“No anti-Islamism in Dante”: the experts on the Supreme Poet speak
Dante "does not place Muhammad among the heretics, but rather among the schismatics", thus recognizing "the common Abrahamic root" between Christianity and Islamism
by Cristiano Somaschini and Carlandrea Poli
RAVENNA – Exempting some Islamic students from a school in Treviso from the study of Dante, as happens for some Islamic students, is “anachronistic”. And probably not even conceivable in Ravenna, the city that preserves his bones and perpetuates his study and memory. It has always been characterized as a “gateway to the East and a city of relationships”. The director of the Ravennantica Foundation Francesca Masi, an organization that also manages the Dante Museum and Casa Dante in the city, explains to the Dire Agency that it is “anachronistic to see the authors as contemporaries”. Of course, the Great Poet “asks questions that are contemporary, he almost seems to come from the future, but he is a man of the 1300s”. Without forgetting that “with the same criterion we should then exclude” from study and reading other works such as The Betrothed and fairy tales such as Snow White. Thus losing, he argues, “the dynamics of the importance of literature which is the context”.
Furthermore, Masi continues, Dante “does not place Muhammad among the heretics, but rather among the schismatics”, thus recognizing “the common Abrahamic root” between Christianity and Islamism. For the fugitive Ghibelline “Islam, which he knows only through literary sources, is a schisimatic form, a side street compared to the same strain of Christianity“. This is why, for the director of the Foundation, it would be “much more important to bring out the values that unite”. And think about those. And thus “help all citizens, those of Italian origin and those who come from other countries and will be Italian, to understand the evolution of relations between peoples”. Because, he points out, “this helps achieve true integration”.
As Dante highlights, Masi reiterates, “there are elements of community, a common root“. And then in the Divine Comedy popes and philosophers are also abused, but Dante places Averroes, a Muslim philosopher, “among the great wise spirits”. Therefore, Masi insists, in him “there is no anti-Islamism, Dante looks to theological elaboration“. At the Classis Museum “there are Arab and Macedonian presences who are consolidated into a single community”; in front of the Tomb there is the perpetual reading of the Divine Comedy, also the controversial XXVIII of Hell and the meeting with Muhammad, among other things frescoed by Giovanni da Modena inside San Petronio in Bologna. “It means respecting the total thought. Dante – he concludes – looks at the salvation of men through dialogue”.
MANETTI (CASA DANTE): “LET IT BE AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DIALOGUE, NOT CONFLICT”
“From a situation that presents itself as problematic and potentially conflictual, a good opportunity for dialogue between different cultures, but equally worthy of respect, can arise”. This was declared, when asked by Dire, by the president of the Casa di Dante museum in Florence, Cristina Manetti, commenting on what happened in Treviso where, in a middle school, two students were exempted from following lessons on the Divine Comedy due to religious implications of the work. News that has stoked strong political reactions, amplified by the pre-election climate of recent weeks. Tensions that Manetti invites, however, to dilute by recovering the cultural and educational merit of the question.
Going straight to the point he highlights: “The fact that Dante, a man of Christian Europe formed in the thirteenth century who wrote to beginning of the fourteenth century, places Muhammad among the sowers of schisms, it is only typical of his era, for him Muslim thought was only a divisive choice or heresy compared to Christianity, while he shows his respect for that culture and that civilization inserting the character of Saladin into the illuminated castle that welcomes the magnanimous nobles of limbo”. It is precisely the castle of the ‘great spirits’ where, moreover, Saladin stayed in the excellent company of Latin sovereigns, writers, but also philosophers from Aristotle to Averroes: virtuous pagans who distinguished themselves in life for moral and intellectual merits. Therefore, it is the message in a bottle that the president of the House of Dante leaves, “there is no need to make the issue a political, cultural and civilizational clash, but rather a fruitful opportunity for intercultural dialogue”.