We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades against Muslims and Other Minorities

(Paperback)

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In We Are All Moors, Anouar Majid contends that the acrimonious debates about immigration and Islam in the West are the cultural legacy of the conflict between Christians and Moors. Offering a groundbreaking new history of the West's perception and treatment of minority cultures, Majid explores how "the Moor" emerged as the archetypal Other against which Europe would define itself.

Reviews

"We Are All Moors excited me for its implications. The range is superb and reading it is a pleasureAnouar Majid dances across continents, taking a thread and seeing what comes of it. It reminds us of histories long forgotten, and provides a useful way to look back to help understand the present." Vijay Prashad, author of The Darker Nations: A Peoples History of the Third World
"Majid draws much-needed comparisons between events leading to atrocities like the Spanish Inquisition and present attitudes and trends, including growing disdain for Muslims in Europe and Hispanics in the U.S. Further, he shows how nations are strengthened by the acceptance and integration of the foreign (as is the trend, following initial xenophobic fits, in the U.S.), while cultural expulsion and/or cleansing hurts people and states (as in Germany's post-WWII occupation and dismemberment). With this intriguing historical analysis, Majid sounds a clear warning against the West's latest slide toward cultural scapegoating." Publishers Weekly
"An alternative history of European xenophobia that will stimulate and provoke readers across the political spectrum. This work will generate criticism and conversation; it will be taken up by intellectual reading clubs as well as graduate seminars and should be made available to all academic audiences as well as informed readers." Library Journal

Author Bio

Anouar Majid is author of A Call for Heresy: Why Dissent is Vital to Islam and America (Minnesota, 2007). He is professor of English and director of the Center for Global Humanities at the University of New England in Maine.