Dante mistook Muhammad for a lapsed Christian rather than a foreign figure

Evidence

Since Dante seems to have erroneously believed that Muhammad had started out as a Christian, he therefore did not regard him as some totally alien ‘Other’. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 85

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Dante judged belief against heresy, never Occident against Orient — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 776; Dante’s Hell punished heresy and rationalism severer than Muslim identity — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 773

Related

• Dante’s Muhammad was a schismatic Christian subplot, not an infidel outsider (similarity 0.87)
• Dante judged belief against heresy, never Occident against Orient (similarity 0.86)
• Dante ranked by heresy and belief, not by Occident versus Orient (similarity 0.83)
• Dante’s Hell punished heresy and rationalism severer than Muslim identity (similarity 0.83)
• Dante’s Hell encodes the divided loyalties of a transitional age (similarity 0.81)
• Medieval Christianity saw Muhammad as a schismatic Christian, not an external infidel. (similarity 0.79)