Unsettling Orientalism: Toward a New History of European Representations of Muslims and Islam, c. 1200–1450

Positioning itself within decades-spanning debates on Edward Said’s Orientalism, this essay reappraises European representations of Muslims and Islam around the crusading movement, c. 1200–1450. It argues for the presence in crusade-related writings of representations that conflict with or unsettle Orientalist ideologies, tracing their proliferation to the countercrusading efforts of Muslim dynasties in the Levant and to the rise of the Ottoman Empire. The first section maps the long history of the Orientalist motif par excellence of chanson de geste and romance: the “afflicted Muslim” who vents his military frustration on his “gods.” It argues that this motif lost its dichotomizing powers in a two-step process, first when real-life Christians (crusaders, clerics, and laypeople) began to blaspheme against God following crusading defeats, and then when writers of imaginative literature came to portray Christian characters acting in similar fashion. The second section shows that European authors pondering the implications of Muslim victories in the eastern Mediterranean often wrote in ways that ran counter to prevailing Orientalist trends. Rather than depict Islam as manifestly different and its followers as inferior Others, they focused on values and practices they saw uniting the two religions and extolled the moral and spiritual achievements of Muslims to shame and educate Christian believers. The essay discusses both better-known and neglected materials in Latin, French, Occitan, English, German, and Italian.