Milton among the Muslims

Abstract

Writers from the Muslim world have shown greater interest in Milton, his poetry, and his views than he displayed in any aspect of Islam. In the only scholarly study of Milton and Islam to be published, John Milton and the Arab-Islamic Culture (1987), Professor Eid Abdallah Dahiyat has usefully catalogued the numerous and varied critical responses that Milton’s writings have provoked from Arab-Islamic writers, poets and scholars. Since 1886, at least, Arab critics and literary historians have made strenuous efforts to make Milton their own, arguing that Milton ‘drew on’ Abu al-Ala al-Ma’arri’s tenth-century prose tale, Risalatu-al-ghufran, or ‘Epistle of Forgiveness’ when composing Paradise Lost.¹ Al-Ma’arri describes a journey to paradise, a place of sensuous beauty and bodily delights, sufficiently resembling Milton’s to have generated lively discussions about poetic universality and influence. In 1939 an Egyptian essayist, Ahmed Khaki, took a novel approach and declared that ‘Milton’s handling of the fair sex is paradoxical… The reason is that Milton was a sexual maniac restrained by religious and ethical standards.’² Further, Milton’s Satan has continually fascinated and inspired Arab-Islamic writers and critics because he so closely resembles Iblis, the rebel angel and shape-shifter who regularly employs humankind to wage his war against God and Islam.