Belakane und die schöne „Fränkin”—begehrliche Blicke auf die fremde Frau im Parzival Wolframs von Eschenbach und in den ṯaġriyyāt des Ibn al-Qaysarānī

In his Parzival (around 1200), Wolfram von Eschenbach tells of the extraordinary love between Gahmuret, a “white” Christian knight, and Belakane, a “black” pagan queen. A few decades earlier, in 1145, the Syrian poet Ibn al-Qaysarānī travelled around the Principality of Antioch, where he observed the Christian “Frankish” women. In his ṯaġriyyāt , roughly translated as “Poems from the Border,” he expresses his longing for these unattainable ladies, praised for their desirable beauty and virtues. Yet for both Belakane and the crusader women, the combination of their skin colour and their heterodox beliefs—features that in this combination constitute their respective “races”—represent insurmountable obstacles to love. Both the Christian and the Muslim male poet, however, resort to the same rhetorical means to “master” the foreign women, at least in their poetry, and to fictionalize (Wolfram) or imagine (Ibn al-Qaysarānī) erotic intimacies that were well-nigh impossible in real life at the time. In the German and Arabic texts, similar concepts, images, and topoi are used for both the pagan and the non-Muslim woman. Being easily interchangeable, those rhetorical means highlight the constructedness and universality of the very linguistic strategies that are actually supposed to draw a clear line between self and others.