Saracen

Explanation:

*Content warning - this entry contains current usage of a derogatory term that may be offensive.*

The term “Saracen”, like the term “Moor”, is a derogatory name that was used throughout the Middle Ages by western European Christians to denote Muslims and/or Arabs. The origin of the term is not precisely known, although it came into use around the rise of Islam in the mid-7th century. Medieval writers often gave the false etymology that the term means something akin to “those cast out by Sarah”, a reference to the biblical story in which Sarah, wife of Abraham, initially unable to conceive a child, instructed her husband to father a child with her handmade, Hagar, but when Sarah was finally able to give birth to her son Isaac, demanded her husband banish Hagar and their son Ishmael. This story is referred to in both the Christian and Muslim traditions as a genealogical origin for Arabs, in order to connect them as a group to biblical Jews. As Islam arose out of Arab culture, this connection would eventually transfer over to Muslims as well. The most well-known use of the term “Saracen” in the medieval context is in relation to the Crusades, when Crusading Europeans often described the inhabitants of the Holy Land against whom they would fight using this term. In that context, it should certainly be understood as a derogatory, rather than factually descriptive term.

In the modern context, “Saracen” has seemingly taken on association with the historical Islamic “other”, typically in a military context, divorced from a specific time period. It has been used to describe the force that invaded Spain in the seventh century, the armies of Saladin during the Fourth Crusade in the thirteenth century, and the armies of the Ottoman Empire (which existed from the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries). In this sense, “Saracen” is often understood in popular discourse to mean Muslims or Arabs who are the enemies of a Christian European force. Perhaps related to the first Gulf War, several fictional properties appeared in 1989 using the name Saracen to denote enemies, including historical fiction novels and comics.

Even though there are many uses of the term in historical context that are not themselves explicitly pejorative, both the etymological understanding of the term in the Middle Ages as denoting a group of undesirable people, and its contextual use as indicating a broadly-understood enemy or “other” should signal that this term was not neutral. Today, “Saracen” is often applied indiscriminately by medievalist scholars in order to describe historical Arab and/or Muslim populations, adopting the term used by their contemporary European counterparts. However, this usage is inappropriate, both because the term is a slur and because it is so descriptively unspecific that it is meaningless. Because the term was used indiscriminately to describe any individual or group who was not Latin-Christian and European and lived between Spain, North Africa, and the entire Middle East, it serves no purpose for historians attempting to describe a historical population, and instead reinforces the falsehood that Muslims or Arabs living in any of these places are the same in terms of their culture, language, religion, and politics. Indeed, the term “Saracen” obscures the diversity of medieval Islamicate culture, not least of which is the fact that it encompassed groups and individuals who were not themselves Muslim.

Historians should reconsider any situation in which they might use the term “Saracen”, keeping in mind its pejorative implications. Even though Latin sources might use this term, when describing the same target group the onus is on the historian to determine the specific and factually correct name of said group. For instance, when discussing the Crusades, it is not appropriate to refer to Saladin’s army as “Saracens”, but instead as Ayyubids.

Preferred use:

Avoid whenever possible in favor of geographically/culturally/religiously specific terminology. Otherwise, use quotations around the term to create distance.

 Examples of modern usage:

1. Numerous UK sports teams are named “Saracens”, including the Cardiff Saracens RFC, Cheltenham Saracens F.C., Newport Saracens RFC, Saracens F.C., Saracens Women, and Saracens Mavericks. Saracens F.C. is among the oldest of these, perhaps the originator of this name, and has several international affiliates. That club, founded in 1876, was rival to the neighboring “Crusaders” and uses crescent and stars iconography as a reference to the Ottoman Empire.

2. In Marvel Comics, the character Muzzafar Lambert is known as the supervillain Saracen, who first appeared in print in 1989. He is referred to as a “terrorist” from an unnamed Arab country.

3. In the video game series Assassin’s Creed, Saracens are NPC (non-player characters) who form the army of the Ayyubid Sultan Saladin. They appear in Assassin’s Creed (2007), Assassin’s Creed: Altaïr's Chronicles (2008), and the novel Assassin’s Creed: The Secret Crusade (Penguin, 2011) written by Oliver Bowden. The official Assassin’s Creed Wiki acknowledges that the Ayyubid army, reflecting the lands under the sultanate, was ethnically and geographically diverse, but still uses “Saracen” as an official term for the people of the army. https://assassinscreed.fandom.com/wiki/Saracens#:~:text=Saracens%20was%20a%20term%20employed,the%20Crusaders%20in%20the%20Crusades

4. “The Saracens aren’t the kind of enemy we are used to fighting. They’re fanatics. They believe dying in battle brings them untold rewards in the afterworld. We rejoice in life. They glorify death. How do we battle a foe that has no fear of dying?” J.M. Nunez, The Saracen Storm: A novel of the Moorish invasion of Spain (Self-published, 2019) https://www.amazon.com/SARACEN-STORM-Novel-Moorish-Invasion/dp/1999219708

5. In French, the pseudo-cereal buckwheat is referred to as “sarrasin”. According to the French Wikipedia entry on buckwheat, this is due to the origination of the grain in French cooking from Middle Eastern sources during the Middle Ages, as well as the fact that it is believed the darker color of the grain resembles the coloring of Middle Eastern peoples. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarrasin_commun#%C3%89tymologie Because this item of the entry is not well-sourced, it is unclear whether this etymology is accurate; regardless, the use of this explanation in and of itself constitutes an application of the term “Saracen” in modern usage.  

6. “L'emploi du terme « sarrasin » pour désigner la graine de pseudo-céréale Fagopyrum esculentum vient, dit-on[Qui ?], outre de l'origine de la pseudo-céréale (tout ce qui vient d'Orient est qualifié de « sarrasin » au Moyen Âge), de la couleur brune, plus ou moins sombre, de la graine que l'on comparait au teint des Sarrasins.”

The use of the term “sarrasin” to designate the grain of the pseudo-cereal Fagopyrum esculentum comes, so it is said, either from the origin of the pseudo-cereal (which came from the East and was called “sarrasin” in the Middle Ages), or from the brown color, to a greater or lesser degree, of the grain, which one might compare to the skin tone of Saracens. 

Further reading:

Philip Mayerson, “The Word Saracen (Ϲαρακηνόϲ) in the Papyri”, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, Bd. 79 (1989), pp. 283-287.

Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh, “The depoliticized Saracen and Muslim erasure” 2019

Timothy Smit, “Pagans and Infidels, Saracens and Sicilians: Identifying Muslims in the eleventh-century chronicles of Norman Italy” Haskins Society Journal 21 (2009) pp.67-86

John V. Tolan, Saracen (Columbia University Press, 2002). From the publisher: “Saracens explores the social and ideological uses of contempt, explaining how the denigration of the other can be used to defend one's own intellectual construction of the world.”

Walter D. Ward, Mirage of the Saracen: Christians and Nomads in the Sinai Peninsula in Late Antiquity (University of California Press, 2014)