author
Miguel Asín Palacios
1871–1944
A Spanish priest and pioneering Arabist, he became famous for tracing surprising links between Islamic thought and European literature. His work on Dante helped spark a long-running debate about how ideas travel across cultures.
1 Audiobook
Islam and the Divine comedy
by Miguel Asín Palacios
About the author
Born in Zaragoza in 1871, Miguel Asín Palacios was a Spanish scholar of Arabic and Islamic studies as well as a Roman Catholic priest. He is best known for exploring the intellectual connections between the Islamic world and Christian Europe, especially in medieval thought and literature.
His most famous book, La Escatología musulmana en la Divina Comedia (1919), argued that Dante's Divine Comedy may have drawn on Muslim accounts of the afterlife. He also wrote extensively on major figures in Islamic philosophy and mysticism, including al-Ghazali, and became an important voice in Spanish Arabist scholarship.
Asín Palacios died in 1944. Today he is remembered as a bold, influential scholar whose ideas opened new conversations about cultural exchange, even when his arguments remained controversial.