Beheading the Son: Muhammad and Bertran de Born in Inferno 28
In recent years, partly because of the current political resonance of the relationship between Islam and the West, significant attention has been paid to the disturbing portrait of the prophet Muhammad in Inferno 28 and, more broadly, to the issue of Dante and Islam. In this essay I analyze Dante’s depiction of Muhammad in relation to its theological framework, arguing that the Muslims’ rejection of the dogma of the Trinity, which constitutes the central source of doctrinal dissension between Islam and Christianity, allows us to establish a link between Muhammad and Bertran de Born, the other main character in the gallery of sowers of discord presented in Inferno 28. As both sinners severed the tie between father and son, the former breached the principle upon which the unity of the Church is founded, whereas the latter violated the norm that undergirds the dynastic legitimacy of a kingdom. In contrast with Bertran’s and Muhammad’s language of division, Dante conceives his work as a vessel for peace and reconciliation between secular and spiritual authorities.
The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage
Arabic culture was a central and shaping phenomenon in medieval Europe, yet its influence on medieval literature has been ignored or marginalized for the last two centuries. In this ground-breaking book, now returned to print with a new afterword by the author, Maria Rosa Menocal argues that major modifications of the medieval canon and its literary history are necessary. Menocal reviews the Arabic cultural presence in a variety of key settings, including the courts of William of Aquitaine and Frederick II, the universities in London, Paris, and Bologna, and Cluny under Peter the Venerable, and she examines how our perception of specific texts including the courtly love lyric and the works of Dante and Boccaccio would be altered by an acknowledgment of the Arabic cultural component.
Rubik's for cryptographers
Hard mathematical problems are at the core of security arguments in cryptography. In this paper, we study mathematical generalizations of the famous Rubik’s cube puzzle, namely the factorization, representation and balance problems in non-Abelian groups. These problems arise naturally when describing the security of Cayley hash functions, a class of cryptographic hash functions with very interesting properties. The factorization problem is also strongly related to a famous long-standing conjecture of Babai, at the intersection of group theory and graph theory. A constructive proof of Babai’s conjecture would make all Cayley hash functions insecure, but on the other hand it would have many positive applications in graph theory and computer science. In this paper, we classify existing attacks against Cayley hash functions and we review known results on Babai’s conjecture. Despite recent cryptanalytic progress on particular instances, we show that the factorization, representation and balance problems presumably remain good sources of cryptographic hard problems. Our study demonstrates that Cayley hash functions deserve further interest by the cryptography community.