Throughout history, there were many great (or bad, depends on your personal beliefs) Christians and Muslims that seek to cross the boundary of religion through the power of love. However, some of them succeed and left behind their love story as mystic legends, but many of them have failed and were ultimately separated or killed. While it is truly a tragic of what happened to those who fail, it is more important to focus on those that did succeed and learn how or why they succeed. What did they do differently as compared to the others who have failed to cross this boundary? To answer this, we must look at this issue from the two different example: the tales of “Othello” representing Christianity and the story of “The Egyptian and his Frankish Wife” representation Islam.

Let’s start by looking at the Christians and their respond to people that seek to cross the boundary of religion. It is known that Christians had an infamous reputation on how they treat people of different religious group. However, the most shocking thing is not how they treat people of different religious group, is how they treat people with their own religious belief. In Nirenberg’s “Conversion, Sex, and Segregation”, we can clearly see that the Christians were exceptionally cynical towards recently converted Jews. “The converts and their descendants were now seen as insincere Christians, as clandestine Jews, or even as hybrid monsters, neither Jew nor Christian.” (Nirenberg) It’s clear that the converted Jewish Christian were clearly not treated as equal as a “natural” Christian. While it could be argued that it was reasonable for the Christian to be cynical towards the recently converted Jew, the fact that they remained cynical towards their Christianized decedent is quite questionable. Considering that they were never affiliated with any Jewish belief since their birth, the cynical attitude from the “natural” Christians start to bring up another question: Was it even their belief that the “natural” Christian was targeting? Or were they just targeting them for being Jewish?

Looking at the question mentioned above, this could also be seen in the epic play of “Othello”. In the play, Othello was known as a Moorish (or at least of Moorish descent) general in the Republic of Venice. However, the villain, known as Lago thought that Othello was simply not worth the title simply because of Othello being Moorish. We can clearly see that it was never Othello’s religious belief that caused him in this position; instead, it was his ethnicity that brought him into this situation. Also, this was not the first time that he was affected due to his ethnicity. Earlier in the story, we can see that Othello had married to his wife Desdemona secretly. The reason for him to do this is because he knew that Desdemona’s family would have never agreed to their marriage; in fear of a scandal for marrying their daughter to a “heathen”, even though it was clear that Othello was a Christian. This again proves how the Christians were not only judging for a religious belief of a person; they were also judging a person for their ethnicity.

While it’s clear that Christians were concerned about both the ethnicity and the religious belief of a person; the Muslims, on the other hand, is much more tolerant when compared to Christians. As we can see from the story “The Egyptian and his Frankish Wife”, the merchant in the story had three chance to bed the Frankish woman he falls in love with, yet he decided  gave up the first two chances due to his faith/devotion to Allah. The only reason he takes the third chance to bed the Frankish Woman is because she decided to convert to Islam. In this example, we can clearly see that in the eyes of Muslims, ethnicity was not as much as a concern to them seeing how at the beginning of the story, the travelers did not show disgust nor anger when they saw the old man have different color of skin with his children; instead, they were intrigued by what happened.However, they do take the religious belief of a person very seriously, even to some extent, more serious than Christians. Seeing how even a merchant, which would probably be the most cynical peoples to religious beliefs as they get in touch with foreign ideas almost every day, still manage to suppress his lust for his piety to Allah and the gods. This is a virtue that cannot be found even on most of the so-called “crusaders”.

In conclusion, I think that these stories did help to resolve the anxiety between the two religions. While it’s true that most of these stories mainly aimed to promote piety to their own religion, it did also promoted the idea of religious tolerance and provided the ground for medieval man to fantasize and wonder: Are the people from the opposite religion truly were the way that we were told to be like? And leave the seeds of curiosity on the opposite religions in the people’s hearts.

References

Nirenberg, David. “Conversion Sex and Segregation.” The Johns Hopkins University, n.d. Web. 25 Sept. 2016.

Otello. Dir. Oliver Parker. Perf. Laurence Fishburne, Kenneth Branagh, Irène Jacob. Castle Rock Entertainment, 1995. DVD.

Rodriguez, Jarbel. Muslim and Christian Contact in the Middle Ages: A Reader. Toronto: U of Toronto, 2015. Print.