Dante ranked by heresy and belief, not by Occident versus Orient

Evidence

Even more notable, in fact, is the presence of Salah ad-Din (‘by himself apart’) who, unlike Ibn Rushd, was to be much reviled by later centuries throughout Christendom, because he was in fact a commander of the Arab-Islamic forces that were ranged against the Crusading Christians. Dante pays scant attention to that particular bigotry and delivers a ‘judgement’ on ‘the great Muslim kings and philosophers’ and on the Prophet of Islam which is, from the viewpoint of orthodox Christianity, internally incoherent. The literary-critical point I am making is that one cannot read that passage about Muhammad outside this whole range of enormous complexity. The methodological point, in Foucauldian language, is that one cannot detach a representation of Muhammad, which is produced in the discourse of Christian binaries between belief and heresy, and relocate that representation in the altogether different discourse of ‘Orientalism’, which – if it exists at all, and even though it may occasionally use religious forms of ideological interpellation – is a secular knowledge. Furthermore, Dante’s treatment of Ibn Rushd – who is placed at least on a par with Socrates & Co., and towards whom Dante is altogether more forgiving – shows that the poet makes a severe distinction between belief and heresy, but none between Occident and Orient, as would be clear if Said were to reflect upon the fact that Judas, Brutus and Cassius do actually come even after Muhammad, in closer proximity to Satan himself. I might add that the treatment Ibn Rushd receives in Dante’s imagination was no worse than the treatment he received in real life from Abu Yusuf, the Almohid King of Muslim Spain, who ordered him banished into exile and his books burned on charges of heresy. Medievality exacted its price from rationalism on both sides of the Muslim/Christian divide. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 349

Categorization

• XREF: Directly engages Said’s Orientalism (p. 68-69), the central text of this book’s argument; also connects to the wider debate about whether premodern texts can be read through postcolonial/Orientalist frameworks. — 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
• DEFINE: Clarifies what ‘Orientalism as secular knowledge’ means as distinct from Christian heresy discourse — a key theoretical distinction.

Related

• Dante judged belief against heresy, never Occident against Orient (similarity 0.97)
• Dante’s Hell punished heresy and rationalism severer than Muslim identity (similarity 0.89)
• Dante’s Hell encodes the divided loyalties of a transitional age (similarity 0.86)
• Dante placed the great Muslim philosophers in mild Hell despite their post-Christian status (similarity 0.84)
• Dante mistook Muhammad for a lapsed Christian rather than a foreign figure (similarity 0.83)
• Dante’s contradictory treatment of Muslims reflects a transitional medieval-to-humanist ideological moment (similarity 0.82)
• Dante’s Muhammad was a schismatic Christian subplot, not an infidel outsider (similarity 0.81)
• Medieval Christianity saw Muhammad as a schismatic Christian, not an external infidel. (similarity 0.78)