Shakespeare 21 April, 1564
The world-renowned Elizabethan genius, poet and playwright, William Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon, used the character, Othello in themes, amongst others, of racism in the Moor of Venice. This is not to declare that Shakespeare is a racist writer, but rather that he uses racial themes that he learnt elsewhere from different sources in his texts.
In the drama, Othello is a Moor of Moroccan origin. The term ‘Moor’ was used pejoratively in Europe in a broader sense to refer to anyone of Arab or African blood, whether living in Spain or North Africa. Moors are a people of medieval Muslim descent, whether the term is applied to the Berbers, North African Arabs, or Muslims from that region. Othello meets and marries the beautiful Desdemona in Venice, where he is a soldier of the Republic, and takes up his post in Cyprus. His contemporary, Iago, conspires in a plot to convince Othello that Desdemona has cheated him, singling out a black character for a racist attack, impugning his honour and integrity as well as that of Desdemona. “Even now, very now an old black ram is tupping your white ewe"[14] and, “I am one, sir that comes to tell you, your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs”, claims Iago to Brabantio, Desdemona’s father, [15] in a malicious plot to convince Brabantio of his daughter’s adultery.
Othello is referred to as “a lascivious Moor”, and there are a number of references to him as ‘black’, a term in Elizabethan times with negative connotations. Contrarily, Desdemona is referred to as ‘white’ as Shakespeare portrays an undiluted image of: “That whiter skin of hers than snow / As smooth as monumental alabaster” that turns to ice when she lies slain, so that Othello declaims tragically: “Cold, cold, my girl? / Even like thy chastity. O! cursed, cursed slave!”[16]
In the text, Othello becomes ‘Other’, an ethnic racial stereotype described by one character, Rodrigo, as “thick-lips”. The act of miscegenation in marrying a beautiful white woman is clear to an Elizabethan audience not used to the celebration of ebony and ivory.[17] Why should a fellow soldier engage in such racism, it may be asked. Jealousy of Othello’s elevating another officer to high rank is the cause, and Iago plots to avenge him for it: “I follow him to serve my turn upon him”, he cries. Iago’s jealousy causes him to turn it upon others and to create a feeling for revenge in Othello’s breast so that he murders Desdemona, stabs Iago, and finally kills himself: And in justification Othello declares wisely:
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice: then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely, but too well;
Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,
Perplex'd in the extreme; of one whose hand,
Like the base Judean, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe.
Othello puts it on record to explain his actions undiplomatically:
Set you down this;
And say besides, — that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduc'd the state.
The reaction to the tale of racism, passion and jealousy remains something to be regretted as a tragedy with implications for Othello’s money and property; a Muslim is to be ‘traduced’ in turn by his Christian captains and servers:
O Spartan dog,
More fell than anguish, hunger, or the sea!
Look on the tragic loading of this bed;
This is thy work: — the object poisons sight;
Let it be hid. — Gratiano, keep the house,
And seize upon the fortunes of the Moor,[18]
The portrayal of Othello appeals to all the base connotations that the Elizabethans felt about Muslims. It did not assist matters either that the character was played upon the stage at the Globe theatre by a white, male actor with a face blackened with charcoal, leading to issues not only of gender, but of inequalities in the acting profession; nor did it help to cement relationships with those who frequented the ‘pit’ of the open – air theatre in London and those members of the Muslim population who were not theatregoers.
Another Shakespearean character who ascribed negative connotations to the Eastern world is Mark Antony in ‘Antony and Cleopatra’, delighting in the fact that: ”The beds i’ the east are soft, and who has an “emasculating” mistress in Cleopatra. Racist remarks in the voice of Romans are ascribed to Cleopatra by Captain Philo in “tawny front”:
Nay, but this dotage of our general's
O'erflows the measure: those his goodly eyes,
That o'er the files and musters of the war
Have glow'd like plated Mars, now bend, now turn,
The office and devotion of their view
Upon a tawny front[19]
and again in “gypsy’s lust”:
…His captain’s heart,
Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst
The buckles on his breast, reneges all temper
And is become the bellows and the fan
To cool a gypsy’s lust.[20]
The sexuality of her nature is foregrounded, to make her appear a figure of disrespect like a ‘gypsy’ or a whore who has totally captivated the Roman general, Mark Anthony, so that he becomes: “The triple pillar of the world transform'd / Into a strumpet's fool” [21]
Alive, she is a schemer and a clever trickster: ”She is cunning past man's thought” and: “a wonderful piece of work.”[22] Mark Anthony’s speech infers a binary opposition between the supposed idleness of the East and the virility and greatness of the West:
But that your royalty
Holds idleness your subject, I should take you
For idleness itself.[23]
And again, Cleopatra has no use for a castrated man - only a virile one, indicating her allegedly lustful nature: “I take no pleasure / In aught an eunuch has.”[24]
The contrary nature of Mark Anthony’s marriage to Octavia points up Cleopatra’s faults again:
…take Antony
Octavia to his wife; whose beauty claims
No worse a husband than the best of men;
Whose virtue and whose general graces speak
That which none else can utter.
Cleopatra has broken Anthony’s sword, which has been “made weak by his affection”[25] suggesting that she has debilitated him sexually. His submission to Cleopatra offers up the desirability of the East versus the staid and duty bound soldier of Rome. The racism exhibited against the Egyptian queen by Caesar and his Roman generals is part, symbolically, of the Elizabethan audience’s antipathy to things Eastern, Muslim and ‘Other’.
Shakespeare’s exact contemporary, Christopher Marlowe, (1564 - 30 May 1593), has fatalistic tendencies that parallel Islam in the way that many Muslims believe in predestiny and accept the destiny of Allah through subservience to the will of God.
In his deeply fatalistic work ‘Dr Faustus’, the protagonist Dr Faustus reaffirms the pact he has made with the devil in his quest for knowledge and power, and is, consequently, doomed forever. Like many Muslims, his search for redemption drives him to anticipate paradise, where all sins are redeemed, rather than hell where, traditionally, all sins are punished for eternity.
His acts are predestined, for we know that his heart and soul are crying out for repentance. Yet, some force has compelled him to remain silent.
When we consider that Faustus shows an urge to repent and that, overwhelmed by his wickedness, he continually questions himself about the desirability of turning to God and asking for his forgiveness, the conflict between these two ideas arises once more. Faustus's soul is crying out for redemption. And yet, for no apparent reason, some unseen force forbids this course of action and Faustus is therefore doomed to damnation in hell. This idea pervades the rest of the play. Faustus, as the end of the tragedy approaches, really wants to cry out for forgiveness for his sinful pact with the devil. He cries out that he knows that he is damned. After the words of the 'Old Man' he will repent his descent to hell during his quest for power and knowledge. His greed has led him to this fate. Yet he ponders for a moment and then declaims:
I do repent and yet I do despair
Hell strives with grace for conquest in my breast
What shall I do to shun the snares of death?[26]
This means that he will ask God for redemption. It is difficult to decide whether, as John H Ingram declared, it remains merely a tragedy where “a mighty mind is gradually subjugated by the power of evil passions”.[27] Or is it to say that Faustus is an example of the great tragedy of a man who is predestined to a terrible doom and who cannot escape, however much his soul cried out for release from its prefixed bonds. I take the latter view that Faustus was fated, like many Muslims believe they are, to make the choice that he was unable to avoid through an almighty and overpowering predestiny.[28]
A little later, an Arabic scholar, Edward Pococke, 1603 -1691, held the chair of Arabic at Oxford University. In 1650 he had published a short chapter on the history of the Arabs before Islam; however, in this work allegations against the morals of Muhammad were made, not helpful to Muslim – Christian discourse. As a collector of manuscripts on behalf of the Archbishop of Canterbury, he was in a unique position to influence his followers with regard to Islam. Pococke’s attitude to Arabic philosophy was dismissive and inaccurate,[29] despite the fact that the holy Qur’an, its main philosophical text, had stood the test of time for a thousand years. His translation of Ibn Tufayl’s ‘The Living Son of the Awake’ had an influence on Daniel Defoe as the model for ‘Robinson Crusoe’, and which was also influenced by Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest.’ Shakespeare’s comedy, according to Octave Mannoni, is a springboard for the story of Prospero, Caliban and Ariel, whom Mannoni thinks are positively the original characters for the embryo of the escape novel, ‘Robinson Crusoe’ which recounts, "the long and difficult cure of a misanthropic neurosis".[30]
These traditional Islamic worldview stories, such as ‘Robinson Crusoe’, had their apogee in ‘The Tempest’ and are adventure myths set in island places bounded only by the imagination, morality and unwritten law. They stand as symbols for the area of the imagination which a reader makes for himself - the isolation, the clear boundaries, are part of the human limitation which the genre required. Tools are their subject in hand, and this is their satisfaction. Their air is contrived, artificial, constrained: theirs the remoteness, imprisonment, convictdom of the unfree. The only freedom that Crusoe maintains is the freedom of a personal existential struggle to end his own mysterious, irrational, island captivity.
But Edward Pococke, who had studied Arabic, did want to avoid ‘mysterious irrationalities’, basic beliefs and old tales that misrepresented Islam and Muhammad. He helped to introduce the use of primary sources as well as doing field-work in Islamic contexts, and his approach to Islam was through ancient texts, by way of historical rather than modern viewpoints. Writing in Latin meant, however, that he reached very few of the common people in England at the time.
There continued to be mysterious and strange interpretations of Islam throughout the period, but they continued side by side with some positive ones. Edward Gibbon gave a personal description of Prophet Mohammad in his book ‘The Decline and fall of the Roman Empire’. Gibbon took Prophet Muhammad to be a humble, modest and unassuming human being whose rustic charm is appreciated :
‘The good sense of Muhammad despised the pomp of royalty. The Apostle of God submitted to the menial offices of the family; he kindled the fire; swept the floor; milked the ewes; and mended with his own hands his shoes and garments. Disdaining the penance and merit of a hermit, he observed without effort of vanity the abstemious diet of an Arab.’[31]
However the image he portrayed was not totally positive as the author of the book considered Muhammad as an imposter.[32]
There were also travel books that referred to Islam and Muslims. Recording an eighteenth century journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem, [33] Henry Maundrell wrote an account of his encounters with the Middle East. The travel book had its origins in the diary he carried with him on an Easter pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1697. He was born at Compton Bassett near Calne in Wiltshire in 1665. He attended Exeter College, Oxford from 1682 and then obtained his MA in 1688. Maundrell made no attempt to understand Islam or to read Arabic. His work was descriptive and he recorded local scenes with great detail. He was quite disinterested, and brought no local colour or human interest into his accounts. Maundrell’s criticisms were insignificant and only carried his own mysterious prejudices and judgments about the region without bringing any humanity or warmth towards people of the Orient.[34]
In 1708, a scholar named Simon Ockley, along with edited editions by Edward Gibbon, the author, as we saw, of ‘Decline and Fall’, produced a ‘History of Saracens’,[35] the pre-Crusade inhabitants of Europe, referred to as the “Greeks and Latins”, in which he made astonishing comparisons with the Arab nation. Ockley referred to the Arabs in “the age of Moses or Mahomet” [sic] thus: “the human brute, without arts or laws, almost without sense of language, is poorly distinguished from the rest of the animal creation”[36] A further slur upon the Arab nation was contained in the history, where it went at lengths to explain the perfidy and (dis)honourable conduct of its people:
The nice sensibility of honour, which weighs the insult rather than the injury, shed its daily venom on the quarrels of the Arabs: the honour of their women, and of their beards, is most easily wounded; an indecent action, a contemptuous word, can be expiated only by the blood of the offender.[37]
While it is true to say that, even in modern-day Arabia, there is normally a ‘blood price’ of money to be paid for the crime of murder, this is most often redeemed by forgiveness from the victim’s family and does not usually result in the drawing of blood. Such comments only serve to endorse the general stereotype that Western travel writers would like, and still to this day, do place on Arabs’ appearance, dress, manners, customs and religion.
Yet, contrarily, Ockley commented with favour in ‘History of the Saracen Empire,’ on the profound influence of prophet Muhammad, and found much to be admired in the spirituality of Islam: "The greatest success of Muhammad’s life was effected by sheer moral force", he wrote. He went on to comment admiringly on the spiritual profundity of Islam that:
It is not the propagation but the permanency of his religion that deserves our wonder, the same pure and perfect impression which he engraved at Mecca and Medina is preserved after the revolutions of twelve centuries by the Indian, the African and the Turkish proselytes of the Koran....The Mahometans have uniformly withstood the temptation of reducing the object of their faith and devotion to a level with the senses and imagination of man. ‘I believe in One God and Mahomet the Apostle of God’ is the simple and invariable profession of Islam. The intellectual image of the Deity has never been degraded by any visible idol; the honors of the prophet have never transgressed the measure of human virtue, and his living precepts have restrained the gratitude of his disciples within the bounds of reason and religion.[38]
We begin to see here glimmers of an understanding of Islam and Muslims.[39]
Thomas Moore’s novel ‘Lalla Rookh’ is an Oriental romance, published in 1817.[40] The title is taken from the name of the heroine of the frame tale, the daughter of the 17th-century Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. Engaged to the young king ofBukhara, Lalla Rookh goes forward to meet him, but falls in love with Feramorz, a poet from her entourage. The bulk of the work consists of four interpolated tales sung by the poet: ‘’The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan’’ loosely based on the story of Al-Muqanna,’’Paradise and the Peri’’, ‘’The Fire-Worshippers’’, and ‘’The Light of the Harem’’. When Lalla Rookh enters the palace of her bridegroom she feints, but is restored at the sound of a well known voice. She awakes with rapture to find that the poet she loves is none other than the king to whom she is engaged.
Rich and wealthy people had begun to add Egypt and the Holy Land to their "Grand Tour”, a requisite for the upper classes in the early nineteenth century. William Makepeace Thackeray's travel book, ‘Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo’,[41] published under the pseudonym "Tit-marsh", provided a stimulus for English people to go to visit the lands that he described and report on their findings.
The journey begins by sea at Gibraltar, meaning Jab al Tariq, named after the Moorish general, Tariq ibn Ziyad, who captured the promontory on the coast of Spain after a short siege. The Muslim presence in Gibraltar commenced on 27 April 711 when the Berber general led the attack on the Rock. Thackeray refers to the “Moorish castle” as “the only building about the Rock which has an air at all picturesque or romantic…” He then continues to refer to chivalrous romances in which Sir Huon of Bordeaux is made to prove his knighthood by travelling to Babylon and there extracting the Sultan’s front teeth and beard. He hopes whimsically that he “is reconciled to the loss of his front teeth and whiskers – let us try to think that he is better off without them…”[4
Journeying on by steamship to Athens, which “was a disappointment”, he soon came upon Constantinople where the holy month of Ramadan was being observed: “…no eating, the fish and meat fizzing in the work-shops are only for the Christians” and observes “meandering minstrels were there selling figs (in the name of the prophet, doubtless)”. He encounters Islamic ornamentation where: