Dante and Islam

According to some, at the base of the Divine Comedy there would be the mark of Islamic culture. For others, however, this would prove to be inaccurate. Dante Alighieri was known to be Islamophobic. Here is a controversial thesis of comparison.

An interpretation of Dante and his life depicted as Islamic.

In the Divine Comedy there is a strong presence of Islamic culture. Dante Alighieri was aware of the importance of Islam, although his relationship with the Muslim thinking was, at times, problematic and variable. The relationship goes from a scathing indictment toward Muhammad, to the use of images of the afterlife to rebuild the Muslim Hell and Paradise in the Divine Comedy.

The Divine Comedy is not original

Dante Alighieri took inspiration from the culture of Islam to make the journey to which he recounts in the Divine Comedy. In support there are several academics, including the Spanish priest Don Miguel Asin Palacios, Islamist and professor at the University of Madrid who in 1919 wrote “The Divine Comedy in the Muslim eschatology”.

Asin Palacios notes a number of similarities between the work of Dante Alighieri and some texts belonging to the Islamic tradition. In particular the Arabian tales of medieval afterlife with which Dante may have been in contact since the thirteenth century since in Muslim Spain there were many Muslim texts in circulation.

The entire structure of the Divine Comedy is very similar to the Miraj, an Arabic text that chronicles the rise of Muhammad to heaven and which, at Dante’s time, had already been translated into French and Latin. In the Divine Comedy even the Islamic text recounts the journey through the underworld and celestial spheres in order to meet God.

The cover of the Miraj, an Arabic text.

The similarities between the Divine Comedy and the Miraj are abundant. In example, the architecture of Dante's Inferno seems to be trodden on the Muslim Hell: both places are on fire, with a funnel shape, modeled on a series of levels that descend gradually and that the tip reaches the center of the Earth. The damned there are arranged according to the severity of their sins and there are allegorical beasts that stand in the way of the two travelers .

Arrived at the Paradiso, both Dante and Muhammad, see numerous angelic spirits who, ranked hierarchically, revolve around the Throne of God; and when they have the vision to the gods they find it difficult to describe what they saw .

In support of this thesis is also Donnarumma Raphael, a professor of Italian at the University of Pisa, which states that the apparent influence of Islam in the Divine Comedy indicates that Dante was fully aware of the importance of Islamic culture. In fact, in the Limbo, among the wise Greek and Latin heroes, we also find the Sultan of Egypt, Saladin, the Persian physician Avicenna and Averroes, Arab philosopher, with which Dante recognizes the spread of the thought and the works of Aristotle into neo-Latin culture.

Dante Alighieri was an Islamophobic

The contact between Dante and Islamic culture is, therefore, obvious. But not everyone consideres it positive. Gherush92, non-governmental organization for Human Rights, denounced the presence of Islamophobic and racist content in the Divine Comedy.

In Canto XXVIII of the Inferno, Dante describes the punishments inflicted on the sowers of discord, those who have lived to feel lacerations of political, religious, and family nature within life. Among these damned, there is also Mohammed. According to Dante, the Prophet of Allah is a Disseminators of scandal and schism and therefore Islam is a heresy.

In addition, the punishment that Dante attributes to Mohammed is atrocious: the body of the prophet is split from the chin to the backside and his guts hanging from the leg. Similar penalty for Ali, Muhammad's successor, who finds himself with his head split from the chin to the hair. According Gherush92 it is an image that insults the Islamic culture and, for this reason, asked the Minister of Education to abolish the Divine Comedy from school programs or at least to make the necessary comments and clarifications.

The cover a book discussing the controversial topic of Dante and Islam.

This is a request rather difficult to actuate since the Divine Comedy is considered a work of universal high value. In Italian schools it continues to be taught but it must be noted that the Arabic translation of The Divine Comedy, by the philologist Hassan Osman, has already been censured: there have been deliberately omitted some verses deemed offensive to the Islamic population.