Medieval Christian schema ranked Mohammed among the most severe evils in Hell

Evidence

“Maometto”—Mohammed—turns up in canto 28 of the Inferno. He is located in the eighth of the nine circles of Hell, in the ninth of the ten Bolgias of Malebolge, a circle of gloomy ditches surrounding Satan’s stronghold in Hell. Thus before Dante reaches Mohammed, he passes through circles containing people whose sins are of a lesser order: the lustful, the avaricious, the gluttonous, the heretics, the wrathful, the suicidal, the blasphemous. After Mohammed there are only the falsifiers and the treacherous (who include Judas, Brutus, and Cassius) before one arrives at the very bottom of Hell, which is where Satan himself is to be found. Mohammed thus belongs to a rigid hierarchy of evils, in the category of what Dante calls seminator di scandalo e di scisma. … Mohammed’s punishment, which is also his eternal fate, is a peculiarly disgusting one: he is endlessly being cleft in two from his chin to his anus like, Dante says, a cask whose staves are ripped apart. Dante’s verse at this point spares the reader none of the eschatological detail that so vivid a punishment entails: Mohammed’s entrails and his excrement are described with unflinching accuracy. … It will not have been lost on the reader that Dante saw a parallel between Dolcino’s and Mohammed’s revolting sensuality, and also between their pretensions to theological eminence. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 183

Categorization

• XREF: The schematization of Mohammed as a ‘sower of scandal and schism’ and the conflation of him with a renegade priest’s sensuality models how Orientalist representation attaches moral revulsion to the Prophet — a scaffold for later Islamophobia readings. — connects to: Dante’s Hell punished heresy and rationalism severer than Muslim identity — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 773
• SEED: The eighth-circle placement — just above the treacherous — is a precise ordering claim an essay could use to show how moral hierarchy in canonical Western literature already rank-ordered Islam before any East-West encounter.
• DEEPTHINKING: The complete conflation of theological condemnation with somatic disgust — Mohammed’s punishment is physical rending and excrement, coupling the religious ‘error’ of schism with bodily filth — is a dense nexus of the very representational logic Said names Orientalizing.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 183