Dante, Islam, and Edward Said

In: Telos, Heft 139, S. 133-151

Abstract

Explores Dante's relationship with Islam as manifest in the Divine Comedy with an eye toward critiquing Edward Said's assertion that Dante's presentation of Islam is sullied by Orientalism. It is argued that textual ambivalences challenge Said's viewpoint & that Dante's Islam is far less foreign than that; indeed, Dante's Islam is argued to be familiar & historical, geographically & theologically closer to Dante's Christianity than Said's Orientalized reading allows. Eschewing a reading according to any specific teleological arc ending in Orientalism, the Divine Comedy is read in terms of its internal poetic structure & the external historic moment in which it was written. A postcolonial perspective embodying instability & decentralization is used because, it is asserted, that a reading of pre-Enlightenment & pre-colonial works requires a different historical theorization than Said's given the discursive shifts that accompanied a shift from religiosity to secularity. Thus, the question of Islam's representation in the Divine Comedy is analyzed in light of its "extra-colonial" context. Beginning with depictions of Muslim personae in Inferno IV & XXVIII, it is contended that Dante does not conflate Islam & the Orient in the manner that Said does & that Dante's representation of Muslims is not a result of a process of radical distinction or alien exoticism, but are linked to Christianity as part of a vision of the Christian otherworld. Demonstrated is Dante's ambivalent relationship to Islam, which is revealed to be an object of a "non-Orientalized radical un-Othering.". D. Edelman