A few days ago, I was perusing the Dragon Age wiki (as one does) looking for info on Shale when I came across this archived thread from the now taken down Bioware forums. Dragon Age fans were posting their “random Dragon Age question(s)”, and for the first few pages of the thread, David Gaider would respond to some of them. Then I came across this question and answer:
[Image: David Gaider quotes a post by poster Alistairlover94:
“@Mr. Gaider: Was the Tome of Koslun based on the Qu'ran, the Qun on Islam, and Koslun on the prophet Muhammad?”
David Gaider responds:
“Not really, no. The Qun has nothing functionally in common with Islam, and the existence of a prophet or a book is hardly unique. The Qunari play a role in Thedas similar to Arabic cultures in Medieval Europe (combined with the Golden Horde, for good measure), which is where their Middle Eastern “flavor” comes from… but beyond that any similarities are unintentional.”]
Being a Middle Eastern Muslim person myself (specifically, I’m Palestinian diaspora currently living in Canada), this post caught my eye. And… not really in a positive way.
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen the Qunari connected to Arabs. That was back on some Reddit thread or another, where someone suggested that the Qunari are comparable to Arabs/the Moors/the Turks because they are a “foreign race” with a “strange religion” who’d once enforced that religion across a wide stretch of land before being forcibly pushed back.
My reaction at the time was “nah”. Maybe not a totally certain or comfortable “nah,” as I understood it’s possible that was what Bioware was going for, but more of a “nah, I don’t want to think about that, and I’m not gonna take that into consideration in my understanding of Thedas.” Fair enough, I thought, but having seen what Gaider said on the matter, I can’t really just write it off at my own leisure anymore.
I’m not the first person to talk about this. A quick search got me results like this in which people have expressed anger at this parallel before, as well as several threads questioning if the Qunari are meant to represent Muslims that make no reference to Gaider’s response in the thread I quoted at the start of this post. That said, though, I’d like to offer my own take on it here.
I think the first and most obvious thing to point out here is that Qunari are grey, horned giants. While their obvious coding as POC in relation to their designs and the fact they are non-human characters have been criticized before, I think it’s an important thing to mention here as well. Gaider clearly states that the Qunari possess a “Middle Eastern flavour”, i.e. they’re not meant to be a direct representation of Middle Eastern people but rather have cherry-picked parts of Middle Eastern history to use as an allegory. Regardless of their intentions, clearly many people have picked up on the connection, and when you’re a person of colour desperate for representation, the knowledge that something that’s loosely meant to represent you or “play a similar role” to you comes in the form of– well, grey, horned giants, isn’t particularly fun knowledge to have.
Now let’s unpack what Gaider actually said.
First, he states that any similarities between the Qun as a philosophy and Islam are unintentional. I’m going to take him at his word for it; I don’t have any interest in trying to draw parallels between the Qun and Islam, except perhaps to mention that “Qunari” is only one letter and two rearrangements away from being the word “Quran,” which, yeah, real subtle. Reading too much into it? Maybe. I wasn’t originally going to bring it up here at all, but I find it kind of funny, so there it is anyway.
However, I do want to look at what the implications of that are. While there’s differing opinions on the actual subject of “Arabic cultures in Medieval Europe” (I think he’s referring to what’s popularly known as the “Islamic Golden Age”) that I’m not interested in getting into here (because while I do have some knowledge of the time period I think there are still things that I’m ignorant about due to only having heard the story from particular perspectives, and because during that time and in those regions Arabs/Arab Muslims were in the most positions of power, I don’t think it’s for me to try to assess the period with my limited knowledge), I think it’s safe to say that the actual religion of Islam was a major factor in it. And by that I mean Islam, specifically, for what it is. It played a particular role, and to look at it as simply a placeholder where any philosophy, no matter how disconnected, can be readily and thoughtlessly filled in is reductive of the religion itself. No, the Qun isn’t meant as an allegory for Islam, but it is meant to be an allegory of the role Islam played as being a central factor to the people who the Qunari are meant to be allegorical to, and I find the careless substitution here questionable. I get that this issue isn’t a unique one even within Dragon Age let alone outside of it, but it’s worth mentioning.
Now I think it’s worth it to look at the Qunari themselves and the role that they play in Thedas as it pertains to this allegory. One of the central tenets of the Qunari is that they are, as the Dragon Age wiki phrases it, “fanatical in […] devotion, [and] prepared to wage war throughout their entire lives as part of their attempts to “enlighten” all other races in regards to their philosophy.” The Qun may have “nothing functionally in common with Islam” according to Gaider, but if the Qunari truly play a “similar role” to that of historical Arabs/Muslims, then we can’t overlook this element. (Particularly because this isn’t the first time Thedosian history has overlapped with Middle Eastern and Islamic history: the term “templar” references the Knights Templar, which was the name of the Catholic military order that fought the Crusades, of whom Middle Eastern Jewish and Muslim people were the primary victims, particularly in Jerusalem. Another example is in the name “Inquisition” itself, a reference to a group of Catholic institutions whose goal was to combat “heresy”. One of the most famous examples of the inquisiton was the Spanish Inquisition, that was formed around the decline of the Islamic Golden Age and specifically targeted Muslim and Jewish people. Several of the other inquisitions targeted Muslims as well).
The way the Islamic Golden Age has largely been depicted in the West involves the Orientalist idea of Muslims as barbarians who’d taken control of large regions with their “heretical” religion before their rightful defeat. The Qunari aren’t portrayed that much differently: they took control of sweeping regions of Thedas for a long period of time, forcibly converting masses of people to their philosophy, before being defeated by the Tevinter Imperium. The important difference here is that in real life, the details of the Islamic Golden Age were far more nuanced than that, and the labelling of Muslims as “barbaric” and Islam as “heretical” was a deliberate tactic to justify waging a war against them on the basis of their religion. In the Dragon Age universe, with respect to the Qunari, things are what they seem. While the notion of the Qunari being “barbaric” is specifically challenged, the Qunari really did convert people forcibly to their philosophy, and this is an undebated fact.
This is a problem because this view of Muslims and Middle Eastern people still affects us today. One of the major justifications that white supremacists use for their islamophobia is the conspiracy theory of “Islamization”– that Muslims have a master plan to convert the entire world to Islam and conquer. For the Qunari, this is literally true– they actually do plan to conquer and convert the entire world to the Qun. The islamophobic caricature of a Muslim screaming “infidel!” to anyone who isn’t Muslim is still very much relevant today– and the idea that Qunari view anyone who doesn’t follow their way derogatorily is a fact. The characterization of the Qunari, as far as it is allegorical to Middle Eastern people and specifically Muslims, could be more accurately described as an allegory to islamophobic and racist portrayals of Middle Eastern and Muslim people.The existence of Qunari as a fictional entity does not challenge stereotypes, or offer a new perspective. It instead reinforces those harmful sentiments, the same ones that are echoed by those who commit hate crimes against us, and those who target us in politics and legislation.
Like any other marginalized group, Muslim and Middle Eastern people don’t get a lot of representation. The Dragon Age series is one of my all-time favourites, and being able to see myself reflected in the Dragon Age series would be thrilling. But “representation” like this does more harm than good. While it wasn’t the intention of the developers to represent Muslims or Middle Eastern people by the Qunari except to give them a Middle Eastern “flavour,” that “flavour” is deeply embedded with a history of racism and islamophobia. It hurts twice: first, because it’s reductive of Muslims and Middle Eastern people, turning our history into something that can be cherrypicked from at the writers’ leisure without making any respectful effort to actually represent a marginalized group, and second, because that cherrypicking is imbued with stereotypes that have been and still are used to hurt us.
I hope that these concerns are considered in future work done with the game. While I’m not sure how this problem with the Qunari could be specifically addressed in the future, I think one suggestion that could help would be to make a better effort to represent Middle Eastern people in other areas of the game. @dalishious pointed out that we still don’t know much about a lot of the human cultures, such as the people of the Anderfels, and a sincere effort to write more positive and nuanced representations of marginalized people that the series has previously snubbed with human characters could help even things out more and potentially even do a lot of good.
Note: Thank you so much to @dalishious for letting me ramble about this and for looking the post over for me before publishing it! I really appreciate it :)
You’re reading too hard into this, you Canadian freak