Dossier for the Study of Miguel Asín Palacios’ La escatología musulmana en la Divina Comedia, Part 1, Sections II, III and IV
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Abstract
This article closely examines sections II, III, and IV of Part 1 of Miguel Asín Palacios’s La escatología musulmana en la Divina Comedia. Written in the early 1900s, this notable text sparked a scholarly discussion about possible Islamic influences on Dante’s Divina Commedia, preceding the identification of the Liber Scalae Machometi, commonly known as the ‘missing link’. The paper begins with an overview of the pertinent Qur’ānic verses, which shed light on the remote origins of this scholarly debate (Part 1, Section I). It then places the work in the context of early twentieth-century Spanish Arabists, who drew attention to the Islamic cultural heritage in Spain and Europe. The central focus is a comparative examination of the Arabic textual sources employed by Asín Palacios in Part 1, Sections II, III, and IV, together with the accompanying appendix. Over the years, his account of the progressive development of the isrāʾ and miʿrāǧ narratives has been widely questioned, primarily because of his erroneous attribution of a key source text: ch. 167 of al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya (The Meccan Revelations), entitled Kīmiyāʾ al-saʿāda (The Alchemy of Happiness), composed by the Murcian philosopher and Ṣūfī master Ibn ʿArabī. Nevertheless, setting aside this misidentification, Palacios’ investigation into the sources remains worthy of consideration and acknowledgment.
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