New Books In Islamic Studies

In Dante and the Mediterranean Comedy: From Muslim Spain to Post-Colonial Italy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Andrea Celli explores the complex ways in which Dante’s Comedy could be considered ‘Mediterranean,’ ranging widely from Orientalist scholarship to prison wall graffiti in Palermo. He presents both a history of criticism that explores the 20th-century debates around Dante and Islam as well as a novel approach to interrogating Mediterranean possibilities in the reception and appropriation of Dante’s poem. Celli’s Mediterranean Dante is neither given over to the ‘clash of civilizations’ model nor to the idealized notion of a cultural melting pot, but instead to a nuanced perspective that moves beyond traditional binaries and paradigms. In a medieval mode, he draws attention to the possible use of Islamic sources in the punishment of Muhammad in Inferno 28 and explores affinities between Ibn Hazm’s 11th-century Andalusian work Ring of the Dove and Dante’s Vita Nuova. With an orientation to reception, he dwe