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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books The Uncanonical Dante: the Divine Comedy and Islamic Philosophy Chapter Three I cannot hope to settle the issue of Dante's Averroism, a subject that has been contentiously debated from his day down to ours. For the record I should state that the consensus among modern Dante scholars is that he was not an Averroist.32 I myself believe that he was, but that is not the issue here.

Our topic is Dante and the Western canon, and for what I want to show it is sufficient to have established Dante's debt to Averroës. The importance of a central Islamic philosopher to such a canonical European author as Dante in my view puts to rest many of the arguments typically made against the Western canon and especially its supposed Eurocentrism. Dante was evidently far more knowledgeable about non-Western authors than many of their champions today.

I wonder how many of the critics of the Western canon have even heard of Averroës, let alone read any of his works. The case of Dante shows that the simplistic opposition between Western and non-Western cultures often set up today cannot bear careful scrutiny. The sequence Aristotle-Averroës-Dante may serve as an emblem of the complex interactions that have taken place over the**[End Page 147]** centuries between Western and non-Western cultures.

Islamic culture is certainly categorized as non-Western in today's debates, but as shown by the case of Averroës (as well as other Islamic philosophers such as Alfarabi), Islamic thought was profoundly rooted in the very Greek world that is at the fountainhead of Western culture.

Indeed, in his so-called Decisive Treatise, Averroës displays a remarkable tolerance for ancient Greek thought, even though he recognizes that in Muslim terms it is the work of infidels: But if someone other than ourselves has already examined that subject, it is clear that we ought to seek help toward our goal from what has been said by such a predecessor on the subject, regardless of whether this other one shares our religion or not. .

By "those who do not share our religion" I refer to those ancients who studied these matters before Islam. 33 With this defense of studying ancient philosophy, Averroës proved to be one of the central conduits of Greek thought to the European Middle Ages.