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- Title
WAR ON FEAR: REINTERPRETING DANTE'S VIEW OF THE "INFIDEL".
- Authors
DI PASQUALE, DANIELA
- Abstract
In his book Orientalism (1978), Edward Said interprets Dante's approach to the East as an obliteration of otherness and an incorporation and assimilation of the point of view of the Western Orientalist. From this perspective, Said analyses the presence of Muslim philosophers and Islamic leaders in Dante's Divine Comedy (probably written between 1307 and 1321) and describes the presence of Oriental characters as anachronistic: they are condemned according to the Christian Eschatological system and thus treated as ignorant sinners. Similarly, several other scholars have interpreted the presence of "infidels" such as Muhammad and his cousin Ali in the 28th canto of the Inferno as an act of condemnation of the Islamic world, and thus not far from the traditional outlook represented by the Crusades' medieval propaganda and the notorious process of construction of religious identity through the sequence fearrejection- eradication of the non-Christian. However, a more careful analysis of the outcomes of the Medieval European imagination in its textual and iconographic media reveals that the main strategy based on intellectual, religious and ethnic censure of the infidel enemy is very far from Dante's attitude towards Oriental otherness. The Italian poet's point of view can thus be seen as belonging to an exceptional group of positive approaches to the "stranger", previously identifiable in the works of Christian writers as well as in some examples of medieval iconography between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries. Dante's writing can be seen to contain elements of resistance to and textual struggle against the propaganda of terror, conflict and violence against the "other" of the time.
- Subjects
MUSLIMS in literature; DIVINE Comedy, The (Poem : Dante); ORIENTALISM in literature
- Publication
Textxet: Studies in Comparative Literature, 2015, Vol 81, p373
- ISSN
0927-5754
- Publication type
Article