Dadabhoy, Ambereen. "Islam and the West." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/islam-and-the-west. [Date accessed].

Islam and the West

The fictive binary that remains in the 21st century

Download the transcript
Ambereen Dadabhoy
Harvey Mudd College

The supposed supremacy of “Western” civilization is a fiction that has its roots in the premodern past. A major requirement of the development of this narrative is an intentional severance of the “West” from the culture and influence of the “East.” The east, in this construct, is being represented by Islam and Muslim people. Guiding students through early modern texts reveals the entangled relationship between Christian Europe and Muslim culture and can help our students understand how the fictions we live with today were developed and maintained.

Further learning

Reading list

Staging Islam and Shakespeare

Ambereen Dadabhoy’s course asks students to investigate how individual, cultural, and political Muslim identity is manufactured in Shakespeare’s canon.

Ambereen Dadabhoy
Video

Othello and the epithet of "Moor"

Ambereen Dadabhoy uses Shakespeare’s Othello as a text through which students can think about contemporary Islamophobia.

Ambereen Dadabhoy
Video

Early modern Orientalism

Dadabhoy's course asks students to read  premodern texts to deconstruct enduring fictions about Islam and Muslims across time and place.

Ambereen Dadabhoy

Recommended

Essay

Representations of Muslims in El Poema de Mio Cid

El Poema de Mio Cid, when taught contrapuntally with La Chanson de Roland and The Epic of Sunjata, reveals complex and layered representations of Muslims in the medieval Iberian Peninsula.

Adam Miyashiro
Video

Reframing the refugee narrative

Mayte Green-Mercado teaches her students to interrogate the histories of global migration and displacement to study the narratives of refugees in our present moment.

Mayte Green-Mercado
Activity

Collaborative student research

A multidisciplinary and student-centered approach for early modern professors, inspired by Geraldine Heng’s Teaching Early Global Literatures and Cultures.

Geraldine Heng