Miguel Asín Palacios’ Pioneering Analysis of the Complex of Legends on the Isrāʾ and the Miʿrāǧ [La escatología musulmana en la Divina Comedia, Part 1, Sections II, III and IV]

This study examines in detail part 1, sections II, III, and IV of Miguel Asín Palacios’s groundbreaking work La escatología musulmana en la Divina Comedia. Published in the early twentieth century, this famous text initiated the debate on potential Islamic sources for Dante’s Divina Commedia, predating the discovery of the Liber Scalae Machometi, often referred to as the “missing link.” The analysis will begin with an introductory overview of the relevant Qurʾānic passages, which form the distant origin of this debate (part 1, section I). It then contextualizes the work within the perspective of early twentiethcentury Spanish Arabic scholars, who highlighted the Islamic cultural legacy in Spain and Europe. The core of this study involves a comparative analysis of the Arabic sources used byMiguel Asín Palacios in part 1, sections II, III, and IV, along with its related appendix. Historically, Palacios’s reconstruction of the gradual development of the isrāʾ and miʿrāǧ legends has been hastily dismissed. This dismissal largely stems from his incorrect identification of a potential source text that introduced these legends to the Medieval West: chapter 167 of al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya (The Meccan Revelations), titled “Kīmiyāʾ al-saʿāda” (“The Alchemy of Happiness”), by the Murcian thinker and Ṣūfī mystic Ibn ʿArabī. Despite this incorrect identification, Palacios’s work on the sources still deserves attention and recognition.