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

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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

Reading list

Teaching racialized genders

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Early modern Turk plays, travel narratives, medical writings, and drama are rich sources of this history of racialization. This reading list compiled by Abdulhamit Arvas offers useful excerpts and critical analysis to include in your syllabus.

Abdulhamit Arvas
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
RaceB4Race Highlight

Early modern travel writing and race

By attending to the power of composition, Nedda Mehdizadeh highlights the ways in which teaching composition might empower students to work against and past today’s imperial universalisms.

Nedda Mehdizadeh

Selected annotated bibliography