Dear Abdul Mutaal...You started your paper on mysticism with Dante and Dvine Comedy.

It was a mere coincidence that today I was reading Karen Armstrong's book MUHAMMAD....THE PROPHET and found the following paragrah in the first chapter. I thought I would share that with you and Family of the Heart who are having a passionate dialogue about the seminar. She writes

Page 29 " The Muslim philosophers Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd were venerated as intellectual luminaries, though it became increasingly difficult for people to accommodate the fact they were both Muslims. The problem was graphically shown in Dante's THE DIVINE COMEDY. Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd (khown in Europe as Avicenna and Averroes) are in Limbo with the virtuous pagans who had founded the intellectual culture that they had helped the West to acquire: Euclid, Ptolemy< Socrates< Plato and Aristotle. Yet Muhammad himself is in the Eighth Circle of Hell, with the schismatic. He suffers particularly disgusting punishment:

No cask stove in by cant or middle ever

     So gaped as one I saw there, from the chin

             Down to the fart-hole split as by the cleaver

His tripes hung by his heels, the pluck and spleen

     Showed with the liver and the sordid sack

          That turns to dung the food it swallows in

Dante still cannot allow Muhammad an independent religious vision. He is mere schismatic, who had broken away from the parent faith..."

I would love to here your comments.....affectionately sohail

http://www.drsohail.com