36: Absent Arabic Women in Assassin’s Creed

36: Absent Arabic Women in Assassin’s Creed

Simran Dhaliwal, @simcardtoiling, University of British Columbia

Assassin’s Creed’s developers are careful to avoid depicting religion or race and present a neoliberal version of the Crusades. My attention was drawn to there being no female Arabic characters in the original Assassin’s Creed.

The absence of Arabic women stands out in a setting that is otherwise Middle Eastern. As there are no named or plot relevant Arabic female characters, I set out to find every quest giver and background character I could. Most of the women in Assassin’s Creed live out their day to day lives in the background of the player’s adventure. Interactable female characters include jar carriers and beggars. Both types of women serve as an obstacle to the player, potentially ruining stealth. In repeating side quests, you have the option to save the female relatives of "vigilantes" from harassment. You can also choose to ignore this harassment. If you help, you unlock support from the male vigilantes in gameplay. This invokes the role of women in Crusader narratives, being used to characterize the morality of Muslim or Christian Crusaders. In Assassin’s Creed, Arabic women are reduced to possessions in narratives about heroic and wicked men. Common western portrayals of the historic Muslim Assassins originate from Marco Polo. The Assassins have traditionally been depicted as hedonist, serving their master in promise of a mock garden of paradise filled with consumable women and wine.

The game’s Assassins are portrayed as agnostic to better appeal to Western audiences. The in-game master even jokes about the absurdity of such a garden existing. I did not think much of this, until I realized that there IS a garden of paradise in Assassin’s Creed. In the game’s opening screen, the player sees Altaïr, standing in the courtyard of a garden. Altaïr is surrounded by faceless, scantily clad women. This opening feels surreal and unfinished, unlike any of the game’s other constructions of the historical past. After Altaïr and his master have the exchange about the garden, the player is granted access to the garden from the opening, occupied by the same women. They do not speak or react to the player’s presence. The garden is clearly meant to be a reference to the myth of the garden of paradise. The alarming part is that it gone unacknowledged by developers and critics, despite the garden being the setting of both the opening and concluding moments of the story. The player returns to the garden for the final fight of the game, in which they fight the Master. This time, there are no women in the garden, despite their presence in the parallel opening. What stands out about the garden is how unmemorable it is. By reducing Arabic women to decorative roles, players can impose their own Orientalist fantasies onto the landscape. The absent Arabic women in Assassin’s Creed must be spoken of, as it reveals an unwillingness to engage with Arabic women as anything more than decoration.

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