muslims, Jews, and Christians, especially Christian Italians.

Jan M. Ziolkowski is Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Medieval Latin at Harvard University, and Director of Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. His research into the Latin Middle Ages has concentrated on the classical tradition, especially Virgil (The Virgilian Tradition: The First Fifteen Hundred Years and The Virgil Encyclopedia); the grammatical and rhetorical traditions; and the relationship of folktales and vernacular epic with Latin. In Dante scholarship an edited volume on Dante and the Greeks is in press.