Iraqi writer Younis Tawfik: Italian is my language and my homeland

You moved to Italy in 1979 for your studies. Thus began your long literary cultural, and personal journey. What has this experience taught you and to what extent has it shaped your life?

I was still a student at Al-Sharqiyah High School, one of Mosul's oldest schools – if not the oldest (built in 1905 when Iraq was still under Ottoman rule) – when my literary flair began to mature, and my first poems and short stories began to see the light. Some of them went on to be published in national papers and magazines.

This was 1975. The Baath Party had been in power since 1968, and albeit dictatorial, the government's secular nature had allowed the country to flourish and the Iraqi society to become more liberated on many levels. They strived to preserve religious pluralism. Culture was thriving. Theatres, cinemas, and publishing houses were booming.

We even had a national philharmonic orchestra and poetry and music festivals. All you had to do was refrain from venturing into politics outside the ruling party's line. Your works must also receive pre-approval before publication, a typical facet of dictatorship that limits the freedom of many intellectuals and creatives.

In Italy, I got my first taste of what literature, philosophy, history, and other humanitarian sciences look like when untarnished by restrictions and bias. Vast horizons of knowledge and personal growth opened before me.

Art, theatre, and music gave me a new perspective on love and dreams. Couple that with the warm Italian sun, and here I was on a journey of discovery. I understood that beauty is the secret of the universe, just as the Prophet proclaimed: "Allah is beautiful, and He loves beauty." Yet nobody seems to be looking for this divine beauty in Allah's creations.

My quest for knowledge helped me rid my soul of the heavy burdens encumbering me. I overcame prejudice and broke the walls of fear; I freed my mind of the heavy load of the past and began to see past the fog. When I saw the light of the truth, I didn't close my eyes. Instead, I allowed myself to be reborn in a space of eternal knowledge.

The suffering of being far from my country was countered by the ability I gained to better understand my choices and evaluate communication with others. Having to adapt to new values helped me rediscover my own culture's ancient values, but without keeping me hostage to the past.

I freed my mind and spirit. I rediscovered my beliefs and delved into their depths by meeting others and learning to defend myself against intolerance and ignorance. What we need is for our cultures to meet on an equal footing to re-evaluate the past and discover the present. Perhaps then we can free ourselves from the ghost of the past.

Among your most distinguished works are Italian translations of important books on Arab heritage, like 'Letters of Ibn Arabi - The Book of Annihilation in the Contemplation' by Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi in cooperation with Roberto Rossi Testa. What challenges did you face when translating this? And how did you end up cooperating with an Italian translator?

There were indeed many challenges. The first was deciphering the terminology used by Ibn Arabi to understand his unique and deep thoughts that very few could understand. Translating it was an impossible feat without reading Ibn Arabi's books and their interpretations and translations to other languages.

Roberto Rossi Testa was one of my students of Arabic language who mastered the language not only in speech but also in writing. His contributions helped me elevate the text to an eloquent literary level.

Tawfik collaborated again with Testa on one of his most prominent translations, 'Dante e l'Islam' (Dante and Islam: Islamic Eschatology in the Divine Comedy), the most famous book of Spanish Arabist Miguel Asín Palacios (1871-1944). Though published in 1919, it was only translated to Italian in 1997, due to literary protests.

In the book's preface, Carlo Ossola, a literary critic, author, and professor of Modern Literature in Paris, says it "overflows with references, comparisons, and symmetries that draw systematic parallels between the eschatology in Dante Alighieri's 'The Divine Comedy' and other worlds described in Arab literary and religious works".

At the time of its publication, the book sparked a fierce debate, especially among Italian Dante scholars who were not ready to accept the theory that Arab and Islamic thought and arts influenced 'The Divine Comedy.' The timing of the publication did not help, as Italy prepared to celebrate the sixth centenary of Dante's death.

Palacios would later document the reactions to his book in a 1924 book titled 'History and Criticism of a Polemic,' which reviews the positive and negative critiques by Dante experts as well as Arabists, historians, and linguists. Five decades after Palacios' death, Tawfik and Testa's masterful translation was published.

Since then, several editions were printed, with the last containing 20 years' worth of investigations and parallel research conducted by Maria Corti, Andrea Celli, Luciano Gargan, and others.

Their studies showed that Al Qushayri's 'Kitab al-Mi'raj' was widespread in Latin-speaking countries under the title 'Liber de scala'. A copy owned by a Dante-era Dominican Order monastery was even found at a library in Bologna in Italy.

Commenting on Palacios' book, Umberto Eco said in 2014 that the publication of Palacios' book in 1919 had sparked "immediate clamour" because "in a few hundred pages, it outlines brilliant similarities between Dante's text and multiple traditional Islamic books, especially the various versions of Prophet Muhammad's mi'raj story".

He added: "The debate was especially fierce in Italy between proponents of the investigation and defenders of Dante's authenticity. At the time of the sixth centenary of Italy's greatest poet, the world looked down on the Islamic world amid an atmosphere of colonisation and urbanisation ambitions.

"How could some think that Italy's greatest work owed its genius to the traditions of non-European nobodies? Today, however, it is firmly believed that Dante was, indeed, influenced by Islamic references."

The book sparked quite the debate. How did your translation of this work come about? And what do you think of the harsh critiques it received?

In 1991, in the wake of the Gulf War, Italian poet and novelist Giuseppe Conte organised the international forum 'The Moth and the Flame' in San Remo, which sought to bring together the two cultures on the opposite sides of the Mediterranean.

I was invited to recite my poem 'Laylat al-Qadr' in Arabic and Italian. It was there that I met literary critic and linguist Prof Carlo Ossola, who compared 'Kitab al-Isra' and other books by Sufi scholars like Ibn Arabi and Sanai on the one hand, and 'The Divine Comedy' on the other.

He asked me to translate Palacios' book. I accepted the challenge and asked Roberto Rossi Testa to help me with the translation from Spanish while I handled the translation of the original Arabic texts that the writer had included in his book untranslated.

Once published, the book received good reviews from Italian history and literature experts enthusiastic about Arabic literature, from the likes of Maria Corti and other new generation critics, in a sharp contrast to the controversy of the 1950s and 60s. Many publishers would go on to publish subsequent editions of the book.

Whatever their nationality, migrants carry their culture with them. The Italians only understood this when the first books by migrants were published in the early 1990s.

These include 'Io, venditore di elefanti' (I, Seller of Elephants) by Pap Khouma and Oreste Pivetta, 'La promessa di Hamadi' (Hamadi's Promise) by Saidou Moussa Ba and Alessandro Micheletti, and 'Immigrato' (Immigrant) by Salah Methnani and Mario Fortunato.

What's your view of Italian migrant literature?

When I began writing my first novel, I considered myself to be an immigrant writer writing in Italian. I was labelled as a foreign writer by Bompiani Publishers. With time, I found that 'Italian migrant literature' was no longer a fitting label.

For me, language is the land. Whoever writes in the language of the land belongs to that land and the language itself becomes his land. Since my first novel, I've been writing in Italian independently. I was one of the first writers to write and publish books without collaborating with an Italian author.

You established the Dar al-Hikma cultural centre in Turin in the heart of a popular immigrant neighbourhood, in a bid to keep the Arab and Islamic Golden Age alive. Tell us more about it.

The Dar al-Hikma Italian-Arab Cultural Centre was established in 1985 by a group of Arabic language professors at the University of Turin. Its name was inspired by the famous 'Bayt al-Hikma' library in Abbasid Baghdad, in which many great literary works were brilliantly translated into Arabic.

 We rented a 1950s building from the municipality of Turin and restored it in 2000, using both Italian and Arabic culture as inspiration. A one-of-a-kind centre in Italy, Dar al-Hikma became a meeting point for people from various cultures across the Mediterranean. It provides a host of services to both Italian citizens and migrants.

How would you describe your relationship with the Italian language, in which you authored most of your books?

It is a relationship of engagement and belonging, without denouncing my native language. I am fascinated by Italian. It's a Latin language, which means it has an abundance of synonyms, antonyms, and loan words. I love writing in Italian because, just like Arabic, it offers great flexibility and plenty of room for creativity.