ebarn4wv – Islam & Medieval Western Literature http://blogs.elsweb.org/islammedlit Just another blogs.elsweb.org weblog Wed, 04 Jul 2007 09:02:42 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.3.2 Violence in the Middle Ages http://blogs.elsweb.org/islammedlit/2007/07/04/violence-in-the-middle-ages/ Wed, 04 Jul 2007 08:25:30 +0000 http://blogs.elsweb.org/islammedlit/2007/07/04/violence-in-the-middle-ages/ Continue reading →]]> First of all, since I missed class yesterday, if any or all of this was talked about, I’ll shut up and color (although i always had a hard time staying inside those damn lines). From what I’ve read on the blog, it seems like some of y’all are noticing the high level of violence in the Lancelot reading, and thinking that the violence itself is the significant part of the reading. The problem with this is that we’re reading it from a 20th century point of view, from a world in which we are removed from death, and where real violence is something most of us have/will never see. This is not the case for the original audience of Lancelot.

The middle ages were a time of constant warfare (hell, the English and French fought over the same chunks of land for over 100 years), high infant mortality, and rampant disease. As such, death was a very real part of life, and a consequence of that was killing wasn’t really such a big deal. If you had to kill someone – over honor, property, for your country, whatever – you did it because you had to, and that was that. So when the lady asks for the offending knight’s head, it isn’t that she’s a bloodthirsty sociopath. It’s that seeing your foe’s head was a surefire way to ensure that he/she was dead, since you’d have a hard time faking that particular proof.

It’s also not that these people in the story had a hard-on for killing. From our perspective, it seems like their only way of solving any problem is to kill something. This too is a flaw of our particular vantage. Think for a minute, that you live in a world where there is no real court of law. Where there was no police force to keep the peace, and where the strong simply have their way with the weak. This is the world of the middle ages, and as such, physical violence was the favorite way to settle disputes simply because there was no other alternative. If a brigand was strong-arming a village into paying “protection” money, you couldn’t call the FBI to stop him. You had to make him stop yourself, and you had to use the only language he understood: you had to show him that you were stronger than he.

It is for these reasons that the world of Lancelot is one so brutish. For example, if you wanted to send your enemy a message, this is how you did it:

Also, happy Fuck the British Day.


(I couldn’t resist showing an “Oriental” view of America. If it offends anyone, just let me know and I’ll take it down)

]]> Guns don’t kill people, Husbands who come home from work early kill people… http://blogs.elsweb.org/islammedlit/2007/06/28/guns-dont-kill-people-husbands-who-come-home-from-work-early-kill-people/ Thu, 28 Jun 2007 09:06:05 +0000 http://blogs.elsweb.org/islammedlit/2007/06/28/guns-dont-kill-people-husbands-who-come-home-from-work-early-kill-people/ Continue reading →]]> I stole that title from a one-liner I heard on The Blue Collar Comedy tour, but I feel it applies quite well to our readings. The knee-jerk reaction of the husband who discovers that his wife is sleeping with another man – as found in The Arabian Nights – is to kill them both, and with one stroke if possible. As you can probably guess, I’ve been wondering with exceeding wonder about the way adultery is portrayed in The Arabian Nights, and how that contrasts to the way we tend to see it in the west. In a traditional western story, when a wife commits adultery, it’s usually because her husband isn’t satisfying her. So she looks elsewhere – oftentimes to the village priest or some other “unlikely” figure – for gratification, and we all share a laugh over how she was able to get away with it. In the few eastern stories we’ve read, the prevailing trend is that the women sleep with other men – usually black slaves as Kathryn pointed out – with no apparent motive. Unlike the western story, where the circumstances of the adultery contribute to the humor, the eastern story robs us of this background, and makes us accept that the woman is sleeping around merely because she can. I’ll probably come back to this topic later, after we have a little more foundation to base our conclusions on, but for now, I’d like to return to the matter of the wive’s overwhelming lover of choice.

Why a black slave? The answer to that is simple: because in arabia, africans were foreigners, and every culture attributes some sort of sexual supremacy to outsiders. Don’t believe me? Look at our own culture. Black men are supposedly “gifted” in certain areas of the anatomy. Asian women are supposed to possess some innate skill in the bedroom that will fulfill a man beyond his wildest dreams. The list goes on and on, and many of these same stereotypes existed in the Islamic world of which we read. So the fact that the wife of a sultan is seeking her pleasure with a black slave serves one main purpose: to establish the wife as a faithless nymphomaniac. Since the sexual prowess of black men is so legendary, naturally, that’s who she will choose as her lover. The fact that he is a slave just reinforces the fact that she cares for naught but her satisfaction, flingling class and social taboo to the wayside.

I’m not necessarily sure what any of this means – if anything – and I realize that I may just be reading too far into a minor detail, but while the jury is out on that, I leave you with this:

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