ABSTRACT
The discovery of the influence of Islam on the intellectual development of Europe in the Middle Ages is one which has only slowly made its full impact in the course of the last hundred years. The contacts between Islam and the West which Asin claimed to have discovered had both a general and a particular reference. In general, he claimed that Islam exercised much the same kind of influence on the western religious tradition as on its philosophical and scientific tradition. With regard to Dante's knowledge of Islam and attitude towards it, this part of the enquiry may seem at first sight a case of making bricks without straw. All the other inhabitants of Limbo may be regarded as people excluded from baptism by the date or circumstances of their lives: they were pagans by necessity. In the year of Asin's death the long-sought connection between western Christendom and Islamic eschatology came to light.
