Marking the 350th anniversary of the first publication of Paradise Lost (1667), Islam Issa observes that in “three and a half centuries of mainstream scholarly interest in Milton’s Satan, nothing has been said about the Islamic reception of the character, nor comparisons and parallels [made] with Iblīs” (115), apparently forgetting one source he mentioned earlier, Jeffrey Einboden’s 2009 essay in Milton Quarterly (63–64). There are several other misleading claims in Milton and the Arab-Muslim World, not all of which can be dismissed as overenthusiastic exaggeration. Nevertheless, the singular achievement of this study is an important one, which is to generate terms in which Muslim readers—notably students in universities where Milton is being taught—can be encouraged to read, debate, and understand Paradise Lost. Issa successfully demonstrates how Muslims can not only engage with Milton’s epic without losing sight of their own faith, but also strengthen that faith by confronting the many challenges offered by Milton’s idiosyncratic theology and narrative of the Creation and Fall.

Milton and the Arab-Muslim World is in two parts. Part 1 establishes how the English poet has had a controversial “presence” in the Arab-Muslim world since the early twentieth century, initially among poets and literary scholars, but increasingly in popular cultural forms, including political sloganeering following the Arab Spring of 2011. Here, Issa follows and expands upon the sources first noticed by Abdallah Dahiyat in John Milton and the Arab-Islamic Culture (1991, reprinted in 2012), before introducing readers to Mohamed Enani’s authoritative Arabic translation of Paradise Lost (1982–2002). In part 2, Issa uses Enani’s translation and annotations to discuss how features of Paradise Lost—those that are strikingly similar to traditional Muslim belief and that prove especially challenging, if not blasphemous, to Muslim readers—might be approached with reference to the Qur’an and Hadiths. Four chapters focus on Milton’s representations of Satan, God, the Son, and Adam and Eve.

For mainstream literary scholars and Miltonists, the most illuminating moments will be when Issa shows Enani skillfully using the poetic resources of classical and Qur’anic Arabic to render Miltonic language, sometimes even replicating poetic effects (e.g., 104–05), while retuning it in accord with Muslim thought. Noticing how Enani renders Satan’s “God-like imitated state” (PL 2.511) into “what he simulates with the Throne of Allah!,” Issa comments at some length on how the throne phrase echoes “the most famous Qur’anic verse” thereby “adding further weight to Satan’s sacrilegious character” since the Throne of Allah “is mentioned twenty times in the Qur’an” (97). Curiously, we are not told how Enani translated the opening image of book 2—“High on a throne of royal state”—or the other seventy-four instances of “throne” in the poem, which would have proved informative. Sometimes Issa and Enani miss the mark: when in Areopagitica Milton writes “the Turk upholds his Alcoran,” he was using the usual form for referring to the Ottoman sultan and his authority, not the people of Anatolia (48). Issa ignores Peter Awn’s important Satan’s Tragedy and Redemption: Iblis in Sufi Psychology (1983), but convincingly demonstrates the care and sensitivity with which Enani’s translation artfully transforms Milton’s poetic language into Arabic.

For “English-language … Arab-Muslim students” studying Paradise Lost “in higher education English literature classes” (117, 99), Issa’s study valuably indicates ways of approaching insurmountable doctrinal difficulties in reading a poem that seeks “to justify the ways of God” (PL 1.26), represents God, humanizes Satan, casts Jesus as the son of God and a Messiah, and invites readers to imagine Adam and Eve engaging in sexual activities. With key phrases from Enani’s translation ever before him, Issa elaborates at length on Qur’anic verses and Sunni commentaries on the Hadiths that exemplify close affinities with Milton’s versions of things and, on this basis, treats controversial elements as occasions for Muslim readers to refine their own understanding of the Qur’an while learning about an influential English poet. Without dismissing notions in Paradise Lost that Muslims must view as blasphemous, Issa insists that Milton’s poem can be “unexpectedly illuminating for Arab-Muslim readers” who are not put off by “controversies from the outset” (243), but are open to learning from difference.