1. The core argument of this article was first formulated as a paper I presented in Monastir, Tunisia at a conference on “Identity” organized by the Tunisian-Mediterranean Association for Historical, Social, and Economic Studies, and held in November 2016. It has also been shaped greatly by my Fulbright Grant research year in Rome in 2016–2017 and again over six months in 2018, during which time I volunteered with the medical organization Medici per i diritti umani (MEDU, or “Doctors for Human Rights”) to provide medical care to irregular migrants in Rome, operating alongside and in conjunction with the Baobab Experience which offers legal assistance to migrants seeking asylum. I dedicate this article to the individuals with whom I worked—including my MEDU colleagues and the migrants themselves, a number of whom I came to know closely—for what was an incredibly eye-opening experience and which provided me insight into a situation I knew only intellectually before walking onto those streets to experience it unfiltered. Since then, the argument has developed substantially through the insightful feedback I received from my mentors and friends Beth DePalma Digeser, James F. Brooks, and Matt King, to whom I am ever grateful for the encouragement to unfold such a comparative paper, and for the trust that, despite my medievalist training, I might offer some keys to understanding the troublesome but vital notion of “identity” in both historical and contemporary society.
2. Two useful studies on this topic are those of Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983) and Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). For a study more specifically centered on problems in colonial-era historiography on North Africa or the Maghreb, see Abdallah Laroui, History of the Maghreb: An Interpretive Essay (Princeton University Press, 2015).
3. Asserting such a parallel would overlook the momentous and complex transformations arising in the transition from religious and dynastic bases of pre-modern group identity to the secularized politics of the modern nation-state. On this, see Anderson, Imagined Communities, chapter 2 on “Cultural Roots.”
4. “Saracen” is a pejorative term pre-modern authors used to refer to Muslims, alongside “Ishmaelites” and “Hagarenes.” I employ it here because my argument is based specifically on the rhetorical tools engaged in the negative portrayal of Muslims by late antique and medieval authors.
5. This article uses the notion of a "Long Late Antiquity" that extended from the mid-third century to the eighth century. While criticized for reducing the momentousness of the collapse of the western Roman Empire in the late fifth century, a flexible periodization allows for thematic considerations extending beyond firmly fixed chronological boundaries. For more on this, see Arnaldo Marcone, "A Long Late Antiquity?: Considerations on a Controversial Periodization," Journal of Late Antiquity, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring 2008): 4-19