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Largely
due to medieval discussions of their place in a Christian world, the
Arabs, Ismaelites and Saracens have throughout history exhibited a series
of fascinating relationships with each other in the European literary
imagination.
While
we now identify the original Islamic conquerors as Arabs, the same was not
true during the early middle ages (6th to 12th centuries AD). Instead, at
that time, the Muslims, known as Saracens, were identified with the Old
Testament people of the Ismaelites -- who had already been known as
Saracens in western Europe since the fourth century, long before
Muhammad’s lifetime. This ancient, pre-Islamic character of the Saracens
in western European thought has significant consequences for our
understanding of early Christian-Muslim relations. Imported
Latin literature introduced this concept into educated English thinking
and a variety of strange and hostile ideas developed as new information
about Muslims continued to arrive and to be assimilated within older
traditions. Some early ideas about Muslims even moved,
unusually, from learned Latin writings into English translations many
years before the Crusades inspired a vernacular tradition of Saracens on
the Continent. After the Norman Conquest in England, the tradition of the Saracens in both Latin and the vernacular continued to be propagated. Two early ideas in particular – that the Saracens worshipped Venus, and that they had deliberately concealed their true identity – continued to find support into the fifteenth and even the seventeenth century. This has interesting implications for Edward Said's (and others') ideas about English perceptions of Islam.
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