Connecting Middle Eastern Literature To The Canon

By Author: Alex Lee
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The respected Palestinian American literary scholar Edward Said, who died of cancer in 2003, has written about "Orientalism," the stereotyping of Middle Eastern people tied to the European and American interests in the region. I started our class by looking at some of the historically early representations of the Middle East in classic European and British literature.

We read authors and texts frequently in the secondary curriculum but that are often not put into dialogue with Middle Eastern writing. We found classic works available for free online, and, using Wikipedia, students ...
... gained some background about the enormous Arab and Ottoman empires that arose in the Middle East and that were centers of learning during the European "Middle Ages." We began our literary reading with the interesting ninth story from the tenth day of Boccaccio's The Decahedron (1350 AD) that tells about the visit of Saladin, leader of the Muslim armies during the Crusades. Saladin comes to Italy in disguise and is offered generous hospitality by an Italian lord who, later, during a crusade, finds himself Saladin's prisoner. When Saladin discovers the prisoner is his former host, he treats him royally and has his magicians fly him home overnight so he can be with his wife. In contrast to this "positive" romanticized depiction, we read the first part of Chaucer's "Man of Laws Tale", the story of Constance, a European girl who marries the sultan of Syria, converts him to Christianity, and then escapes his death and a massacre of his court led by her motherinlaw. We also looked at the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," and Shelley's sonnet "Ozymandias." The mysterious, violent, lustful, and deceptive stereotypes we also explored in some of the tales from the Arabian Nights, and, most extensively, in Shakespeare's Othello.

Sometimes the best starting point for incorporating living writers into the curriculum is to connect them to classic writers and works. In his essay "Turning Turk in Othello," Daniel Vitkus explains that some of the same ignorance that leads to stereotyping today was present at the time of Shakespeare—the English frequently confused and conflated terms as different as Turk and Moor, linking Muhammad and the Pope as devilish enemies to good Protestant Christians. The Renaissance was a time of warfare as well as economic and ideological competition between Europe and the Islamic world. One of my students, Diane Hall, wrote a paper arguing that by the end of the play, "Othello possesses characteristics that were [stereotypically] attributed to Muhammad. He is lustful, violent, angry, and delusional." Drawing on Vitkus, Diane claimed that "The play Othello does in some sense portray Islamic culture; however, it functions on a larger level to warn the audience about the dangers of conversion. . . . These conversions are the result of subtle actions and words that eventually so envelop the victims that they cannot see clearly and cannot perceive the consequences of their actions." Foregrounding the Middle East as a theme led students to new perspectives on Chaucer and Shakespeare, on Coleridge and Shelley, and also allowed us to recognize the repetition and transformation of stereotypes through time.