I hate the Qunari "islamophobia" discourse
Okay, I really need to get this off my chest. Because being active in the DA fandom really does make increasingly annoyed by this one discussion. Because it is this one kind of discourse where all the worst kind of tendencies of leftwing media discourse show: misquotations, non-affected people talking over people actually affected, and the tendency to specifically hound anyone who is not a white cis man and ever wrote anything to be hounded for the thing written not being perfect, while white cis men will get a gold star for barely trying.
Before I got deeper into it, I will make one thing clear: I consider myself a Muslim convert, though you can argue about the specifics, as I have complicated believes in regards to deities and the like. Still, I do participate in prayer and practice as much as my disability allows it, read theology, and history on this, and talk to people who were raised in the faith.
I also spend pretty much all of the pandemic hyperfocusing on colonialism and how colonial narrative influenced fantasy, science fiction and also specifically roleplaying, reading books by indigenous writers, and participating in exchanges on this topic.
I want to make both of this clear, because... well, this is a discussion mostly dominated by people who are not Muslim - and often do not know a whole lot about Islam.
Both things considered make me so bloody annoyed with the discussion based around the idea that somehow supposedly the Qunari in Dragon Age are "islamophobe" stereotype. Because, frankly, there is pretty much nothing about the Qunari that is explicitly Muslim, and this idea goes back to an interviewer explicitly misquoting a forum post that Gaider supposedly made before Dragon Age came out (but that - according to what is reconstructable through Internet archive data - did actually not use the words that are being quoted).
I will get to the issue with the quotation in a bit, but let's first start with two general topics on this before we get to the qunari and Dragon Age specifically.
The Inherent Problem of Fantasy Races
There is a bunch of essays from the past that wonderfully refer to the concept of races in fantasy as the genre's original sin. (Here is one of them, but there are others.) And this is painfully true. The issue with races, as fantasy does them is that it usually has the "planet of hats" thing, just with races.
If you have a fantasy world, it tends to go like this: there is humans, who come in a variety of different cultures, that are distinct from one another. And then there is elves, who are all one thing. And then there is dwarves, who are all another things. And then there is halflings, who are all their one thing as well. Usually something like this: elves are the fancy ones who live in the forest and understand nature, then there is dwarves who are a racist carricature of Scottish people who live underground, and then there is halflings who all like cooking and eating a lot, and then there is orcs, who are inherently evil and will attack and kill people for fun.
We often talk about the orcs in this context, because in many TTRPGs the orcs are very clearly coded with Black stereotypes, which makes this even worse. And the idea of any race being inherently evil is just really, really bad. Because it says: "Oh, those people are evil, and you cannot do anything about that other than kill them. Genociding orcs, or goblins is totally morally fine, no problem." (Lily Simpson made a really good video about how Baldur's Gate 3 also does this by letting you kill the Goblin kids with little consequences.)
This problem goes obviously back to Tolkien. And mind you, even Tolkin himself noted in his later life that the way he had written this, especially the orcs, was not supported by his own interpretation and philosophy.
It also should be noted that Tolkien, despite being openly anti-racist, used a lot of Orientalist stereotypes for his orcs. Put a pin into this. 📌
Still, the issue of races as a whole being all one thing is so universal within fantasy, that Dungeon Meshi is the one example I can think of where this is not the case and where the different races actually have a variety of different cultures throughout the world.
Forgotten Realms in the last 10 or so years has been making steps in that direction, mostly due to public pressure, making the drow and orcs more complex, but in general it still goes very much into this issue. And of course Thedas for Dragon Age also has this. Sure, elves and dwarves come in two flavors each, but those flavors are the "elves/dwarves who live like elves/dwarves" and "those who assimilated to human culture". Qunari, for the most part, come just in one flavor, though not quite. We will get to that.
Fantasy and Orientalism
[This paragraph is just the shortened version of what I posted yesterday, if you want to know more about Orientalism, read the essay I posted yesterday.]
If you ever want to read into this topic of colonial fictional narratives, you will not get past one book: Edward Said's Orientalism. Said (who himself originated from Palestine) goes into how western stories since the Middle Ages depicted the "Orient" (the East, though he uses this to refer to the Middle East, Asia, and North Africa) in a very patronizing way. The "Orient" was always shown to be a place that would not develop, was backward, and in some narratives also savage.
This means that those places tend to be painted in overly broad strokes, and always with the goal to depict them in a somewhat negative light. Sure, there is also always an exoticism to it, so that white people could dream of adventures in those strange lands, but it definitely was not in a way that accepted the fact that in fact both the Middle East and a good part of Asia were for most of actual history more advanced than Europe. (I cannot stretch enough how much the rest of the world considered Europe as a backwater - till Europe got money and then military advancement by genociding people in the Americas.)
This kind of depiction can be seen both in supposedly historical tellings (both by people who travelled to those places, and also historical tales about things like the Ottoman attacks on Europe, or the Mongols - put a pin into that as well 📌), and in fictional accounts (if anyone has read the original Phantom of the Opera story you know exactly what I mean).
But Orientalism is also something readily found in fantasy. For one there are Tolkien's orcs, who on the pages of Lord of the Rings - in an universe where Asia and Mongolia do not exist - get described as mongolic in their appearance. Which, well... yikes! And even outside of orcs being coded either Mongolic or African, there tends to be a bunch of this in fantasy.
If a fantasy world is not 100% a "vaguely historical European setting, that claims to be medieval but is more like 18th century in most examples", there is a good chance that there is "the Asian nation" that uses a ton of Orientalist stereotypes in its depictions. The Forgotten Realms have Kara-Tur, which is their "Fantasy Asia", but it is a common trope. There is either a nation with onion roofs and turbans, or a nation that looks like you threw all stereotypes of Japan, China, and Korea into a blender and then fished out a random spoon.
The onions roofs are anther thing we should put a pin in, because they are not an Arab thing, but a thing from the Eastern Orthodox church, that was found throughout all of Byanzine (the late Roman Empire!), which is why it is today very associated with the Ottomans. And the Ottomans are the thing that are in fact at the very core of this thing.
The Ottoman Empire - A Short Refresher
Let me quickly talk about the Ottoman Empire, because they really are at the core of the Qunari problem.
There is a bunch of jokes being made online how a certain type of men tends to be very obsessed with the history of the Roman Empire. Yet, many of them do kinda forget about the fact that Rome was not really destroyed in the 4th century. That was only the Western Roman Empire, the one that actually incuded Rome. The Eastern Roman Empire, which we know as Byzantium, was alive and kicking till the tail end of the Middle Ages. They were the people that included Constantine, and converted to Christianity fairly early on on a wide scale (which very much included pagan hunts, and them burning down pagan temples, including temples to the Greek gods for example).
The Ottomans originally were a nomadic tribe from Anatolia, who had at some point converted to Islam, though a very specific flavor of Islam: Sufism. (If you want to know more about Sufism, you can just look in my blog, I have written a couple of blogs on the topic.) It is in western text often referred to as "Islamic Mysticism", though first and foremost it is more defined by it saying that it is more up to the individual Muslim to study the Qur'an and understand it for themselves.
The Ottomans also kept some practices from their older Turkish culture alive.
Either way, at some point in the 14th century, the Ottomans started to settle and compete with Byzantine for land. A struggle that they ultimately won, which lead to the Ottoman Empire to be seated in the same area. And from this on they started to do what Empires do: become expansionist and invade both into Europe, as well as the Arabian peninsular and North Africa.
However, the Ottoman rule became more and more oppressive as time went on, which lead to a variety of Arab tribes to team up with the British and French to free themselves from Ottoman rule. After which the British and French backstabbed them hard, and did the Sykes-Picot agreement, which is the reason that so many of the Muslim nations today are politically massively unstable. Something that the British and French did to ensure their access to resources in the area. Also Israel came to exist because of this, which added further to the instability.
The important thing about this is: Ottomans are not a standing for all Muslim people. They are in fact not actually Arab, if we go by this, but Turk. However, a lot of western media, when using Orientalism, will love to depict "the Orient" as Ottoman, rather than anything else. And this is the important bit.
Where did the Idea of Qunari being Stand-Ins for Muslism Come From?
Let me start by saying this: as someone who does identify with Islam, not in my wildest dreams would I ever even have considered the Qunari as a standin for Islam. I will explain in the next bit why this is just something that does not make sense, again, pin 📌, you know the deal. I definitely saw Orientalism in them, sure, but not anything that would strike me as specifically Muslim.
However, in several discussions I had on this topic, any suggestion of daring to doubt the fandom narrative of the Qunari being a racism-informed stand-in for Islam was immediately shut down. Any suggestion that they might be inspired by anything other than Islam or possibly North Africa was immediately shut down. The reaction was always: 'Gaider said they were Islam. He was racist, and Weekes just went further into racism by making them blow stuff up! And if you say anything else, you are Islamophobe as well who excuses this!' which is always a great baseline for having a discussion. I asked several people who claimed this why they thought that the Qunari were Muslim, and to just show me the evidence, which generally ended with vague references to Gaider (in some cases people also named Epler on this) having said so.
Sure, there is a good chance that indeed Gaider, being a white cis guy from Canada (aka from a western hegemonic country that is known for racism happening a lot, like most western countries) indeed had such a superficial understanding of Islam that he thought: 'People who are religious and blow stuff up are Muslims'. This did not really fit with my general understanding of the worldbuilding as Dragon Age generally shows at the very least - while still suffering a lot of typical fantasy tropes - a vague understanding of cultural anthropology. More than your average high fantasy setting at least.
So, I went to find that darn quote.
And as you might guess from the context... It actually does not exist.
Yeah. I know. who could've guessed?
So, what actually happened here?
Mainly Dragon Age as a franchise being 17 years old by now happened, and the typical cliché of some things having been repeated so often that... people just assume they must be correct.
But what actually happened was, that before Origins came out on the forum Gaider was asked about the qunari. And in this post - which in its exact words has been lost to time - he compared the qunari to three groups: the Ottomans (who he wrongly just described as Muslims - and as noted above: while the Ottomans were Muslim, they were not all Muslims and this is complicated), the Mongols, and the Vikings. The clear context being him trying to compare the invasion of Thedas by the qunari to the invasion of Europe by those groups.
Sure, this betrays Gaider's western hegemonic point of view that when thinking of comparisons of an invading force he thinks of forces that attacked Christian Europe, rather than... you know, the British pretty much invading anything that might have a sliver of gold or resources in it. Though then again, of course, given that Andrastian Thedas is very much modeled after Christian Europe... I guess it is a not completely invalid comparison.
He also compared the qunari to the Borg from Star Trek, because, well, I guess he is a nerd, and he had this idea - the one we see in the comics - of them actually having some magic artifact that can make people compliant.
This reference that Gaider made was then picked up by several gaming journalists talking about Origins and DA2, including in several interviews that Gaider gave upon release. And from all I can say - given what the internet still remembers and has not been lost - in one of those interviews the interviewer misquoted Gaider as saying the Qunari were a "militant Islamic Borg", something that Gaider apparently corrected and was actually outraged by.
However, from all I can say that phrasing that did not originate from Gaider himself, at least given what I can find on the internet still, but from the interviewer, stuck in the fandom. And was quoted again, and again, and again. And given that, yeah, most people living under western hegemony usually associate Muslims with terrorism (especially in a post-9/11 world, where many of us grew up with South Park and the like making a ton of racist jokes on the expense of Muslims), and historical Islam very likely with the Ottomans using explosives to almost take over Europe, people looked at the qunari, using explosives, and instantly went: 'Muslims! This is Islamophobia.' And there we have the problem...
Why the Depiction of the Qunari is not Islamophobe but Orientalist
Let's start with a very simple observation. There is not a whole lot about the Qunari that reads Muslim. There just is not. If they were supposed to be Muslim, I would assume we would see something akin to at least some of the five pillars of Islam. That is Shahada, Salah, Zakat, Sawn, and Hajj. Or to make it more accessible: the declaration of faith, the five daily prayers, the giving of alms, the fasting during Ramadan, and the Pilgrimage to Mecca. Obviously you could argue that those are in their basis more Sunni, but in general Shia Muslims do agree with these as well.
Sure, one could argue that in a very, very vague idea the Qunari do have something akin to the Sufi interpretation of Salah and Zakat (usually Qunari do not possess a whole lot of stuff, which is how Sufi tend to interpret Salah, and we do know they have daily meditations). But that is with a lot of interpretation.
Then there is of course the less well-meaning interpretation that it seems a lot of people do assume. Because there is also Jihad, the struggle. Something that religiously is actually more meant as a "even when the world will persecute us we will stay strong in our believes", but that of course the western world has started to see mostly as the thing they associate with terrorism, as some of the terrorist groups (most of which were originally created by western nations, mind you) interpret Jihad as offensive.
But you will note, looking at this, that this interpretation is quite literally the interpretation assuming both the worst about Islam, and the worst about Bioware. And while Bioware definitely has done iffy stuff over the years, usually it is not quite this flavor of iffy. More like unreflected depictions of things, that they will usually correct upon being called out on it. They did that with their depiction of trans characters in Dragon Age for example (those were fucking tasteless in Origins and DA2).
Something that you should keep in mind, given we have literally 17 years of interviews, several of which do include the correction of the mentioned misunderstanding.
And frankly, I personally find it weirdly offensive how people will push that "no doubt the qunari are Islam and an islamophobe" - especially given that the qunari are an atheist religion. And Shahada is arguably the most important pillar of Islam.
And sure, you can see some influences from the way some now majority Muslim countries shape their weapons and armor (though none of the countries most people will think off when you say: 'Muslim country') in the qunari weaponry. Just as you can see the influence from Japan, China, and India in qunari armor and weaponry. Because they are very clearly aesthetically a wild mix of Orientalist design clichés. And mind you, a ton of the visual stuff is also Greek in origin, which technically speaking also is very close to Orientalism, though... that is really a topic for another day.
The one thing about the qunari that does explicitly tie them to the Arab world is their language. Their language is clearly based on a variety of semitic languages, with some vocabulary clearly being based in the Arab language. And yes, if you know some Arab names or phrases, it is reasonable if you hear words like Ben-Hassrath, or Tal-Vashot, to instantly go: "This sounds somewhat Arab." That is fair.
Other than that though, there is not a whole lot Islam in the Qun. Which, I feel, is actually quite obvious. Again. The Qun is explicitly atheistic, if not actually anti-theistic. Which is about as opposite of Islam as you can get.
However, something the Qunari are - and Tevinter is as well by the way, and Antiva, and a whole bunch of other stuff in Thedas - is Orientalist. The Qunari do not really have a whole lot of cultural parallels with either the Ottomans or other Muslim cultures. However, they are definitely clad in vaguely Orientalist symbolism and designs. These are from all over the places that Said covered in his book on Orientalism, and the wider theory of Orientalism. There is some things that read very Hindu, some that read Buddhist, some that read more West African. A bunch.
Meanwhile Tevinter, while so clearly being a stand-in for Rome, still somehow visually has a whole lot of China, and the Ottoman empire on display as well.
So, what is the Qun based on?
And whenever people talk about the Qun supposedly being Islam, these people do kinda overlook the elephant in the room. I will admit, I overlooked that elephant as well in some discussions, given that me reading about the specific reference has been a while and my brain had forgotten most of it. But after having time to think about it for a bit, and read a bit more, there is just no way around it.
The Qunari are based on Plato's Republic!
Once you realize this, it is the most obvious thing in the entire worldbuilding. Nearly as obvious as "Andrastianism is Christianity with even more singing".
So, quick refresher on Plato's Republic. Plato, as we know, was a Greek philosopher, and one of his very famous philosophical thought experiments, was his Republic. (The other one was Atlantis, which he made up, explicitly, but who reads Plato, am I right?) An utopia that he assumed would be the ideal way for people to live.
The general idea of it was this: the republic would be ruled by philosopher kings, who came into this position not by election or inheritance, but by proofing their worth. Meanwhile in this republic all people would be equal (including men and women), and would do whatever kind of purpose they would be most suited for. Generally Plato put the people of the republic into three groups: philosophers, the military, and the producers. These would parallel for the Republic the parts of the self: mind, soul, and appetite (which you can also translate as mind, spirit, and body). The people within the society might have some small luxuries of their own, but the things everyone needed would be shared among them equally. He made a big point out of even the rulers not having more, to prevent them becoming too powerful or too greedy, arguing that if they had the same as everyone else, they would act more in the interest of the people. Plato also said that ideally the Republic would not be expansionist, but if the Republic was either being endangered or became to overcrowded it might still have to expand. Plato also believed that his Republic would need to reform religion, so that religious practice would be replaced through one that ideally was working without gods of any sort, as claiming divine support would make the priests (who he generally saw as part of the philosopher class) too easily corrupted.
Sure, there are a handful of other elements integrated into the Qun. There is definitely some flavoring from Zoroastrianism and Confucianism in this philosophy/religion, as well as some other Greek philosophical schools of thought. But there is literally nothing within the Qun that is recognizably "Islam", and a whole lot that is very much Plato.
So, if you know anything about the Qunari... Yeah, that is the Qunari culture. They are Plato's Republic. If you read through Plato's ramblings (at least those that have survived those thousands of years) it becomes very obvious very fast, that the Qunari creation looked like this: "We want something like tieflings, with horns. Horns are sexy. Hmm, they are new to this world. Where are they from? From another continent. And they are invading. And what is their culture? Uhm... Plato's Republic?"
The biggest difference to Plato's philosophy is that the Qunari are indeed expansionist - something that Plato did not want his Republic to be. But for one, given that indeed there is no real Plato's Republic, it is fairly safe to say: "Plato, but expansionist", and frankly, it also should be said that Plato himself mused about what might happen if for some reason the Republic might be endangered and for some natural or hostile reason be forced to move to another place. Which is somewhat the situation that the Qunari find themselves in, due to the "Adversary".
Of course there is still the general issue that the Qunari are being constantly othered by the narrative, and how the framing of their collectivist culture is indeed quite hostile towards that collectivism - and collectivism tends to often also be associated with Orientalist clichés in western media. So one could definitely argue that in some way this framing is very much racist and features once more this idea of "individualism good and free, collectivism is basically slavery" which is a whole different headache. But... I would argue that in this the framing is more so the issue than anything that the Qunari actually are.
The Actual Issue with the Qunari
To summarize: the claim that Gaider said the Qunari were based on Muslims was taken out of context, as what he was doing - albeit with very racist language - was comparing the Qunari to Ottomans, Mongols, and Vikings as invaders of Europe. Yes, this clearly does speak of a eurocentric worldview (in which the people who invaded Europe are the one thing Gaider thought about as invaders, rather than European nations doing the invading). The culture of the Qunari is based on Plato's Republic with some seasoning from other philosophic schools. However, there definitely are some Orientalist clichés in how visually the Qunari culture is being depicted and some Arab influences in their language. Other Orientalist clichés are being found in how Tevinter is shown, and technically speaking can also be found in the design of some things associated with the Free Marches (especially Starkhaven which is very much framed with Egyptian stereotypes for some reason) and Antiva. And given that Orientalism is tied very much to colonial ideas, this is iffy.
Per se I would also argue that there little issue with the Qunari as a culture mostly being seen in an antagonistic light. We see that there are Qunari as in the Kossith (people with horns) that are not members of the Qun. So this bioessentialist idea of the culture somehow being biologically inherent, is not there. Which tends be the bigger issue with this kind of stuff in fantasy. We see people with horns who have left the Qun for a variety of reasons. Heck, even the Antaam in Veilguard explicitly state that they as a whole have left the Qun, as the Qun (like Plato's Republic) was not quite as expansionist minded as the Antaam wanted. (Side note: I also have seen people saying that the Antaam not being Qun is somehow showing that the Qun is needed to control them. But, like... No, what is being said is that it is probably not a good thing to have an entire class of people who through a philosophical framework are removed from the concept of individuality and pushed into the role of a soldier, so that they never know anything else but being a soldier. If they somehow get removed from the framework guiding them, this will probably have a bad outcome. This bit of a story is clearly a push back against militarism more than anything else.)
We mostly see the Qunari as a culture in an antagonistic light, because of how the story in Dragon Age is framed. For pretty much all the games - no matter what kind of character you play - the story is framed from the perspective of humans in this world. Specifically at least Culturally Andrastian humans, mostly from Ferelden, Orlais, and the Free Marches. Even if you play an elf, a dwarf, or a qunari in those games that allow it, the story is still very much framed around that perspective. And that is the issue. That you as the player, you are bound to this perspective. And even in all the other material...
The only time we actually go into the perspective of a Qunari who believes in the Qun is one of the short stories in Tevinter Nights. Other than that? We do not get that perspective. In the books and comics we do get the perspective of the elves, and some of the dwarves. And generally the franchise at least superficially cares a lot about the elven lore. Maybe a bit too much so. But the issue with the Qunari is, that basically if you interact with Dragon Age, you interact with the Qunari at the very least from an outside perspective, and in the game often in an outright antagonistic way.
It is perfectly fine that in the perspective of the humans the Qunari are antagonistic in general. That makes perfect sense from the setting. The Qunari just appeared two hundred years ago, and generally had been at war with the human ever since. And their culture - especially because it is atheistic in nature - is very, very different from the cultures established in Thedas. They are different, they are at war. That is fine. It is expected.
The issue is that we never get the other perspective. We never get the perspective of the Qunari on all that. We get to talk to some of them, sure, and they will tell us some things about how they feel about Thedas. But we always do this from the perspective of someone who is from Thedas, who is not Qunari. And this is the problem.
Again, this holds to some degree even true for elves, and dwarves. Because even if you play an elf or a dwarf in Origins or Inquisition, the game generally assumes that you are at the very least somewhat on board with Andrastianism, even though this makes little to no sense. And yet the answers you can give are very much based on this general presumption. I note again: even an dwarven or elven Warden in Origins cannot say: "I do not think we should chase after a legend to heal the Arl". And of course, Rook as a character has very, very little dialogue specific to their origin whatsoever, and even those they have are based more on the faction, rather then their cultural context.
This kind of framing creates a narrative in which the humans are "us", and the other groups are "them". And this is an issue that once more holds true for so, so much fantasy. Humans are the default. They are us. They get to be in all sorts of roles. Hero, friend, antagonist. They are everywhere. Everyone else is weird and exotic.
Yes, the humans will in general look at the Qunari and be weirded out because they are different and their worldview is alien to that of humans, and people as a whole tend to not deal well with having their worldview questioned. But if we actually would do something entirely from the Qunari perspective, it would be exactly the same. To a Qunari the humans would be backwards and savage. They do not care for their sick and their poor the way Qunari do. They have those hierarchies with people on top who are not fit to rule. To a Qunari that would feel as off and as hostile as it is the other way around. But that is not a perspective we ever get.
The way Veilguard sets up the entire story about the Devouring Storm, the Adversary, and the Executors feels, as if they were actually planning on going more into Qunari backgrounds for a possible next game. But... that game never got made and probably never will be. So we are left with a franchise in which Qunari are always "the other", and that other is defined as Plato's Republic clothed in some vague Orientalist clichés.
