|
|
Representations of Muslims have never been more common in the Western imagination than they are today. Building on Orientalist stereotypes constructed over centuries, the figure of the wily Arab has given rise, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, to the “Islamist” terrorist. In Idols in the East Suzanne Conklin Akbari explores the premodern background of some of the Orientalist types still pervasive in present-day depictions of Muslims-the irascible and irrational Arab, the religiously deviant Islamist-and about how these stereotypes developed over time.
Idols in the East contributes to the recent surge of interest in European encounters with Islam and the Orient in the premodern world. Focusing on the medieval period, Akbari examines a broad range of texts including encyclopedias, maps, medical and astronomical treatises, chansons de geste, romances, and allegories to paint an unusually diverse portrait of medieval culture. Among the texts she considers are The Book of John Mandeville, The Song of Roland, Parzival, and Dante's Divine Comedy. From them she reveals how medieval writers and readers understood and explained the differences they saw between themselves and the Muslim other. Looking forward, Akbari also comes to terms with how these medieval conceptions fit with modern discussions of Orientalism, thus providing an important theoretical link to postcolonial and postimperial scholarship on later periods. Far reaching in its implications and balanced in its judgments, Idols in the East will be of great interest to not only scholars and students of the Middle Ages but also anyone interested in the roots of Orientalism and its tangled relationship to modern racism and anti-Semitism.
Reviews
"Idols in the East is an excellent as well as a timely book. Suzanne Conklin Akbari's assessments of the primary and secondary sources that come under her scrutiny are judicious, insightful, and fair-minded. Above all, Idols in the East makes clear how wide a range of evidence there is for a discourse of medieval Orientalism and how such a discourse might be understood in the present."—Iain Macleod Higgins, University of Victoria, author of Writing East
"Idols of the East recuperates a lost orientalism and a history of oriental power dropped from the famous Orientalism of Edward Said: for the historical power and cultural significance of the Islamic East, Suzanne Conklin Akbari argues, has been dramatically underemphasized. Akbari carefully unpacks medieval practices of mapping the East, representations of Judaism and Islam, conflations of ethnic and religious terminology, and iconic figurations of the Saracen. Her book reaches beyond medieval studies to furnish an account of orientalism’s prehistory that all postcolonialists should read: highly recommended."—David Wallace, Judith Rodin Professor, University of Pennsylvania
About the Author
Suzanne Conklin Akbari is Professor of English and Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. She is author of Seeing Through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory and editor of Marco Polo and the Encounter of East and West.
Subject Areas
