Shakespeare’s Missing Muslims: Strategic Silence and Erasure
William Shakespeare, the quintessential English playwright, authored plays in which he completely erased the presence of Muslims, despite their significant presence in his world, according to a new book ‘Shakespeare Through Muslim Worlds’ by Dr Ambereen Dadabhoy.
Considering many of Shakespeare’s plays are set in the Mediterranean, by choosing not to mention Muslims and Islam, he makes a significant statement. When Shakespeare was writing in the sixteenth century Muslims dominated this area, trade routes, were immensely wealthy and were not a presence that could be ignored. By erasing Muslims while referencing cultural practices or objects rooted in Islam — yet not naming their origins — Shakespeare makes a deliberate point.
According to Dadabhoy, “Shakespeare’s interest in Islam and its cultures, and his desire to construct a pan-European polity free of them: and his desire to represent England as white and Christian, untouched by the international, inter-religious, and inter-racial intimacies that Queen Elizabeth was cultivating with the Ottomans,” is very telling.
Shakespeare’s use of terms such as ‘Turk’, ‘Saracen’, ‘Moor’ were used interchangeably during this time to reference Muslim people of any background, but looking at these terms out of context and anachronistically suggest that Shakespeare was writing only about colour and ethnicity. Dadhabhoy states that the word ‘Turk’ often stood for Islam and its manifold cultures. Europeans were trying to fix identity of Muslims within an ethnic racial identity marker, and ignoring the diversity of the Ottoman Empire. These attempts to racialise people is a colonial tactic of division and control of the ‘other,’ and is still part of the framework today.
Othering of Muslims is historic because the interconnection between the western and Muslim worlds was a reality. Queen Elizabeth I was excommunicated from the Catholic Church by the Pope for her Protestantism, and as a result she had no Christian allies and instead sought relationships and trade with the Muslim world. The English theatre houses had many plays that made reference to these connections, albeit in a negative light. “The theatrical representation of the “Turk” functioned as yet another tidy shorthand to convey certain stereotypes about Islam and Muslim identity, such as rapacious sensuality, extreme violence, luxuriant wealth, and religious misbelief”, states Dadabhoy.
Dadabhoy explores the concept of race further in connection to Shakespeare, and argues that the way of classifying people through the colour of their skin, using racial terminology is part of European ideas of sorting people through physical difference. The focus is overwhelmingly on skin colour, which isn’t a reliable way to capture the full picture of someone’s identity. And in the case of Shakespeare ignores their faith which was central to Muslim identity and cultural expression.
As well as race being a social construct, and not actually being a tangible marker of identity, it is also a construct of space according to Dadabhoy. This concept is fittingly evidenced by Shakespeare’s depiction of the Mediterranean as a place only for white Christian people, even though that was not the case in reality. At this time, the Mediterranean area was dominated by the more powerful Muslim world. Dadabhoy says: “Despite the centrality of Islam and its cultures to the geography of the Mediterranean, encountering Islam in Shakespeare entails an interpretive practice that looks from the margins in order to see the strategic erasures of Muslim cultures from the representational frame.” Dadabhoy adds: “Examining his representation of that space as deliberate and exclusionary, as part of a project of European worldmaking, reveals the cultural and ideological contours of the plays and their insistence on a Mediterranean void of the religious, racial, and cultural differences that formed its quotidian reality.”
The exclusion and erasure of Muslims continues in the world today, where western systems and governance follow the same construction of white superiority. The continuous use of race to describe people of diverse background, heritage, and faith fits this worldview, and the idea of race has often been used historically to justify systems of exploitation and oppression around the world. The use of the term ‘Moor’ in Shakespeare, and his most famous Moorish character, Othello, is stripped of his full identity. Dadabhoy writes, “It is not coincidental that Shakespeare’s so-called race plays are also the ones that contain characters who are definitely (maybe) Muslims or a set in geographies that facilitate easy cultural contact with Islamicate societies.”
The term ‘Moor’ derives from the Spanish, ‘Moro’, which in turn is derived from the Latin ‘Maurus’ - which means an inhabitant of Mauritania – the Roman name for the Maghreb or North Africa. ‘Moor’ is associated with Islam mainly because of the long history of Muslim rule in Spain. The use of the term ‘Moor’ was used to describe Arabs, Africans, North Africans, and Slavic Muslims all under the same banner. Shakespeare in Othello racialises the identity of ‘Moor’ in his work. Dadabhoy states, “While Othello‘s race, his blackness, has troubled some critics in term of his construction as a “Moor”, Islamic cultures in the early modern period encompass many geographies and ethnicities, including the northern and western parts of the African continent. Blackness in all of its cultural and somatic variations is not at all incompatible with Islam; in fact it is central to it.”
The discussions around race and power are very interesting in relation to Shakespeare’s work. Dadabhoy says, “Human difference becomes race when it has been assigned meaning within a system that hierarchically organizes society and culture.” Racism is a set of beliefs and actions that justify unequal treatment. Dadabhoy states that, “What Fields and Fields succinctly demonstrate is that race cannot function outside of a racist framework,” and the fact that it continues to define the ‘other’ today, raises the question of how much has changed since Shakespeare’s time?
The way Shakespeare hides Islamic identities and existence in the margins is very similar to modern day realities. Muslim being seen as “incompatible with liberal western “values” and suggests that they are “fundamentalist” “home grown” sleeper cell agents of terror who must be surveilled and controlled to ensure the safety of the white Christian nation.” This is a repeated narrative throughout history, since the birth and quick ascendance of Islam.” These anti-Muslim sentiments ‘are not new, and this work on ‘Shakespeare Through Muslim Worlds’, “exposes how central Islam and Muslims are to the western culture’s self-image and self-representation.”
Erasure is as bad as overt anti-Muslim sentiments. Dadabhoy explains, “My interest in Islam in Shakespeare is very much shaped by my own identity but is equally motivated by the historical amnesia of scholarship that has further marginalized Islam and Muslims from the plays and the places that they inhibited.” Yet by writing about this erasure, she is targeted and judged for her ‘otherness’ because the narrative falls outside the dominant Anglo and euro American viewpoint.
The impact of being excluded and wiped out from history is significant, and systemic. Dadabhoy states: “Early modern literature and Shakespeare have often not simply erased all or parts of my identity – a sign that I do not fit or belong here as a reader, audience member, or scholar – they have also denigrated and demonized all or parts of my identity.” If we do not confront how canonical literature like Shakespeare’s constructs and maintains white, Christian supremacy, we risk repeating the same silences that shape our present. Uncovering these erasures is not just literary critique — it is a demand for historical justice and genuine inclusion.
Related articles:
Shakespeare and Islam by Fuad Nahdi, Arab News
Without Islam there would be no Shakespeare by Nadia Khan
Elizabeth I and the Ottomans by Nadia Khan, TRT World
