The depoliticized Saracen and Muslim erasure

Abstract

AbstractIn this article, I follow a powerful genealogy of BIWOC feminists who practice auto‐ethnography critique, and I assert my presence in the audience of scholarship on Muslim representation in the Middle Ages and show how many of the choices we value as authoritative and academic end up yielding criticism that reproduces the racism and Islamophobia of the objects of study. I argue that with few exceptions and unless it is a direct quotation, all qualified and unqualified uses of Saracen should be replaced with the word Muslim in scholarship on European representation of Muslims in the Middle Ages. When we choose Muslim over Saracen, we make explicit the racism and Islamophobia in the primary material. By doing so, we show that we value the victims who suffer from the violence in the primary material over the material itself. And we grant these objects of study powerful roles in the history of Islamophobic violence.