The Qur'an in the Commentaries on Dante's Comedy

Abstract

Since the publication of Asín Palacios's theses, the issue of Arab sources in the Comedy has aroused considerable controversy among supporters and detractors of Dante's dependence on Muslim traditions. Rethinking the terms of the debate, scholars prefer nowadays to evaluate not only the role played by Latin or Romance intermediaries, but also the judgement that the Middle Ages expressed on Muslim religion. On the other hand, the perception of the Qur'an has remained insufficiently investigated. The Qur'an was known to the Christian Middle Ages as Lex Mahometi and therefore as a normative corpus which, being identified with the Prophet himself, ended up being denigrated through the usual tópoi of anti-Islamic propaganda. The present article will attempt to reconstruct the image of the Holy Book of Islam in the commentaries on the Comedy in relation to the concepts of heresy and schism.