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Dante, Islam, and Edward Said

After nearly seven hundred years of commentary on the poem, the nature of Dante's relationship with Islam in the Divine Comedy continues to elude us. Scholarship on the subject tends to oversimplify Dante's portrayal of Islam, maintaining a reading of the poet's indisputable tendentiousness either for or against Islam.² In particular, Edward Said has suggested that Dante's presentation of Islam is tainted with an Orientalism that positions Islam in the Comedy as a timeless exotic Other of Christianity, radically distinct so as to allow for a clearer self-definition: "We are not them." Ambivalences in the text, however, challenge this viewpoint,...