Ambereen Dadabhoy, Shakespeare through Islamic Worlds (Routledge, 2024).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Ambereen Dadabhoy (AD): I wrote this book from a place of resistance to the dominant mode of scholarship on the representation of Muslims and Islamic cultures in early modern English literature and Shakespeare. A lot of the scholarship that I am responding to opened up the pathway for my own scholarship, but a lot of it was resistant to thinking about the logics of demonization and Orientalism that are embedded in the construction of Islamicate identity found in Shakespeare’s plays and in those of his contemporary playwrights. As a Muslim woman, these are things that I have had to be attentive to, because the portrayal of people like me in Western society has tended to rehearse and reinscribe tropes that were common during the time that Shakespeare was writing. It seemed to me that other scholars were missing a key point in their analysis, maybe because their experience meant that they could look past those elements of the representation. Shakespeare through Islamic Worlds, then, was written from a place of critical opposition but with the desire to open up Shakespeare to people who might think that Shakespeare does not have anything to say to or about them. It turns out that he has a lot to say, and that a lot of it is not necessarily flattering—but even recognizing that can be powerful.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
AD: One of the ways this book differs from others on the topic of Islam and Shakespeare is through its insistence on looking at how Muslims are racialized and how these representations are part of the discourse of Orientalism as defined by Edward Said. Most studies of Islam in the period have focused on the power of Muslim empires, such as the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal. This scholarship subsequently stressed Muslim imperial power as a way to discount the demonization of Muslims in the literary works of the period. While European polities and elites did have political and trade alliances with these Islamicate empires, other discourses including those political, religious, and artistic, like Shakespeare’s, still found ways to render Islam and Muslim as dangerous and Other to European Christian culture. Shakespeare through Islamic Worlds, then is engaged in explicitly naming and critiquing these strategies. By ignoring racialization and Orientalism, we have an impoverished notion of the cultural power at work, which sought cultural triumph over Islamicate societies through these exact processes. My book seeks to fill this gap and foregrounds how racialization worked to render Muslims as outsiders to European culture, even while Muslims were very much shaping that same culture.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
AD: I see this book as a continuation and expansion of my previous work because it maintains its focus on the representation of Muslims while also opening up that representation to theoretical methods that the field has not always embraced. Muslims have been central to the construction of Europe as both white and Christian, yet they have been presented as foreign to this geography. Part of the ideology underlying the Otherness of Muslims is their religion, which is discredited as heresy or a “doctrine,” rather than a theology in many of these texts. Islam’s difference from Christianity, then, allows for the racialization of Muslims as pathologically or somatically different from Christians. It is not a coincidence that, during the Renaissance, Europe developed blood purity laws, which claimed that Muslim and Jewish people had blood that was inherently different and inferior to the blood of Christians. This book brings the racialization of Islam to the fore, to examine how the supposed foundational or bodily difference of Muslims becomes the justification for expulsion and violence against them.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
AD: I hope that this book will have an audience beyond Shakespeare scholars. I wrote this book for my undergraduate self who experienced exclusion in the world and works of Shakespeare. Back then, it was common to hear that “Shakespeare invented the human condition,” but if Shakespeare created the human, where did I fit in if I am not part of his idea of humanity. Of course, such bardolatry is nonsense, but in the West Shakespeare still has cultural capital and ideological significance. I want people who love Shakespeare but who have felt marginalized by his work to know that they can still do things with Shakespeare. They can still read and enjoy his works, and they can be critical oppositional killjoys of Shakespeare. I also wrote this book as a way for scholars who work on postcolonial or SWANA fields to think about what the early modern period can offer to more contemporary research areas. There are so many connections between the past and the present that we have yet to uncover.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
AD: I am working on my next book project, which I am currently calling Orientalism without Orientalists: Islam and Muslims in the Early Modern English Imaginary. This study is animated by the provocation that early modern English studies need to put Orientalism, as a critical methodology, into circulation as we consider the representation of Islam and Muslims in early modern texts. While much work has been done on “the Turk” and other Islamicate identities such as Moors, that work has elided, side-stepped, ignored, or wholeheartedly rejected Edward Said’s thesis as a theoretical framework for analyzing the early modern period because of the charge that it is anachronistic to do so and because it seems to deny agency to the peoples and cultures of the East. Taking these positions seriously, while also challenging some of their base assumptions, this study demonstrates how ignoring the stereotypes and culture-work that Orientalism performs allows the blatant and latent anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia of early modern English texts to go unaddressed. My investigation is geared toward understanding how Islam gets written out of European history and placed outside of theorizations of "Western civilization," despite being quite central to it. I am also hoping to launch a podcast around my scholarship, focusing on the representation of Islam and Orientalism in the premodern period but also how those same constructions bubble up in our contemporary moment. Unfortunately, the overwhelming Islamophobia of the last three years has provided me with an extensive archive for my nascent show, whose working title is “Radio Dadabhoy.” Look out for it in the latter half of 2026!
Excerpt from the book (from the Conclusion: “What Is’t To Me”: or Muslim Worlds through Shakespeare, pages 218 to 223)
In pursuit of the question of whether Shakespeare’s works engage with Islam and Muslims, this book has taken a varied itinerary through Shakespeare’s works, from romance, to history, to tragedy, and comedy, yet it has rooted its inquiry in the geography of the Mediterranean, which is the primary geography of Shakespeare’s plays. In doing, so, however, Shakespeare through Islamic Worlds has, necessarily, been limited in its scope. No one book can cover the entirety of the vast and many worlds of Muslim societies and cultures, and this book certainly does not try. Instead, I have focused my attention on the Muslim Mediterranean of the early modern period because it was the most familiar geography in which Muslim-Christian encounters occurred. The Mediterranean provided a contact zone wherein cultural contest, traffic, and exchange was the norm. By focusing on the multicultural Muslim Mediterranean of the early modern period, Shakespeare through Islamic Worlds highlights the deliberate exclusions, evasions, and excisions that Shakespeare effects in the cultures and societies of his plays. Islam and its cultures were both foundational and fundamental to this geography, and their erasure in his works not only belies the popularity of this material on the early modern stage, in the works of his fellow playwrights, and in the religious and political culture of the period, but also reveals his investment in constructing a “globe” devoid of Islam. While Shakespeare does depict Other religious and racial identities, even those are banished to the peripheries, destroyed, or transformed altogether in order to construct a Europe and a Mediterranean that is white and Christian, a geography safe from the looming threat of difference. Indeed, Shakespeare’s omissions seem to be part of the larger world-making project that his works engage in and in which—for him—Islam and Muslims should have no purchase.
My investigation of Islam and Muslims in Shakespeare, then, has looked for shadows, traces, and phantoms that haunt the margins of his oeuvre and materialize only through referents, keywords, and a coded shorthand. Islam appears through substitution and projection, in tropes that ambivalently circulate in his works reminding his audience of Muslim cultures that occupy their world yet have been deliberately removed from the place of the stage (and page). Mining the plays for these moments where phrases or allusions appear has sometimes felt like a futile exercise in overreading and overreaching, magnifications of sparse incidents that rendered their presence and subtext meaningful. However, by putting pressure on these referents and contextualizing them throughout this study, I have unveiled the broader social and political milieu in which they circulate and the particular way that Islam and Muslims affected Shakespeare and early modern English and European cultural production at large. In looking for Islam I have had to dilate my evidence in order to apprehend why, for example, the trope of the “Turk,” was commonplace, accessible, and legible to both Shakespeare and his audiences. If the “Turk,” was such an extreme and radical Other—geographically, socially, religiously, and culturally distant—then how was this referent meaningful in any way? If it was significant, then what did the “Turk” convey beyond ideas of betrayal? By plumbing the depths of seemingly inconsequential rhetorical devices, Shakespeare through Islamic Worlds has resituated or re-placed Muslims within the world that Shakespeare and his audience inhabited, where the trope was backed up by the real, material, social, and cultural presence of the Ottoman Empire, which was consequential to the operations of European and English political life. In addition, thinking spatially, with and through the geography of Shakespeare’s locales, allowed me to harness the meaning-making possibilities of space. The geographies of Shakespeare’s plays have traditionally been examined for their classical antecedents, circumscribing their meanings within a European cultural inheritance and excluding the influence of the Islamicate cultures that inhabited these places before and during the time of Shakespeare’s writing. These scholarly and critical exclusions have evacuated the ways that Muslim cultures may have influenced Shakespeare’s mobilization of specific locales and have made geography and geographic knowledge and customs the purview of whiteness and Europeanness. Reading through space has also allowed me to examine how identity construction in the period and Shakespeare’s works is particularly rooted to geographic origin. My inquiry into the ways that “Moor” is often sutured to Muslim has emphasized the significance of Islamicate geographies into the construction of this identity. The “Moor” is one of the few recurring Others in Shakespeare’s corpus whose racial and ethnic designation also contains a religious dimension, specifically historicized in and through Islam and an identity that is often made legible through its own itinerant wanderings across Muslim societies and cultures. I have in Shakespeare through Islamic Worlds made much out of very little, but by looking from the margins, I have been able to see that a little was quite a lot.
Shakespeare through Islamic Worlds also represents my own journey through Shakespeare. As an immigrant, Pakistani, Muslim, American woman, my work is influenced by my own social location, by who I am, where I come from, and where I am. All scholarship, as Edward Said so cogently reminded, is subjected, meaning that it reflects the situatedness of scholars in bodies and geo-political spheres: “no one has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar from the circumstances of life, from the fact of his involvement (conscious or unconscious) with a class, a set of beliefs, a social position, or from the mere activity of being a member of a society” (Said 10). Some scholars have the benefit of being seen as more objective than others and the assignment of such scholarly neutrality often rests on their normative identities, which include race, gender, class, sexuality, ability, and citizenship. Others of us, whose identities mark us as different from the majority, particularly in Shakespeare studies—which remains profoundly white and dominated by an Anglo and/or Euro-Americans—have a more tenuous hold on the label of scholar, let alone Shakespeare scholar. These same identities mark our scholarship as having an “agenda” or as disrupting the heritage politics of early modern studies with our own identity politics. My interest in Islam in Shakespeare is very much shaped by my own identity, yet it is simultaneously motivated by the historical amnesia of scholarship that has further marginalized Islam and Muslims from the plays and the places that they inhabited. Much of this historical amnesia—the willful forgetting of the influence of non-white, non-European, and non-Christian people’s contributions to world systems and cultures—stems, I believe from Orientalism, which, as Said defines, is a mechanism of controlling the Orient through discourse, a vital tool in the arsenal of imperial regimes of knowledge and power. Even though English and European powers did not have empires in Muslim geographies in the period, Orientalism was a mode of intellectual practice that was inherited by scholars working on Shakespeare in later periods, such as Samuel Chew, whose important book, The Crescent and the Rose, seemed to inaugurate, in the twentieth century, the field of Anglo-Islamic studies in early modern English literature. Chew’s study performs vital recovery work yet is infused with Orientalist language that constructs the east, Islam, and Muslims in ways that reproduce the damaging and dehumanizing stereotypes so frequently encountered in texts from the high period of Orientalism. My point is not to castigate Chew, whose work has been quite necessary to my own, but rather expose how Orientalism seeps into the very fabric of the work scholars do when they investigate these cultures and geographies because it has been part and parcel of our training, insidious and invisible in the core texts of the field. Orientalism informs historical amnesia because it prioritizes Europe in world history and the early modern period and so necessitates a constant recovery project of other peoples and societies who also influenced the development of early modern culture. Shakespeare through Islamic Worlds builds upon decades of such recovery projects, scholarship to which I am deeply in debt and have cited throughout this work, but it is also scholarship that has often refused to engage with Said’s thesis on its own terms: that knowledge-power is simultaneously discursive and material, that even without European empires controlling Islamicate geographies in the early modern period, their cultural productions were complicit in establishing and rehearsing stereotypes that were integral to Orientalism’s ideological program. Without thinking through how Orientalist epistemologies have influenced our own examination of Islam and Muslims in the early modern period, we remain in the constant cycle of historical amnesia and risk reproducing rather than challenging Orientalism.