Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
The book is about "the prophet Muhammad's famous 'night journey' from Mecca to Jerusalem, followed by his ascent (up the 'ladder' of the title) to the nine circles of heaven and his descent to hell, the whole of the trip under the guidance of the archangel Gabriel, narrated by Muhammad himself in the first person. Both surviving translation, one in French and one in Latin, both from 1264, were made directly from the written Castilian translation rather than from the Arabic original . . ." Brunetto Latini is remembered "for his role in the most transcendentally important vernacular work of the period, the Divine Comedy . . . Dante, who was born in 1265, while Brunetto was in Toledo, immortalized his fellow Florentine as a revered teacher . . . But no question has more scandalized and provoked students of Dante than whether, among the many treasures the world traveler Brunetto revealed to the young Dante, was included the book that had been all the rage at Alfonso's court and had been translated by another fellow Tuscan, the amazing vision of the other world narrated by Muhammad himself, the story of his guided tour of heaven and hell." {Menocal: Ornament of the World, p. 226-8] "Shortly before her death, the Italian philologist Maria Corti pointed out that, during his stay at the court of Alfonso X, Dante's mentor Brunetto Latini met Bonaventura de Siena, a Tuscan who had translated the Kitab al Miraj from Arabic into Latin. Corti speculates that Brunetto may have provided a copy of that work to Dante." [Wikipedia]