ISLAM AND THE DIVINE COMEDY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ISLAM AND THE DIVINE COMEDY By MIGUEL ASÍN Professor of Arabic at the University of Madrid and Member of the Academia Española TRANSLATED AND ABRIDGED By HAROLD SUNDERLAND NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY 1926 _Printed in Great Britain by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury._ _DEDICATION_ THE AUTHOR AND TRANSLATOR WISH TO RECORD THEIR GRATITUDE TO THE DUKE OF BERWICK AND ALBA TO WHOSE GENEROUS INITIATIVE THE PUBLICATION OF THIS EDITION IS DUE _INTRODUCTION_ BY THE DUKE OF ALBA The Spanish original, of which the present is an abridged translation, appeared six years ago under the title of _La Escatología musulmana en la Divina Comedia_ (Madrid, Imprenta de Estanislao Maestre, 1919). Its author, Miguel Asín y Palacios, a Catholic priest and Professor of Arabic at the University of Madrid, is the disciple of another Arabic scholar of Spain, Julián Ribera, by whom he was initiated in Oriental studies and the methods of historical research. Asín has devoted over twenty-five years of his life to the investigation of the philosophic and religious thought of mediæval Islam—the Islam of the Orient as well as that of Spain—and its influence on the culture of Christian Europe. His training in Arabic philology and his mastery of mediæval scholastics had enabled him several years before to make important discoveries regarding the influence in theology of Averrhoes on St. Thomas Aquinas, of Ibn Arabi of Murcia on Raymond Lull, and of the _Ikhwan as-safa_ on Fr. Anselmo de Turmeda, and so forth. His most important discovery, however, and the one on which his fame is chiefly based, was his discovery of Islamic models the influence of which on the Divine Comedy of Dante forms the subject of the present work. From the very date of its publication in Spanish the book aroused the curiosity of the general public and caused a great stir among the critics of literary history. The Italian Dantists particularly could with difficulty bring themselves to recognise that Moslem sources should have formed the basis for the Divine Comedy, the poem that symbolises the whole culture of mediæval Christian Europe. The book at once became the subject of lively and passionate controversy. Over a hundred articles and pamphlets have been written and lectures delivered in favour of, or against, the thesis propounded by Asín Palacios. The principal reviews devoted to literature and literary history, those both of a general and special character, have published