Why Were Arabs and Muslims Called Saracens in the Medieval and the Renaissance Literature?

Abstract

Several English writers from different literary periods, including the medieval and the Renaissance literature portray the people coming from the Arabian Desert in the frame of racial and religious otherness. Most writings stress the danger of those people by describing them as people whose only goal is to fight and kill Christians in order to conquer their lands, destroy their churches and force them to convert to Islam. Furthermore, the writers avoided calling those people by their national name, Arabs, or even by their religious name, Muslims. They used the name of Saracens instead. This study explores the etymology of the name of Saracens as well as the reasons why this name was used to describe most peoples who come from Middle East. The research also points out the relationship between the name of Saracens and the skin color as a major characteristic that distinguishes Arabs and most Muslims from European people. The findings of this research are very important in part because they are a contribution to the etymological studies of the name of Saracen, and in part because they clarify the real reasons why Arabs and Muslims were called Saracens by the medieval and Renaissance writers. Since the name of Saracens was mostly used in an offensive way, the American writer and academic Edward Said's (1935-2003) theory of Orientalism is also considered in this approach. Keywords: Saracens, Saracens in the medieval literature, Arabs and Muslims in the English literature, Orientalism Introduction Such words like 'Arabs' and 'Muslims' were almost completely absent in the drama and poetry that extended throughout the different periods of the English literature, if not of all European literatures, particularly in the medieval and the Renaissance literature. Very few isolated exceptional works used the words of Muslim and Islam before the sixteenth century. (Tolan, John V. 2002) Those words were commonly superseded by the name of Saracens.