UC Berkeley

The Muslim Prism: Reflections and Refractions of the Racialized Premodern Muslim Body argues that medieval Christians in England racialize Muslims in their texts because they realize that they cannot exert cultural or political power over them in lived historical reality. In the first chapter of my dissertation, titled “The Shock of Islam,” I read Peter of Cluny’s anti-Muslim tracts and argue that Christian racialization of Muslims is motivated by two factors. Firstly, Christians recognize that Muslims have beaten them to global, religious expansion. Secondly, given that the tenets and beliefs of Islam so closely parallel those of Christianity, Christians fear that Islam has situated Christianity in its past in ways that parallel Christianity’s placement of Judaism into its own. These beliefs form the basis for a Christian desire to not only protect the Christian world from the increasing threat of Islam’s encroachment, but also to fight for continued political, theological, social, and cultural relevance in the world. So, as I show in my second chapter, “Race-ing to Use the Masculine Muslim Body,” Christians rewrite and redefine Muslims’ use of resources and their relationship to land and history. I read fourteenth-century historiographies of the Crusades and romances alongside Sara Ahmed’s theories of use, Donna Haraway’s theories of nature and technology, and Saidiya Hartman’s theories of racial subjection to argue that Muslims are imagined as cyborg-like— lacking basic survival needs, unrealistically large in number, and inefficiently occupying land and resources. This representation allows Christians to justify, even honor, mass murder, eradication, and cannibalism of Muslim men. In the next chapter “Race-ing to Appropriate the Feminine Muslim Body,” I think through Black feminist theory to argue that Muslim women are reinscribed into Christian communities to make appropriation of their racialized characteristics—willfulness, courage, knowledge, ability to collaborate— possible. Ultimately, however, Christians begin to fantasize a world in which they have just as much social, political, and cultural power as Muslims do. This fantasy takes the shape of narratives of racial passing. In the fourth chapter “Race-ing for Embodied Settlement,” I look at romances where Christian heroes take on racial characteristics of Muslims, a move I theorize as “embodied settlement.” Embodied settlement, I argue, allows Islam to take on the characteristics of a space, and settling into that space makes possible Christian exploration of gender, class, and race.

The Muslim Prism pushes back against the general consensus among scholars that the premodern Muslim, when converted to Christianity, assimilated into the European Christian race. Instead, it argues that Muslims remained raced both before and after their conversions. In fact, I argue that it was because Muslims were so powerful in their political, cultural, and scientific scope that Christians ultimately realized that they benefitted from thinking through ways to adopt and consume Muslim power, rather than erase it.