&quot;A Moor&quot; in period use meant &quot;a Muslim,&quot; primarily &quot;a Muslim North African.&quot; What&#x27;s important and troublesome about Othello&#x27;s position is that he&#x27;s a Muslim general fighting for Christian Venice, against his fellow Muslims. (Recall that Muslims aren&#x27;t supposed to kill other Muslims -- and particularly aren&#x27;t supposed to fight against the Muslim community on behalf of outsiders.)<p>_That_ is what makes his loyalty just barely suspect -- just suspect enough to have him living on edge, and to allow Iago to stab him in the back. The play says nothing about his race, one way or another; early performances could go either way, sometimes casting Othello as black, sometimes as white (if Arabs are white) -- a &quot;black Moor&quot; and &quot;tawny Moor&quot; respectively.<p>In the present day and age, with multiple half-revived Islamic Ummahs actively at war with each other, and with the loyalties of Muslims in the US military sometimes suspect (cf. the Fort Hood shooting, and a similar active-shooter incident that occurred during the 2003 invasion of Iraq), it says something unflattering about the theatrical world that every performance of _Othello_ is about race, and none about religion.<p>...<p>And if I&#x27;d read the article, I would have discovered that it talks about precisely that. It mentions that a king from the Maghreb came to London in 1600, and probably inspired the play...