Tracking Representations of Islam In Various Cultures

Over the course of the quarter and over the course of my education I've been continually fascinated with the portrayal of Islam and Muslims who emigrate to other countries from the Arabic world. A trend I've noticed is that most of the books about Muslim emigration are written from a purely 'Western' perspective and are therefore filled with Western cultural biases. So I felt I should look for a more diverse set of primary sources and learn about the opinions and representation of Islam in various, non-western countries. This proved quite difficult especially on the SCU library website which had primarily western sources. I talk in detail about my research experience in one of the tabs.

For this topic, I chose Home Fire as my home text and radiated out from there. To me, Home Fire represented a modern and western depiction of Islam. So I divided my search into four categories: Modern Non-Western, Modern Non-Western but in a different region, Classical Western, and Classical Non-Western. This provided an astonishing amount of depth, especially in the Classical categories. Most of the stories I found from the classical time period are written in an almost proverbial fashion and provided fascinating insight on many topics. 

After a great deal of searching, I settled on four sources of varying mediums. 

• Modern Non-Western: Modern Hajj Memoirs from Southeast Asia. This collection of short memoirs about the yearly pilgrimage to Mecca showed the perspective of Muslims traveling from Southeast Asia. While they didn't expressly state how their cultures viewed them, the information could be extrapolated from how the memoirs were written.
• Modern Non-Western 2: Privately Empowered: Expressing Feminism in Islam in Nothern Nigerian Fiction. This source was a collection of short stories that alone would not be enough information to form a conclusion. While not a full cultural analysis of the relations between Islam and Nigeria, this book examines the experience of Muslim women in Nigeria.
• Classical Non-Western: Representations of Islam from non-muslim characters in Arabian Nights. This collection of tales has been immensely popular since the middle ages in Arabic folk tradition and existed before what I would describe as Modern Islam. Therefore it provides a unique perspective on the early Islamic world. I choose to primarily focus on the perspective and experience of non-muslims as it provides an outsider's perspective on Islam.
• Medieval Western: Chansons de Geste, Liber Floridus, and Dante's Inferno. These texts provided valuable insight into fictional and scholarly perspectives on Islam during medieval times. Chansons de Geste was a genre of epic French poems that had various representations of Islam throughout. Liber Floridus and Dante's Inferno provided supporting evidence to the perspectives expressed in the Chansons de Geste. For these texts, I could not find any direct access due to how old they are.

Along with these texts I also examined some scholarly articles which helped me to corroborate information and form a more complete conclusion about representations of Islam.

Works Cited

“Empty Idols and a False Prophet.” Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100–1450, by Suzanne Conklin Akbari, 1st ed., Cornell University Press, Ithaca; London, 2009, pp. 200–247. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt7v85c.10. 

Edwin, Shirin. Privately Empowered: Expressing Feminism in Islam in Northern Nigerian Fiction. Northwestern University Press, 2016. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt22727xh. 

Encountering Islam: The Politics of Religious Identities in Southeast Asia, edited by Hui Yew-Foong, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.libproxy.scu.edu/lib/santaclara/detail.action?docID=1132438.

Christie, Niall. “Noble Betrayers of Their Faith, Families and Folk: Some Non-Muslim Women in Mediaeval Arabic Popular Literature.” Folklore (London, UK), vol. 123, no. 1, Apr. 2012, pp. 84–98. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/0015587X.2012.642988.

Rodríguez-Rodríguez, Ana M. “Old Enemies, New Contexts: Early Modern Spanish (Re)-Writing of Islam in the Philippines.” Coloniality, Religion, and the Law in the Early Iberian World, edited by Santa Arias and Raúl Marrero-Fente, Vanderbilt University Press, NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE, 2014, pp. 137–158. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv16755f4.10. Accessed 8 Dec. 2020.

Krämer, Hans Martin. “Pan-Asianism’s Religious Undercurrents: The Reception of Islam and Translation of the Qur’ān in Twentieth-Century Japan.” Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 73, no. 3, Aug. 2014, p. 619. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edb&AN=98277641&site=eds-live.