Handling Islamophobia in Edmund Spenser’s Poem The Faerie Queen
Instructor Arwa Hussein Aldoory
University of Jordan, Faculty of Foreign Languages
DOI: https://doi.org/10.25130/jls.1.3.3
Keywords: - Animosity -discrimination - fear - heresy - Islamophobia - opposition - other
Abstract
Being a growing religion throughout the world, Islam is
increasingly becoming the ghost which threatens to shatter the established
norms of the Western thinking. Islamophobia, hence, grew as a doctrine which
designates fear and antagonisms towards Islam as a religion and a system of
cultural behavior. It has been widely represented in English literature
throughout various literary ages. This paper is concerned with Islamophobia in
Edmund Spenser‟s epic poem The Faerie Queene (1595), which is ranked
among the greatest works in the history of English literature. Spenser employs
this work to represent his biased attitude to Christianity and to portray the
tyrannous reign of Muslims. The paper argues that Islamophobia, as a concept,
is recently conjured; however it is very old as an ideology in the history of the
human race since it represents the Western mindset which is based on the
prejudice and hatred of the „other.‟ The faerie Queen, which is set in the
medieval ages, reflects a religious antagonism towards Muslims who achieved
great victories over the Crusaders in Jerusalem. The paper, for this reason,
questions whether the term of Islamophobia which is a modern one is fit to
describe the prejudiced tone against Muslims in a sixteenth century work. It
employs Edward Said‟s discourse of the binary opposition, which has been
tackled in his outstanding book Orientalism, as a theoretical framework. It also
comes across his book covering Islam in order to argue that Islam has been
portrayed as a „form of heresy‟, synonymous with terrorism and religious
hysteria.
