New Light on Dante and Islam

Extract

Thirty-four years have passed since the Discorso de recepcion of the then young Arabist, don Miguel Asin Palacios, was presented in the Spanish Academy; and I still recall the impression of astonishment, admiration and almost alarm which the first reading of the Escatologia musulmana en la Divina Comedia aroused in my father, one of the first to spread the ideas of Asin in Italy—such was the impact of the novelty, the audacity, and the wide range of his thesis and his conclusions. I vaguely recall the discordant voices of both Orientalist and Dante criticism in the heated atmosphere of the centennial celebrations of 1921, the enthusiasm of the neophytes, the scandalised consternation of the idolators, and the profound echo of agreement and disagreement which Asin's book aroused, as surely no other publication of the centenary. Then, everywhere to some extent but above all in Italy, the voices of dissent prevailed, from those of the more or less reasoning and reasonable disbelievers to those of the early believers whose faith began to vacillate, as was the case of my father. Asin answered these, with lively and often cogent dialectic, in his Historia y critica de una polemica. Then the dispute languished and expired, leaving on both sides, as usually happens in these cases, a whole series of misunderstandings which had not been clarified. Among Asin's non-Orientalist critics—even among the most learned of them, and perhaps in the very measure of their learning—the initial prejudice against that strange world remained invincible: that world aberrant in language, custom, place, and civilisation, which the erudite Spaniard had brought into abrupt contact with the Christian-Latin world, the only background against which the figure of Dante had customarily been seen. On the other hand, the conviction was firmly planted in Asin's mind that the opposition to his theory, especially from the Italian point of view, was moved not only (as was indeed quite true) by mental laziness, by horror novi, by intellectual vitalde in the face of the bitter new truth he proposed, but also and above all, by cultural nationalism, by the set purpose of defending at any price a national glory whose originality and hitherto unquestioned greatness had been disparaged. He had been at pains to point out at the end of his book that the poetic glory of Dante was in no way compromised by the close, continuous, and fundamental dependence which he believed he had found between Dante's vision of the other world and Islamic eschatology; even so, Italian pride in the absolute originality of the sacred poem had been hurt, and this, Asin thought, more than any other motive, had inspired the Italian reaction.