SOURCE: Al-Dabbagh, Abdulla. “The Oriental Framework of Romeo and Juliet.” The Comparatist 24 (May 2000): 64-82.

In the essay below, Al-Dabbagh examines the way in which Romeo and Juliet is influenced by Arabic culture and concepts, noting that the play's use of imagery related to light and dark reflects the conceptions of good and evil found in Islamic Sufism.

There has always been a tendency in literary and cultural scholarship to barricade oneself behind narrow specificities and a one-sided sense of “uniqueness,” a tendency that may ultimately give the wrong emphasis to national, cultural, or even racial factors. The truly comparative counterapproach has, however, always reached for the universalist standpoint, from which literary phenomena can be regarded across borders and within a complex variety of cultural contexts. In the field of East/West literary relations, and specifically in the area of Arabo-Islamic legacies in Western traditions, major strides have recently...