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🪵 The Threshold

Dante placed the great Muslim philosophers in mild Hell despite their post-Christian status

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tagsja-picks, question, xref, seed, contrarian_or_surprising, trade, singleton, category/contrarian-or-surprising
aliases@ahmad_theory_1992, loc. 347

3 min read

Dante placed the great Muslim philosophers in mild Hell despite their post-Christian status

Evidence

Now, few readers of Inferno would find it possible to forget that Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, is found in the eighth of the nine circles of Hell, eternally gyrating and eternally being cleft from brain to anus, in the worst punishment Dante’s prolific imagination could devise. This treatment of the Prophet of Islam is, to put it mildly, indefensible, and I am entirely in sympathy with Said when he takes offence. The peculiarity, in any case, is that Ibn Sina (‘Avicenna’ in English, the Arab-Islamic philosopher best known for his expertise in empiricist physiology and medicine), Ibn Rushd (‘Averroës’ in English, the great Arab-Islamic philosopher of rationalist humanism), and Salah ad-Din (the ‘Saladin’ made famous by the Crusades), are found in the first Circle, in the company of such ‘virtuous pagans’ as Homer, Socrates and Plato. Now, the presence of those figures from Greek Antiquity in this mildest of all circles of Hell makes a certain sense within the Christian topography of punishments and sufferings, because they are heathens only to the extent that they came before Christ and therefore never had the benefit of Christ’s teaching; this also explains the otherwise surprising decision on the part of Beatrice to appoint Virgil, himself a heathen, as Dante’s guide on this eventful tour. But why Ibn Rushd? He came after Christ, and therefore had the choice of renouncing the Islamic heresy, but didn’t! Dante never faces up to this question, and is benign towards Ibn Rushd (‘of the Great Commentary’, he specifies) despite this key difference between him and Socrates & Co. One grasps the full force of this discrepancy only if one recalls that Ibn Rushd was a splendid rationalist whose books were banned in some places by the Inquisition – not because he was a Muslim but, explicitly, because he was a rationalist. How, then, does one explain the discrepancy in the Inferno? — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 347

Categorization

  • QUESTION: The anomaly of Ibn Rushd’s benign placement is genuinely puzzling and worth chasing further — how much of the Dante scholarship agrees with this reading?
  • XREF: Ahmad is rebutting Said’s Orientalism reading of Dante; this connects to the whole Orientalism debate and to Said’s treatment of empire in Mansfield Park which Ahmad critiques in the opening paragraph. — 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; Dante’s contradictory treatment of Muslims reflects a transitional medieval-to-humanist ideological moment
  • SEED: Angle: Dante’s Hell as a map of pre-Renaissance ideological contradictions — how a literary space encodes a society’s transitional values.
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