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

Syllabus

Premodern race

This graduate seminar created by Geraldine Heng asks what is lost or gained by tracing the history of race backward in time.

Geraldine Heng
Essay

La Chanson de Roland and white supremacist medievalisms

La Chanson de Roland as a national epic was a product of both European nationalist and colonial aspirations. It's important for students to understand how the poem and its histories can reiterate Eurocentric white supremacist values if not properly contextualized.

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