The Reality of Dante’s Influence by the Epistle of Forgiveness: A Textual–Historical Approach.

Abstract

This study re-examines the alleged influence of Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī’s Risālat al-Ghufrān on Dante’s Divine Comedy through a concise textual–historical comparison. It integrates a critical survey of Arab and Western scholarship with direct testing of their claims against the two works’ structures and eschatological motifs. The analysis focuses on the otherworldly journey—its layered reward and punishment, the guide figure, dialogic encounters, and the functions of satire and moral exhortation—together with likely medieval channels of reception and translation. Findings point to broad structural and thematic convergence around a trans-cultural (afterlife journey), alongside clear functional divergences: al-Maʿarrī’s linguistically inflected satire versus Dante’s theological–civic architecture. Available historical evidence does not decisively prove Dante’s direct access to Risālat al-Ghufrān, though the Islamic intellectual milieu plausibly shaped certain details of the Comedy. The study proposes moving beyond the simple influence/denial binary toward a more precise account of parallelism and transmission.