Afterword

Abstract

How are scholars of the twenty-first century to interrogate medieval texts in hopes of discerning the attitudes of their authors toward those who are “Other”? To what extent are our own categories (religious, racial, or other) useful, and to what extent do they prevent us from seeing clearly? Since Edward Said published Orientalism in 1978, his ideas have colored much of the research on medieval attitudes toward Islam and toward the East more generally. Although Said’s conceptual framework has often been put to good use, at other times it has been used clumsily. Said saw Orientalism as a discourse that justified European colonial conquest and domination of large swaths of the “Orient.” While some medieval authors (chroniclers of the First Crusade, for example) indeed use the negative image of the “Saracens” and their religion to justify war against them, much premodern Christian European discourse on Islam came on the contrary from those who lived under Muslim rule or who feared being conquered by Muslims. Said’s Orientalist model cannot be transferred unreflexively to explain discourse coming from very different social realities.¹ Indeed, if we are to use Said’s categories to understand, say, the virulent anti-Muslim polemics of Eulogius and Paulus Alvarus in ninth-century Cordoba, we should rather see them as manifestations of what Said calls a “resistance culture,” a subversive discourse directed against the dominant “colonial” culture of Islam.²