Constant Mews claims here that the West owes a great debt to Islam and to Muslims. He even has a few books in mind which he thinks are examples of that insufficiently acknowledged debt.
While there is debate about the extent to which the Italian writer Dante was exposed to Islamic influences, it is very likely he knew The Book of Mohammed’s Ladder (translated into Castilian, French and Latin), which describes the Prophet’s ascent to heaven. The Divine Comedy, with its account of Dante’s imagined journey from Inferno to Paradise, was following in this tradition.
Dante was not “following” in this supposed “tradition,” which consists apparently of one work, The Book of Mohammed’s Ladder. The first, and still the most important, scholar to have suggested that the Kitab al Miraj, or “The Book of Mohammed’s Ladder,” was Dante’s inspiration or model for the Divine Comedy was the Spanish priest Miguel Asin Palacios in 1919. Since then many Dante scholars have questioned his notion that Dante was influenced by the Kitab al Miraj. The celebrated 20th century Orientalist Francesco Gabrieli expressed deep skepticism regarding the claimed similarities, and noted the lack of evidence of a vehicle through which it could have been transmitted to Dante. René Guénon, a Sufi convert and scholar of Ibn Arabi, in The Esoterism of Dante rejected the theory of Ibn Arabi’s influence (direct or indirect) on Dante. Palacios’ theory that Dante was influenced by Ibn Arabi was satirized as an absurdity by the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk in his novel The Black Book.
Dante deplored Islam as schismatic, a heresy sowing discord in the world. He places Muhammad in the ninth ditch of the Eighth Circle of Hell (Inferno, Canto 28), designed for those who have caused schism; specifically, Muhammad was placed among the Sowers of Religious Discord. Muhammad is memorably described as split in half, with his entrails hanging out, representing his status as a heresiarch. Would Dante have read, much less emulated, a book celebrating this same Muhammad whom he so detested?
Note how Constant Mews protects himself: he repeatedly says about some unproven claim that “it is very likely.” So he writes that “it is very likely” that Dante knew “The Book of Mohammed’s Ladder.” Why is it “very likely” that he knew that book? Just because it existed? He offers no evidence for this claim; there is no mention of, nor allusion to, the book or its author anywhere in Dante’s writings. It is quite a leap to describe something as “very likely” when not only is there no supporting evidence, but almost every Dante scholar denies a link between Dante’s masterpiece and the Kitab al Miraj.
Dante very likely heard lectures from Riccoldo da Monte di Croce, a learned Dominican who spent many years studying Arabic in Baghdad before returning to Florence around 1300 and writing about his travels in the lands of Islam. Dante may have criticized Muslim teaching, but he was aware of its vast influence.
Riccoldo da Monte di Croce went to the East in order to convert Nestorian Christians to Latin Christianity. He spent roughly 13 years in the East, from 1288 to 1301, where he engaged in theological disputes both with Nestorians and with Muslims. When he returned to Florence, he completed several works, including a damning study of Islamic theology, Contra legem sarracenorum (Against the Laws of the Saracens). That anti-Islamic study is not mentioned by Constant Mews, though it was Riccoldo’s most important work. We have no way of knowing whether Dante attended lectures by Riccoldo, though Mews claims it is “very likely” that he “heard lectures from Riccoldo.” Why is it “very likely”?
Dante is thought to have been influenced by Islamic cultures.
Dante is “thought to have been influenced by Islamic cultures” that he regarded with horror? He places Muhammad himself in the Eighth Circle of Hell, that is, deep in the Inferno. Where is the evidence that Dante was “influenced by Islamic cultures” that he so openly and completely rejected? Notice that Mews, instead of adducing even one bit of such evidence, offers the vague “Dante is thought to have been influenced…” By whom? And what about all the eminent Dante scholars who have denied any such influence? Should we ignore them?
Islam also gave us the quintessential image of the Enlightenment, the self-taught philosopher. This character had his origins in an Arabic novel, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, penned by a 12th-century Arab intellectual, Ibn Tufayl. It tells the story of how a feral child abandoned on a desert island comes through reason alone to a vision of reality.
Hayy ibn Yaqzan was published in Oxford, with an Arabic-Latin edition in 1671, and became a catalyst for the contributions of seminal European philosophers including John Locke and Robert Boyle. Translated into English in 1708 as The Improvement of Human Reason, it also influenced novelists, beginning with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in 1719. The sources of the Enlightenment are not simply in Greece and Rome.
Here again we have the matter of evidence, or of its lack. How does the author conclude that John Locke read and was influenced by the “Hayy ibn Yaqzan” written by Ibn Tufayl? Did Locke anywhere make reference to it? Surely, if he had, Constant Mews would have quoted it. The absence of any such reference is telling. And the Enlightenment did indeed have sources outside of Greece and Rome, but they were not found in Muslim writers. The main influence, “outside of Greece and Rome,” on the European Enlightenment was Spinoza, whom Professor Jonathan Israel credits as the father of the “Radical Enlightenment.”
It is hard to comprehend how Islam, which discourages skeptical inquiry, and encourages the habit of unquestioning mental submission (see the many online sites where Muslims submit questions, and a cleric authoritatively answers them, adducing as unquestioned authority a Qur’anic verse, or a statement of Muhammad in the hadith, in ipse-dixit fashion, brooking no discussion or disagreement), could possibly have been one of the progenitors of the European Enlightenment. Indeed, Islam’s most trenchant contemporary critics, such as Ibn Warraq, point out that Islam never experienced “an Enlightenment,” nor, given the nature of the faith, could it.
As for Daniel Defoe owing a debt to Ibn Tuyfal for his Robinson Crusoe, nowhere did Defoe mention he was even aware of the novel Hayy ibn Yaqzan. Mews is not the only one to make large claims for Ibn Tufayl. We find on Muslim sites such remarks as this: “Ibn Tufayl may have inspired Daniel Defoe’s famous novel about an island castaway.” “May have…” “Very likely…” “Some have thought…” Defoe had no need of Ibn Tufayl’s novel to come up with the idea of an island castaway; he had before his eyes the real-life tale of Alexander Selkirk, a contemporary of Defoe, who had been stranded on a tropical island for four years.
Civilisation is always being reinvented. The civilisation some call “Western” has been, and still is, continually shaped by a wide range of political, literary and intellectual influences, all worthy of our attention.
“Civilization is always being reinvented.” Is that true? Is Islamic civilization “always being reinvented”? In what way? And what exactly does it mean to claim that a “civilization is always being reinvented”?
The quotes around “Western” are meant to call into question the very idea of this so-called “Western civilization.” Western civilization may be “continually shaped by a wide range of…..influences,” but it has not been “equally” shaped by those influences. We are supposed to believe, from what Mews has written, that Muslim writers have had an important influence on Western literature. There are exactly two examples provided as evidence of this, which I have discussed above, but the details bear repeating. The first is Kitab al Miraj, a book concerning Muhammad’s Night Journey to Heaven, that Miguel Asin Palacios, a Spanish scholar-priest, in 1919 first proposed as having influenced Dante’s Divine Comedy. More recent scholars, including the celebrated Orientalist and Arabist Francesco Gabrieli, the Sufi convert Rene Guenon, who wrote on metaphysics and sacred scripture, and the Turkish Nobel Prizewinner, the writer Orhan Pamuk, have all roundly rejected this supposed source for Dante. The second claimed literary influence is that of Ibn Tufayl’s tale of a castaway on Daniel Defoe, but there is no evidence that Defoe ever read Ibn Tufayl’s story, and besides, he had no need: the real-life story of Alexander Selkirk, contemporaneous with Defoe, was influence enough.
The West does “owe” Islam in a number of ways. Let us count those ways. It owes Islam for the vast and expensive security apparatus, costing hundreds of billions of dollars, that has been deployed all over the Western world, that Islamic terrorism has necessitated. Think of all the jobs that have been created as a result, in Europe and North America, at airports, train and bus stations, outside government office buildings, around national monuments, at sports stadiums, in museums, in lecture halls, at synagogues and churches. Think, too, of the extra work now provided to defense lawyers, to police, prosecutors, judges, prison guards. It is thanks to Islam that hundreds of millions of man-hours are now spent annually by passengers who must arrive several hours earlier for airline flights, in order to stand in line and go through security, all because of the threat of Islamic terrorism. We “owe” a debt to Islam, too, for the general atmosphere of anxiety that has been created in the West by the fact, and the threat, of Islamic terrorism, and that keeps us from worrying about other matters. We “‘owe” Muslims a debt, too, for allowing us to practice charity, by helping millions of Muslim economic migrants to settle comfortably in the welfare states of Europe, where non-Muslims now lavish every possible benefit on them, including free or highly subsidized housing, free medical care, free education, unemployment benefits (even without the need to have been previously employed), and family allowances. We owe Muslims a debt for having brought into the West, undeclared in their mental baggage, a new strain of antisemitism, which makes all our lives just that much more exciting. We Americans owe a special debt to Muslims for making us spend several trillion dollars fighting jihadis in Iraq and Afghanistan, which has put our military in a state of combat readiness, and besides, that is money that otherwise we would no doubt have wasted. We owe Islam a debt for all that, and much, much more.