DANTE AND ISLAM: A STUDY OF THE EASTERN INFLUENCES IN THE DIVINE COMEDY Jeffrey B. McCambridge Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in the Department of English, Indiana University August 2016 Accepted by the Graduate Faculty of Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. Master’s Thesis Committee ___________________________ David Hoegberg, Ph.D., Chair ___________________________ Jonathan R. Eller, Ph.D. ___________________________ Missy Dehn Kubitschek, Ph.D. ii Acknowledgments I must give my greatest thanks to Drs. David Hoegberg, Jonathan Eller, and Missy Kubitschek, without whose guidance and insight this work would not have been possible; to the Institute for American Thought for allowing me access to their libraries; and to the scholars whose hard work helped guide and strengthen my own arguments. iii Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction……………………………………………….………………..1 Chapter 2: Literature Review…………………………………………………………13 Chapter 3: Dante, Saladin, and the Crusades…………………………………………27 Chapter 4: The European Muhammad………………………………………………..39 Chapter 5: The Prophet Muhammad in the Divine Comedy…………………….……58 Chapter 6: Islamic and Christian intertextuality in the Divine Comedy……….……..75 Appendix……………………………………………………………….……………108 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………125 Curriculum Vitae iv Chapter 1: Introduction Dante’s poetic masterpiece, the Divine Comedy (1308-20), has been continually analyzed, explained, and retranslated by scholars in the centuries since its publication. The poem is a definitive work in multiple canons and has been an inspiration for countless other works, and it has been claimed that, excluding the Bible, Dante’s Divine comedy is the most studied work in the English canon.1 Scholars have carefully analyzed the work’s many references to other literary works, historical figures, religion, social norms, and politics to reveal a complex tapestry of symbolism, allegory, and intertextuality. Despite this wealth of critical attention, few have addressed the poet’s interest in Islam. Dante ultimately rejects Islam as a religious, social, and political system throughout his work, but the frequent references to Islamic topics, characters, and images demonstrate that the religion of Islam was an important consideration worthy of repeated mention in his Divine Comedy. Islamic references can be found throughout the work, making them an important motif, but these references are often missed or discounted by literary scholars. An explanation for this critical oversight could be that many Western literary scholars are untrained in recognizing Islamic imagery and unable to assign significance in the same way they are trained to recognize references from Western history or the Western canon. Another barrier to understanding the full richness of Dante’s non- Western references in his poem has been the nationalistic tone Dante scholarship has adopted.2 Dante was seen by many of his critics as the progenitor of an identity and emblem of Western literary superiority, helping the West to transition from the Middle 1 María Rosa Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History, 115. 2 Vicente Cantarino, “History and Analysis of a Controversy,” in Dante and Islam, 36. 1 Ages into the Renaissance. This view was not incorrect; the poet’s use of the vernacular when the literary language of the West was still Latin was revolutionary, and in terms of content the Divine Comedy is an encyclopedically incorporated religion, philosophy, history, autobiography, and much more in high literary style.3 The poet has earned the accolades awarded to him by critics and commentators over the centuries, who have noted that the poem’s complexity and richness that seeks to guide Dante’s Christian, European audience. While Dante was addressing a European and Christian audience about perceived threats to Christianity, Dante’s continual references to Islam signal for the reader that not all of the challenges to Christianity and Christians are domestic or matters of reform. While acknowledging internal problems, Dante’s Pilgrim is also confronted with foreign and eerily omnipresent representations of Islam. My aims in the present work are to analyze some of the Islamic references in the Divine Comedy to better understand how the poet draws on Islam in his work, to analyze how these references impact the meanings of the poem, and to better understand the points of intersection between the Islamic East and the Christian West as presented in the poem. This project analyzes the poem through lens of competition for territorial, ideological, and economic dominance between East and West, and narratives from both Eastern and Western traditions are consulted to help negotiate the often-fine lines separating the two. The present work pays attention to expanding empires and spheres of influence as well as and religious doctrine in an attempt to gain a more complete view of the intertextual dialogue, and sometimes battle, the poet engages in with Islam through his poem about the Christian otherworld. 3 Henry F. Cary, “Introductory Note,” in The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, 4. 2 The two areas of the poem that are be most heavily analyzed in the present work are Inferno Cantos IV and XXVIII. These two areas in the poem are the most emphatic representations of Islam in the Divine Comedy. In Inferno Canto IV, the figure of Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn (Saladin) is present among other virtuous pagans. Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn was commonly used held up as an ideal for chivalry in medieval Europe, but historically represented the military and economic threat of Islam during the Crusades. As a Muslim military leader during the Crusades, his presence in Dante’s poem presents a problem of interpretation. In Inferno Canto XXVIII the Islamic Prophet Muhammad is punished as a representative of Christian schism. Because he was not a Christian but treated as one, his punishment represents unique problem for Dante scholars because it means that Islam is a threat from outside as well as within Christianity. To accomplish my aims in the present work, Dante’s poem and the work of Dante scholars will be synthesized with close readings and historical analysis, and compared to often inaccessible or obscure Islamic texts and scholarship to establish the various roles that Islam plays in the poem.4 As with many of his commentators and critics, Dante had little more than a base knowledge of Islamic traditions and no practical knowledge of Islamic texts, yet this should not be taken to mean that the poet was ignorant of Islam or that the religion was not active in his mind or a concern for Christian Europe generally.5 Presentations of Islam from other medieval European writers are compared with sections of the Divine Comedy and compared with Islamic texts to gain a fresh understanding of 4 Islam is treated as a heretical ideology, foreign culture, and a threat at various points in the Divine Comedy. 5 María Rosa Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History, 42. Menocal notes the poor, anti- Islamic paraphrases of Peter the Venerable taken from Arabic language works and presented as scripture in addition to his translation of the Qur’ān as a common source on the Islamic religion for Christian writers. These “translations” made parts of the Islamic East accessible to Western scholars, but were little more than “a very imaginative vision of Islam” (42). 3 the East-West dichotomy that both sides struggled to maintain in forging discreet Christian and Islamic identities. Highlighting these gaps between Western representations of the Islamic East and Islamic representations of the Islamic East will help to better inform the reader about the longstanding traditions that have developed and limited the West’s understanding of Islam. Dante’s Divine Comedy provides a good starting point for this type of analysis because of the frequency with which these demarcating lines between East and West break down and are reinforced. A fresh reading of Dante’s Divine Comedy, an Italian language poem, in light of Arabic works is relevant to English literary studies because of the poem’s importance as a direct or indirect influence on many writers and works in the English canon. Dante’s Divine Comedy negotiates a fine line between political and religious poetry and has enjoyed wide appeal with writers concentrating on either or both, giving it a long period of relevance while other medieval classics have either faded into obscurity or been lost altogether. Because of the Divine Comedy’s recognized importance to the English canon, a revised reading of Dante’s poem in light of Islamic texts allows for analysis of latent Islamic ideas in texts inspired by it. In addition to the Divine Comedy’s longstanding cultural significance in the West (the poem is virtually unknown in the Islamic East) it can also be used to measure changes in Western representations of the Islam over time.6 The present work has important limitations. Linguistics-based studies on Dante and are available for reference,7 and most translations include an introduction in which the translator provides some brief notes about their translation. Because I lack familiarity 6 The Divine Comedy has never been fully translated into Arabic, although Persian language editions are available. 7 One good example is Trullio di Mauro, Storia Linguistica dell’Italia Unita (Rome: Laterza, 1993). Italian edition. 4 or fluency in the Italian language, this analysis must be limited to content based on translations and will therefore always be slightly removed from the original verse. Because of this handicap in language, discussions about syntax, grammar, word choice, and to some extent meter and rhyme do not figure largely in the analysis. To compensate I have compared multiple translations for my analysis. It is outside the scope of the present study to provide an exhaustive catalogue and analysis of every Islamic reference in the Divine Comedy.