Dadabhoy’s Book Recognized by Shakespeare Association of America

Shakespeare through Islamic Worlds, the book by Ambereen Dadabhoy, associate professor of literature at Harvey Mudd College, received an Honorable Mention for the Shakespeare Association of America’s Jerome Singerman First Book Award.

In her book, Dadabhoy investigates why Shakespeare doesn’t write about Islam. “In The Merchant of Venice, the Prince of Morocco is never identified as a Muslim,” she says. “However, if he’s the Prince of Morocco, he can only be a Muslim. There’s no other option.”

Shakespeare’s work clearly contains Islamic characters and influences. Dadabhoy describes how Shakespeare removes Muslims or makes them peripheral or referential because he’s creating a Europe and a ‘globe’ that is free from Islam, racial otherness, and religious otherness. By consigning the diverse cultures of the Islamic regimes that occupied and populated the early modern Mediterranean to the peripheries, Shakespeare constructs a Europe and Mediterranean freed from the presence of non-white, non-European and non-Christian Others, which belied the reality of the world he occupied.

Dadabhoy hopes the book will encourage readers to consider that even if something isn’t explicit, it’s still worth searching for traces of it. “The book is very much a project where I’m trying to put Muslims back in the places from which they were evacuated by Shakespeare,” she says.