Dante and Islam, Prose/Poem 6/19/2014

Dante and Islam

The Divine Comedy was likely written
from 1308 to 1321.
Dante built his poem
From Islamic as well as Christian lore.

Dante's wide learning, directed
by his scholar-guardian-teacher,
Brunetto Latini,
included the Islamic Isra—

Mohamed's nocturnal journeys
through hell and purgatory--
merged with the Miraj--Mohamed's
visit to the joys of paradise.

Dante fused these texts
into his Christian afterlife.
With parallels between
Mohamed and Dante

lost in a dense wood and kept
from ascending a mountain
by allegorical beasts,
and guided on a tour through hell,

Purgatory, and Paradise
which at its border was Limbo
that enclosed the righteous who died
as babes, or virtuous pagans

before Jesus blazed a path to Paradise.
Dante adopts Limbo,
with its Islamic imagery
of seven walls and seven gates,

into an unscriptured topography
of the afterlife, according
to a Jesuit Arabic scholar.*
Dante adapts classical lore,

and Jewish Old Testament,
with Islamic literature
into a Christian epic of life after death
which was as catholic as it was Catholic.

Such innovation. derived from a cross
between Christian, non-Christian,
and non-western cultures,
disputes the narrow minded

stereotype of the Middle Ages.
The unconventional Dante, also,
wrote the Divine Comedy not
in old Latin but in Italian.


*Miguel Assin, Dante and Islam, 1926.