Isra and Mi'raj
In 1919, Miguel Asín Palacios, a Spanish scholar and a Catholic priest, published "La Escatología musulmana en la Divina Comedia" ("Islamic Eschatology in the Divine Comedy"), an account of parallels between early Islamic philosophy and the "Divine Comedy". Palacios argued that Dante derived many features of and episodes about the hereafter from the spiritual writings of Ibn Arabi and from the Isra and Mi'raj or night journey of Muhammad to heaven. The latter is described in the "ahadith" and the "Kitab al Miraj" (translated into Latin in 1264 or shortly before as "Liber Scalae Machometi", "The Book of Muhammad's Ladder"), and has significant similarities to the "Paradiso", such as a sevenfold division of Paradise, although this is not unique to the "Kitab al Miraj" or Islamic cosmology.