The Divine Comedy and the Formation of Modern Adab

Join us for a talk with Professor Elisabetta Benigni and Professor Pier Mattia Tommasino as they explore the influence of the Divine Comedy on Arabic literature and intellectual debates in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Abstract: The question of the medieval Islamic sources of the Divine Comedy has been a longstanding topic of debate. Notoriously, the debate started by the end of the nineteenth century and reached its climax after the publication of the famous work of Miguel Asín Palacios, The Islamic Eschatology in the Divine Comedy, in 1919. In this talk, I reverse this question and investigate the influence of the Divine Comedy on Arabic literature and on the philosophical and intellectual debates produced by Arab intellectuals during the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

By doing so, I will show how the Divine Comedy was part of the transnational library of the late Ottoman age and how, during the Nahḍah, it contributed, along with the rediscovery of medieval adab, to the creation of new literary works in Arabic. I will also show how the debate about the Islamic sources of the Divine Comedy shaped the discipline of comparative literature in the Arab world and, finally, how a specific reading of the figure of Dante, one that placed him in the lineage of a Sufi tradition, contributed to the modern debate on the relationship between Christianity and Islam.