The crimes committed at Abu Ghraib and at other sites, despite their description as aberrations (“a few bad apples”), result from the historical continuities displayed in anti-Muslim discourse that features an imagery of horror and death.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on dehumanization and colonial violence, and to critiques of the 'bad apples' framing in institutional accountability.

The positive and even romantic treatments of Muslims are, however, trivial when considered alongside the grand narrative about Islam, an overwhelmingly negative and dehumanizing treatment that has its origins in the Middle Ages, sees its development in pre-modernity, and is cemented into the Western consciousness through colonialism and Orientalism.

This is countered by two facts: first, the large number of Muslim monsters found across numerous fields of cultural production and the disparate locations in which they function as social, literary, artistic, and filmic characters. Second, negative feelings are voiced by high numbers of non-Muslims against Islam and its followers. For example, European attitudes toward Muslims are far worse than attitudes toward other immigrants, a situation that is amplified in most eastern European states.

Fantasies about Muslims are convincing. Muslim men are viewed as terroristic villains, despite the fact that statistically, an infinitesimally small number of Muslims participate in violent political acts. These representations matter; if they did not, we would not have “the Muslim problem,” a phrase that American news host Bill O’ Reilly uses to describe the existence of Muslims as a pestilence, a biblical descriptor that has anti-Semitic resonances of “the Jewish problem” and suggests that a solution must be found.

FICTION: The framing of 'the Muslim problem' as a pestilence invites stories about how loaded language constructs an outgroup and calls for a 'solution.' QUESTION: What evidence exists on the gap between actual rates of Muslim political violence and public perception? Would be worth gathering more data.

I want to change the question from “Why do they hate us?” and ask instead, “Why do we fear them?” This requires an examination of the ways in which Islam was first constructed, and the ways in which these early characters established a fantasy that has been difficult to let go of.

QUESTION: This reframing suggests a deeper investigation into how early constructions of Islam persist in shaping present-day perception.

Orientalism is the vehicle through which the symbols and images generated by these various ideologies are delivered and through which the ludicrous is rendered believable. Orientalism did not invent Muslim monsters, but it helps to sustain their authenticity through an ideological system in which anything—orgasmic harems, flying carpets, fantastic and magical creatures—is possible.

DEFINE: Clarifies how Orientalism functions as a delivery vehicle that renders the ludicrous believable within an ideological system.

Because the Oriental was deemed incapable of serious thought, only the European or American scholar could do this work. After all, the Orient was created by and for the West, and under this system, “objects are what they are because they are what they are, for once, for all time, for ontological reasons that no empirical material can either dislodge or alter.” No wonder the fantasies of the East have been so difficult to dismantle.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's broader thesis in Orientalism about how the West constructed the East as a fixed, unchanging object of study.

Earlier studies of Prophet Muhammad were largely polemical, neglecting to include any Muslim sources and offering little biographical detail. Enlightenment treatments of Islam typically rejected theological perspectives on Islam and instead offered romantic treatments of Islam as a civilized and reasonable tradition and cast Prophet Muhammad as a visionary philosopher. Yet these efforts to humanize Islam would hardly qualify as academic treatments. It was not until the advent of Orientalism that Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and other relevant languages were included as a foundation of academic studies on Islam.

Texts served as the foundation of early Orientalist scholarship. “The essential characteristics of the members of the subspecies could be identified by the use of philological methods to study certain key texts which were regarded as embodying the core principles of Islamic civilization.” Such a process established the Muslim as a subject, rather than a human individual, formulating a character stuck in arrested development and incapable, unlike the white man, of adapting to modernity.

DEFINE: Explains how the 'subject' framing of Orientalist scholarship operated — through philological study of key texts that were taken to embody Islamic civilization. XREF: Connects to Said's broader thesis on Orientalism as a discursive construction of the Orient, and to critiques of philology as a colonial knowledge practice. SEED: Angle for an essay: how 'foundational texts' methodologies in any field smuggle in assumptions of cultural stasis versus adaptability.

In addition to alienating Muslims from the human community, these mythologies have helped to validate numerous colonial and imperial adventures. Orientalist fantasies continue to sustain a vision that insists upon Western supremacy and everyone else's inferiority—a useful paradigm in a neocolonial world. The same delusions have contributed to the ideological alienation of Muslims from normativity, leading to the ways in which Muslims are seen today, as characters in a story the West has created about itself.

XREF: Builds on Edward Said's Orientalism thesis about how Western representations of the East serve imperial power.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Europeans and Americans who visited Egypt, the Holy Land, or elsewhere in the region often experienced the chasm between their reality and fiction, while clinging to some part of the imaginaire about the East. During his travels in Egypt and the Holy Land in 1836, American traveler John Lloyd Stephens wrote, One by one I had seen the many illusions of my waking dreams fade away; the gorgeous pictures of Oriental scenes melt into nothing; but I still clung to the primitive simplicity and purity of the children of the desert

XREF: Connects to Orientalism (Said's framework) — the persistence of the imaginaire despite firsthand evidence is a core Saidian theme.

In Bush Junior's discourse, the “Oriental Other” was either emphasized as feminine and infantile (Afghan and Iraqi men, women, and children) or barbaric, beastly, and toxically masculine (al Qaida, Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein). Thus, once again both “Others” embodied qualities maintaining an essential gendered inability for self-determination. Bush Junior, like his father, was discursively constructed as the sole player granted agency in the international arena: The toxic masculine villains were creatures of nature who simply acted through bodily impulses rather than through rational and strategic logic and thus had to be controlled by Bush Junior.

XREF: Connects to broader postcolonial and feminist theory on how imperial powers rhetorically justify intervention by constructing colonized/othered subjects as incapable of self-rule. SEED: Potential essay angle on the rhetorical continuity of gendered dehumanization across American presidential administrations and wars.

The idea that all Muslim men are naturally violent—blowing up buildings, planes, and markets, and willingly killing themselves in the process—is often explained as an innate Islamic impulse, a product of race, ethnicity, or religious impulse, at times cast as an “Islamic rage” that emerges from sexual repression and frustration.

SEED: Could build an essay examining how reductive racial-religious explanations mask structural and political drivers of violence, and how this trope functions ideologically.

Fantasies of both the Orient and Oriental tend to be strongly sensualized, situated in medieval ideas about the East and typified in portrayals of Muslim monsters. Male Muslim monsters are typically hyper-masculine—aggressive, overly sexual, and violent—characters that also function as tableaux of desire and fantasy. Descriptions of Oriental landscapes utilize a gendered vocabulary in which the land is romanced, conquered, and penetrated, like the symbolic "unveiling" of Muslim women, an act that has been linked to the rape fantasies of colonizing men. The bulk of studies on desiring the Muslim Other are focused on the male gaze and its fixation on Oriental females, harems, veils, and the like. However, other Muslim characters, including the monsters examined here, are also repositories of Western desires and fantasies. These fantasies range from the bestiality associated with medieval monsters like the cynocephalus to the homoeroticism and necrophilia evident in Gothic characters like Vathek and Dracula.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism framework about the East as an object of Western desire and domination.

Monsters serve an important function in the construction of identity as characters against which we define ourselves, our normative behaviors and customs, and the larger community in which we live. This study is a teratology of Islam—a study of Muslim monsters: "Teratology thus makes possible a critical purchase on the processes of definition and exclusion by which the boundaries of what it means to be (authentically) human are drawn. What we are seeing is not essentialist doctrines of 'human nature' therefore, but the discourses and devices by which they are articulated. For every assertion of the definitively 'human' there is a refracted 'other'—the almost human, the monster, the alien—who shows the workings of the principles by which normative and exemplary humanity is defined."

DEFINE: Establishes the concept of 'teratology'—a study of monsters—as an analytical lens for examining how communities construct identity through boundary-drawing against a refracted other.

Medieval monsters were created along the contours of the Classical imagination, which is why we find early Muslims, often called Saracens, depicted alongside Plinian creatures including Blemmyae, Amazons, Cyclops, Panotii, and Ephiphagus, creatures that often regenerated as new monsters in the modern period. One example is the cynocephalus, a dog-headed man that dates from the Classical period and was identified as a Jewish and Muslim monster in the Middle Ages. Medieval Muslim monsters were often located in faraway lands, a strategy that helped identify Christians with the lands they themselves occupied and further identified these lands as not controlled by the foreign creatures who dwelled nearby. Jews, Europe's internal enemies, were often conflated with Saracens and other foreigners despite their location within, or on the edges of, European communities. Identity was often shaped by ethnogenesis—a sense of origins situated in a limited understanding of geography that dominated much of the Middle Ages.

The differences between pre-modern and modern monsters are numerous, and in some ways can be understood best through the series of transformations that occur in modernity. Charles Taylor has described this as a transition between enchantment and disenchantment, "the shift from symbol to mechanism." Modernity's encounter with monsters profoundly changed the way these creatures function, through "Gothic mobility." In pre-modernity, monsters—whether located inside or outside a territory's borders—were often restricted to the spaces that exist beyond the borders of a community or the "natural world." On medieval maps, the Plinian monstrous races are located in a region that lies south of Africa. Jewish monsters were often shown occupying areas near Christian communities. In one image, a Jew Dragon is shown in an underground dwelling representing hell, just below the earth. In contrast, Christian encounters with Saracens often took place in Muslim territories, evil places where the sun was absent and every rock and stone was black.

DEFINE: Defines 'Gothic mobility' and Taylor's enchantment/disenchantment shift as frameworks for understanding monster transformation.

The majority of monsters examined in this study are defined by the "toxic" masculinity pointed to earlier. Muslim monsters are not just masculine—they are outrageously so, with superhuman sexual powers, an otherworldly kind of strength, and an unfathomable propensity for violence. A few female monsters are included, but they are scarce when compared to the overwhelming number of romanticized female Muslim characters in the literature. Like all monsters, the female characters included here—cannibalistic Saracens, vampires, and others—vary considerably depending on the anxiety in force, although the overwhelming majority of female Muslim monsters are cast as sexually toxic.

QUESTION: What specific cultural anxieties drove the sexualization of female Muslim monsters versus the romanticization of most female Muslim characters?

In the case of Muslims, the body has been manipulated in numerous ways. Foucault's argument that history exercises power on human bodies—and in some cases, invents subjects, including fantasies that are then attached to these bodies, called phantasms—helps us to understand why Muslim fictive bodies remain so powerful.

Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus complements Foucault's focus on the body as an instrument of power relations. Bourdieu defines the habitus as those "principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them." Habitus refers to the ideas and behaviors internalized by a given society, described as "the set of symbolically structured and socially inculcated dispositions of individual agents," which interact with fields, modes of cultural production that exist as a result of "symbolically mediated relations of domination." In this study, I show how the fields of cultural production—literature, drama, art, cinema—helped to sustain a habitus about Islam that relies upon Muslim monsters.

DEFINE: Defines Bourdieu's habitus as socially inculcated dispositions generating practices without conscious aiming, distinguishing it from Foucault's bodily power framework.

Foucault's episteme is the model for this study's historical approach. This book is organized in large historical periods—the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the colonial period that intersects with Orientalism, the Enlightenment and the Gothic, the age of exploration, the American colonial period, and the present. The episteme is a code that determines how people understand and act within their world, much like the doxa that underlies habitus. Monsters must be examined within this milieu that generates them. To this end, in each chapter I identify the dominant forces in play to suggest why monsters emerge in the ways they do.

XREF: Parallels Foucault's episteme and Bourdieu's habitus/doxa, both explicitly invoked in the passage.

To be clear, Arabs, Africans, and others are still cast as Muslim monsters after that time, but Turkish creatures join their ranks in high numbers. The anxieties surrounding the Ottomans are displayed in Shakespearean drama, the Turkish tales known collectively as Turcica, and the savory pie called the Turk's Head—a food that represents the consumption of Turkish flesh by a Christian soldier.

XREF: Connects to post-1453 European-Ottoman anxieties, echoing themes of orientalism and demonization of Muslim figures in early modern literature.

Medieval imagery is displayed in numerous post-medieval forms, even today. Medieval characters, themes, and narratives—the knight, the damsel, and the crusade—are seen in Gothic fiction, late modern architecture and art, science fiction and horror literature, and horror films. The monsters that continue to be popular today are situated in Gothic horror, a genre that resurrects medievalism while also employing Orientalism. At the very least, medievalism continues to have an aesthetic agency that has survived into post-modernity.

Over the past 35 years, there has been a shift from seeing the medieval as the parent civilization of Western modernity to exposing a more "vivid and disturbing" Middle Ages. One area of scholarship is medieval monster-making, seen in the work of medievalists and art historians like Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, John Tolan, Michael Camille, and Debra Higgs Strickland. Whereas the Middle Ages is for some the foundation for modernity, for others it is viewed as "the quintessential 'other' " from which modernity differentiates itself. One of the arguments I make, which is supported by this claim, is that medieval notions of alterity continue to impact the ways in which the West thinks about Islam and her followers. Nickolas Haydock calls this the Saracen doxology: "The medieval portrait of the Saracen in general and of Mohammed in particular survives humanism, continues largely unabated through the Enlightenment, gains renewed and altered vigor during the nineteenth-century revival of chivalry and medievalism, and continues to surface unabashedly across Western culture today." The Middle Ages is the era in which anti-Muslim rhetoric is founded, later to be resurrected by the Gothic movement and sustained and legitimized by Orientalism.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and the argument that medieval frameworks of alterity underpin modern Western views of Islam.

How was Europe defined in the Middle Ages? Even when Europeans have been pressed in recent years to define their borders, numerous answers have emerged, from a Europe that excludes the Eastern regions to a Europe that is situated in "the nineteenth century, an age that combined the romantic political philosophies of Rousseau and Hegel with 'scientific' history and Indo-European philology to produce ethnic nationalism." Medieval Europeans did not identify as belonging to a large community. People living in a monastery or village did not think of themselves as European. Identity was situated in smaller spaces—the town, city, or district. In other words, it was localized.

Medieval monsters were generally located along or beyond the borders of Christian communities. Spaces outside the village, town, or city were considered the domain of monsters, a convention seen today in horror films, where monsters often occupy the hinterlands—the desert, forest, or jungle. On medieval maps (see Figure 2.1), Saracens are typically located on the edges of Christian territory or beyond the known world, examples of "boundary phenomena inseparable from their place at the territorial edge and inside the symbolic structure."

By the fourteenth century, this had changed with Ottoman incursions in Bulgaria and Hungary. "Thus Islamic society was by no means as distant as some Chaucerians have suggested, or as many late-medieval Christians might have wished it to be." At this point, miscegenation and monstrous births became more prominent in stories of monstrous Muslims, who were seen as having violated the boundaries of Christian space.

While the masses of believers influenced Christianity, in particular pilgrimage and the relics associated with it, the institutions of organized religion also shaped beliefs and attitudes in numerous ways. The ways in which Church doctrine impacted individual attitudes toward Islam is a broad subject not fully addressed here, outside the Christian polemics examined in this chapter. Notions of geography, race, and the constitution of community also influenced the ways Christians thought about foreigners and internal enemies like Jews and heretics. The Church had a paramount role in establishing and disseminating these beliefs, thus shaping the minds of believers. Dogma informed imagery, including the artistry of monsters. Talal Asad describes this process as disciplinary: "Note that here it is not mere symbols that implant true Christian dispositions, but power—ranging all the way from laws (imperial and ecclesiastical) and other sanctions (hellfire, death, salvation, good repute, peace) to the disciplinary practices of social institutions (family, school, city, church) and of human bodies (fasting, prayer, obedience, penance)."

XREF: Connects to Talal Asad's concept of disciplinary power in religion, a key theoretical frame for medieval studies.

North American medievalists have identified the twelfth and thirteenth centuries with the emergence of a "persecuting society," described as a "Foucaldian Panopticon of discipline and colonization" that sought to discipline and punish those who dissented from the Church's teachings. Muslim monsters didn't suddenly emerge in these centuries. Disciplinary practices engendered an increased reliance on the imagination that sustained the monsters of antiquity and inspired new monsters. The medieval Christian Church's practices of exclusion and punitive discipline as a matter of theological doctrine resulted in the emergence of Muslim monsters and other fantastic creatures.

XREF: Connects to Foucault's Panopticon concept and the 'persecuting society' thesis, echoing disciplinary power shaping cultural imagination.

Ethnogenesis, the formation of identity according to one's understanding of his or her origins, is a more apt descriptor for what went on in the Middle Ages.

DEFINE: The passage defines ethnogenesis as identity formation based on one's understanding of origins, contrasting it with modern notions of fixed ethnicity.

Early in the eleventh century, an otherwise unknown Anglo-Saxon named Edward took to cutting his hair in the Norman fashion. He shaved the back half of his head and let dirty, long hair cover his face. His brother, thoroughly disgusted with Edward's new hairstyle, wrote him an angry letter, which has been preserved, "You despise your race and your ancestors," he seethed, "since in insult to them you dress [your hair] in Danish fashion with bared neck and blinded eyes. . . . He will be accursed who follows heathen practices in life and dishonours his own race."

“The language of identity is always spoken in response to the language of morality.” Christianity, to some degree, determined people's sense of normativity. The “disciplinary practices” supported and manufactured by the Church aided in the “formulations of the self and manipulations of (or resistances to) others.” The others who existed within a social community (Jews) and outside it (Muslims and Africans) established a category of monsters.

DEFINE: Clarifies how Christian disciplinary practices formulated selves and produced categories (like 'monsters') for outsiders.

For medieval Christians, monsters, demons, and all manner of fantastic creatures occupied the same world as humans. Typically, there was no separation of the human community and the world of the fantastic and the horrible, and this resulted in a constant and intense anxiety about Satan and other creatures, who could attack at any moment. Medieval Christians believed that “demons were everywhere ready to attack the souls and bodies of the unwary,” a fear that contributed to a “terror of all mental conceptions.” This thinking created a world that was much like the modern horror film—terror was around every corner, in every glen, living in the forest, the cave, and the lake. Even the local church was not safe, as demons were observed to walk through the halls of sanctified spaces, often in the guise of a dark-skinned foreigner.

In literature and art, Saracens (often, but not always, representing Arabs) were portrayed as demons, black-skinned monsters, Satan, or souls condemned to the underworld. In these lines from Richard Coeur de Lion, Saracens are described as souls trapped in hell: “Allas Mahoun! What has he ment, This Ynglyssche dogge that hygthe Fouke? He is no man, he is a pouke, That out off helle is jstole!” In many cases, the language is almost identical to that found in descriptions of devils in Harrowing of Hell dramas, thus equating Muslims to demons once again.

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of medieval othering and racialization of non-Christians, and to the 'Saracen' figure in crusade literature.

According to Steven Kruger, both Jews and Muslims “stood in simultaneous proximity and distance from the Western European Christian; that is, in positions that guaranteed them a certain ideological and emotional significance within the processes of self-definition.” This resulted in fantasies of a Jewish-Muslim conspiracy in which the enemies of Christendom cooperate as agents of Satan, intent on overturning God's order on earth through military invasion, trickery, and magic.

XREF: Connects to theories of how in-groups define themselves against proximate out-groups, relevant to studies of othering and identity formation.

Norman Cohn posits, in the face of this miraculous cooperation of Jews and Saracens in the popular demonology of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, that the only reason Christians were somewhat more obsessed with Jews was that they “lived scattered through Christian Europe.”

As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen puts it, “the classification of the Jews together with the Muslims” was one of the major “subsets in a larger genus of hermeneutically constructed infidels who undermined the unity of the Christian faith.” These ideas did not end with the onset of modernity, a point raised by some scholars of Orientalism and anti-Semitism, who have argued that the vilification of Jews and Muslims is a continuously related historical process. Without one, it is impossible to fully understand, or acknowledge, the other.

XREF: Connects to scholarship on Orientalism and the linked vilification of Jews and Muslims as a continuous historical process.

Anti-Jewish rhetoric and anti-Muslim rhetoric are similar. Guibert of Nogent's account of Muhammad's death describes an afflicted body, mirroring contemporaneous anti-Semitic writings about diseased Jewish bodies. The account of Muhammad's death in this work “echoes, in its focus on the body and bodily debility, the stories involving Jews in the Memoirs.” In Guibert's well-known account, pigs overtake Muhammad while he is while having an epileptic seizure and consume his body:

XREF: Connects to larger patterns of how medieval Christian polemic constructed religious others through bodily difference — parallels scholarship on monstrous bodies and religious boundary-making.

As this example shows, enemies are often constructed by institutions that have an interest in maintaining power. In medieval Europe, Christianity was the most powerful vessel of power, one that "created and worked through legal institutions, [the] different selves it shaped and responded to, and different categories of knowledge which it authorized and made available." Christian identity was based on what was perceived to be normative, and because black skin functioned as a symbol of sin and evil, light-colored skin was privileged. "Race" was not a concept active in the medieval vocabulary, although bodily difference—including the color and tone of skin—certainly played a role in the formation of identity and in monster-making.

XREF: Connects to Foucault's work on power/knowledge and how institutions shape categories of knowledge to legitimize their authority.

Anxieties surrounding ethnicity and bodily differences were imprinted on non-Christian bodies, in particular, on Jews, Muslims, and Africans. This was a medieval kind of racialization, characterized by Cohen as "a phenomenon of multiple category overlap rather than a distinctly verifiable or measurable 'thing'. . . (that is, race has no independent ontology), and race is therefore always written on and produced through the body (race is nonetheless biological)." This medieval "multiple category overlap" echoes Foucault's argument that human bodies are determined by the "effects of power." Muslim monsters are punished bodies, often suffering with more than one disease or affliction.

As early as the fifth century, black skin functioned as a symbol of the devil and other menacing religious frights. Dark skin was understood as a theological consequence of sin. Gregory the Great claimed that Ethiopia was a sign of the fall of mankind, and other Christian writers followed suit, tying dark skin to sin and perdition. Jeremiah surmised that the Ethiopian's skin could change like a leopard—one of many examples in which Africans were likened to animals. Muslims were often depicted with black, blue, or purple skin. Muslims reportedly worshipped Venus, a black goddess "dressed in a gold robe with a striking red blob for its hellish tongue." Islam has, from the beginning, been an identity situated in racial, ethnic, and cultural difference.

XREF: Connects to scholarship on the premodern origins of racial thinking, such as works by Geraldine Heng or the history of color symbolism in Christian theology.

In other cases, blue and purple were used to depict monstrosity, as in the iconic image from the Luttrell Psalter, where Richard the Lionheart fights Saladin, a purple-skinned, big-lipped, hook-nosed monster.

XREF: Connects to the broader history of color symbolism in medieval art and the cost/availability of blue pigments like ultramarine.

The king met with four Saracens, who were black and blue as lead. . . . Never before that hour did anyone see so horribly shaped a creature. Their black hue was marvelous, and their mouths were in their breasts. . . . Their mouths were so broad, their eyes so large, that it made their faces repulsive. In their foreheads stood their eyes. . . [They say], "We are loathsome, but loathsome also are the soul and body both of a wicked man. . . ." David held [the rods] out to them to kiss; and they kneeled and kissed them. Immediately their skin became as white as milk, and they took on the hue of high blood, and all their appearance was made new.

QUESTION: How does this text engage or complicate modern debates about race and medieval literature? The medieval notion of 'race' here seems moral/theological rather than biological. DEFINE: Shows a medieval framework where 'blackness' is allegorically tied to sin and whiteness to salvation, distinct from modern racial categories.

This narrative promises that the Muslim will be transformed into a human if he or she converts to Christianity. In another story, a Saracen infant is transformed from a lump into a human:

XREF: Relates to postcolonial and critical race scholarship on dehumanization of religious/racial others in medieval Christian discourse.

The identification of light skin with Christianity is found through the centuries in tales of Muslim monsters and monstrous births that follow the medieval formula of conversion and healing, the restoration of humanity to the true believer. For medieval Christians, there was no community of "white people," per se, even though foreigners were often represented with dark skin. Certainly, "race" as I am speaking of here is not constructed or politicized in the medieval mind in the same way as we find it in the modern imaginaire. However, in the Middle Ages we see the foundations of the ways in which "whiteness," race, and Christianity become connected over time.

XREF: Connects to modern critical race theory and the historical construction of whiteness; useful background for understanding how race and religion intertwine across eras. QUESTION: How exactly did the medieval light-skin-as-Christian formula evolve into modern racial categories? The author notes the shift but leaves the precise mechanism to explore.

As mentioned earlier, woods, mountains, and other wild places were viewed as dark places, regions of danger where demons, evil spirits, and monsters dwelled. The borderlands were equally frightening:

If these edges were dangerous, they were also powerful places. In folklore, betwixt and between are important zones of transformation. The edge of the water was where wisdom revealed itself; spirits were banished to the spaceless places "between the froth and the water" or "betwixt the bark and the tree." Similarly, temporal junctures between winter and summer, or between night and day, were dangerous moments of intersection with the Otherworld.

XREF: Connects to liminality theory from anthropology (Turner, van Gennep) about rites of passage occurring at thresholds. SEED: Could angle an essay on how modern storytelling uses thresholds — doors, crossroads, twilight — as transformation points.

The dark regions of hell also contained monsters identified as Jewish, Muslim, and African, featured in medieval paintings torturing humans. Hell represented the artistic antithesis to "the calm aesthetic numbness of heaven." We find many more paintings of hell because heaven was, in the aesthetic sense, boring. Hell was seen as an imminent danger, a misstep away from the village or city if one was foolish.

XREF: Connects to broader art history questions about why negative/violent imagery captivates audiences more than peaceful scenes — a recurring pattern across eras.

Although demons and other monsters occupied the human world, what existed beyond the borders could be even more bizarre and horrifying. This helps to explain why most Muslim monsters were located in distant lands, frightening landscapes that had been forgotten by God, with no sun, no vegetation, only monsters. These places are later resurrected as part of the new medievalism of Gothic literature, seen in Transylvania and the far regions to which Frankenstein's monster briefly escapes in what may be understood as a visit home.

XREF: Connects to the Gothic tradition and Frankenstein's monster's escape to far regions — a direct lineage from medieval Muslim monster geography to later Gothic landscapes.

This makes sense given the semiology of monsters, which includes "fixing horror elsewhere, in an obviously and literally foreign body." Saracens and Ethiopians existed along the edges of the universe, represented on maps with a normative center and dangerous borderlands, always occupied by strange and frightening creatures, Plinian monsters, and non-human races that served as examples of God's displeasure. These maps were theological tools which suggested that those who dwelled the farthest from the Christian center were the most dangerous. "In those maps that give a theological turn to geography, monstrous men are represented in a narrow band at the edge of the world, as far as possible from Jerusalem, the center of Christianity." The classification of the Saracens as a monstrous race is a result of this cognitive mapping. By the time of the Crusades, Muslims were understood to be a race of creatures cursed by God and alienated from the human world:

XREF: Connects to medieval cartography, orientalism, and the othering of non-European peoples as theological geography. QUESTION: Worth chasing how this mapping logic evolved into later colonial cartography.

From the confines of Jerusalem and the city of Constantinople a horrible tale has gone forth and very frequently has been brought to our ears; namely, that a race from the kingdom of the Persian, an accursed race, a race utterly alienated from God, a generation, forsooth, which has neither directed its heart nor entrusted its spirit to God, has invaded the lands of those Christians and has depopulated them by the sword, pillage, and fire; has destroyed by cruel tortures; it has entirely destroyed the churches of God or appropriated them for the rites of its own religion. They destroy the altars, after having defiled them with their uncleanliness.

DEFINE: This is the famous speech (or account of it) launching the First Crusade, demonstrating how the enemy was dehumanized as 'an accursed race... utterly alienated from God.'

In painting and architecture, bizarre creatures often lurk on the edges in psalters and bibles and in the corners of churches and cathedrals. In the Middle Ages, these figures functioned as "moralizations of sinfulness," and in the schema of monsters, as "extreme examples of the caricatured bodies that were used more generally to represent non-Christians and heretics." Many religious manuscripts were populated with strange creatures, at times holding up a letter or a word. In the Canterbury Psalter, a horned creature stands in the text, holding up a letter. In other cases, monstrous races float on the edges—symbols of the outsider status of Saracens, Africans, and other non-Christians.

XREF: Connects to medieval art history and how visual marginalia encoded religious and social hierarchy — the outsider's place at the literal edge of the page mirrors its marginal status in society.

Non-Christian territories were sinister spaces—far more dangerous than Christian territories, whatever monsters dwelled there. Muslim lands were dark and foreboding landscapes separated from the natural world. According to one medieval account, Saracens lived in a land "[w] here the sun does not shine, not any grain grow. There falls no rain or dew. There are no stones that are not all black. Some say devils dwell there." In a medieval Muslim island referenced in Aliscans, the lost island is so far removed from human society that it lays "outside the known world."

XREF: Connects to medieval cartography and the othering of foreign peoples, and to Edward Said's orientalism framework.

The dominant vision expressed in medieval Christian writings about Islam's founder is that he was a monster who begot a monstrous race, a sexual monster with impressive powers, including a super-supply of semen—a gift that is magically transferred to all Muslim men, who, according to at least one text, had penises the size of trees. Early Christians often identified Muhammad with Biblical monsters. In one example, Alvarus identifies the Prophet with both Behemoth and Leviathan. Pope Innocent III claimed that Muhammad was the Antichrist: A certain son of perdition, Muhammad the pseudo-prophet, arose.

XREF: Connects to histories of Islamophobia, Orientalism (Said), and how polemical caricatures of religious others persist in contemporary discourse.

Polemicists were often quite creative in their evaluations of Islam. Some claimed that Muhammad was a pervert who took innocuous lines in the Qur'an and refashioned them to satisfy his carnal desires. In Liber Denudationis Ostensionis Aut Patefaciens, the Qur'anic instruction, "God will not take you to task for what is unintentional in your oath," was explained as, "[a] nd thus he [Muhammad] perjured himself and had sex with that woman again. See how much impiety he officially established on account of this so that he might commit adultery freely." The mythology that Prophet Muhammad was a pervert, expressed in the claims that he planned to rape the Virgin Mary in heaven and had unending supplies of semen, is an important part of the story of Muslim monsters. Originally identified with Prophet Muhammad, these fantasies were eventually attached to all Muslim men and they stuck. Today, Muslim men are often depicted as rapists and pedophiles, characterizations rooted in the Middle Ages.

Sexual violence, especially acts attempted or committed against the most innocent—virgins and children—is also ascribed to Muslim men. The writings of Eulogius include an invented biography of Muhammad, who "gave his soul to hell," "fills the stomach of gods," and "committed not only his own soul, but the soul of many, to hell," and who planned to rape the Virgin Mary when he reached heaven. Eulogius writes, "I will not repeat the sacrilege which that impure dog [Muhammad] dared proffer about the Blessed Virgin, Queen of the World, holy mother of our venerable Lord and Savior. He claimed. . . that in the next world he would deflower her." The fantasy of Muslim men raping women is a powerful one, and it has remained part of the social imaginary, exhibited today in anti-Muslim discourse from South Asia to Europe.

XREF: Connects to contemporary anti-Muslim rhetoric and orientalism, showing continuity across centuries.

Claims of Muslim sexual monstrosity were not restricted to polygamy and pedophilia. Fantasies of Muslim sexual power included Prophet Muhammad's superhuman sexual abilities and energy, which influenced later mythologies, including claims of abnormally large genitalia possessed by Muslim men. One Christian text claims that upon entering heaven, Muslim males were rewarded with a penis so long that it required "seventy Christians and seventy Jews to carry it before him." Many centuries later, during the colonial era, Europeans claimed that croco-sapiens roamed the Nile, crocodiles with Egyptian—that is, Muslim—genitalia.

XREF: Connects to broader scholarly literature on orientalism and how colonizers deploy sexual stereotypes to justify subjugation, as in Edward Said's work.

Many of the polemics against Islam are framed within concerns about Christian orthodoxy and typically include charges of idolatry and heresy. These writings often identify Muslims with Satan, a figure strongly implicated in many Muslim monsters. The Venerable Bede wrote, "the Saracens occupy the same ideological space as the erring, the worldly and the gentiles in opposition to the spiritual fraternity: in short, as enemies of the church they are in the company of Jews, Philistines, heretics and the devil." Satan was among the many idols that Muslims were accused of worshipping. One of the earliest references to Muslim devil-worshippers is found in Jerome's writings, where he refers to a Lucifer-worshipping cult in pre-Islamic, fourth century Arabia.

In writings about Islam penned by famous Christians like Jerome and Bede, it is worth remembering that much of the so-called knowledge produced about Islam was based on folk tales about monsters and mythical narratives about the East and its associated mysteries. These early works were nothing but musings and conjecture, written by individuals who had never opened the pages of a Qur'an or met a Muslim. When Bede attempts to validate his opinions about Islam, writing, "ex priorum maxime scriptis … Anglo-Saxon perceptions of Islam "were formed in a Christian literary matrix, since most people had no chance to witness Islam for themselves or to hear a first-hand report—and even a pilgrim to Jerusalem such as Atculf or Willibald had been informed to some extent by the Christian literary corpus before arriving in Saracen territory."

In the year of our Lord 729 two comets appeared around the sun, striking great terror into all beholders. One of them preceded the sun as it rose in the morning and the other followed it as it set at night, seeming to portend dire disaster to east and west alike. One comet was the forerunner of the day and the other of the night, to indicate that mankind was threatened by calamities both by day and by night. They had fiery torch-like trains which faced northwards as if poised to start a fire. They appeared in the month of January and remained for almost a fortnight. At this time a terrible plague of Saracens ravaged Gaul with cruel bloodshed and not long afterwards they received the due reward of their treachery in the same kingdom.

DEFINE: Illustrates how medieval sources read celestial phenomena as providential omens of disaster rather than natural events.

Bede was not alone in his appraisal of the Saracens as a sign of the final reckoning. Sebeos identified the Saracens as one of the four Beasts of the Apocalypse, along with the Greeks, Sassanians, and the people of the "North." In other writings, Muslims are described as a "burning and lethal" poisonous wind, "setting alight the tall and beautiful trees in the garden," or as the Beast, complete with iron teeth and copper talons, or as a monster from the desert. There are also descriptions of Muhammad as a monster, including one that depicts him as a creature "with the head of a man, the neck of a horse and the body of a bird."

XREF: Connects to apocalyptic and monster literature of the early medieval Mediterranean, and to how religious others are dehumanized in polemical writing.

While the dominant narrative about Muslims is filled with these monsters, not all medieval writings about Islam are negative. Some of the most positive examples are found in Islamic Spain, penned by Mozarebs. In the Chronicle of 741, Muhammad is described as "a prescient man, a foreseer of future events," whom Muslims treat "with great honor and reverence as they affirm him to be an apostle of God and a prophet in all of their sacraments and scriptures." The daily contact between Jews, Christians, and Muslims living in Andalusia, coupled with a lack of inter-religious warfare, helps to explain why these writings emerge.

XREF: Connects to the broader theme of convivencia in medieval Iberia — daily interfaith contact reducing hostility. QUESTION: Does this positive portrayal in the Chronicle of 741 reflect Mozarab perspective or political pragmatism under Muslim rule?

The identification of the Hagarenes, described as a lowly, racially degenerate race, with the Muslims is another way in which the appearance of Islam was explained. John of Damascus, who wrote about the Hagarenes, claimed the black stone of the ka'aba was worn smooth because “Abraham has sexual intercourse with Hagar on it.” This race was constructed along theological lines, and much like the Saracens, the Hagarenes were a community that was alienated from God.

XREF: Connects to broader scholarship on how religious difference was racialized in medieval Christian-Muslim encounters and to the earlier Saracens discussion.

The invention of the Hagarenes was due in part to the medieval racial classifications expounded by Isidore of Seville, who divided the people of the world into 72 types, all originating from Noah's sons, Ham, Shem, and Japheth. The offspring of Ham also played a role in racial constructions of Muslims through the identification of Saracens with Africans, who were classified as Hamitic. These powerful ideas are later seen in the efforts of Europeans to explain away the “high civilization” of the Egyptians, arguing that they must have been “Caucasian, far removed from the inferior Negro.” According to this logic, only a light-skinned race could have built the pyramids and other great monuments of Egypt.

XREF: Connects to racialization of Islam and the Hamitic hypothesis, relevant to postcolonial and critical race scholarship.

The Ethiopians were another monstrous race connected to Muslims. It is important here to reiterate that in the medieval view, non-Egyptian Africans were often referred to as “Ethiopians.” Like the Saracens, they were considered members of a monstrous non-human race fixated on sex and violence.

The Muslim with dark skin is one of the consistent images that we find in the history of Muslim monsters. It is sustained by numerous anxieties surrounding Africans and Muslims, including the Moors of Spain and North Africa, and later, the Barbary beasts that populate the North American imaginary.

XREF: Relates to Orientalism and racialized depictions of Muslims across Western literature and political rhetoric.

Typically, the way this was expressed was through the actions of these monsters, who were shown harassing, torturing, and killing Christian saints, and also were depicted as the executioners of Jesus. As early as the 690s, Jews were accused of being in cahoots with the Muslims, referred to as their “Hebrew” brethren by King Egica of Spain.

The Towneley Cycle featured Prophet Muhammad as “the god of the Jews,” a character that “embodies the fulfillment of Old Testament villains and a warning of the approaching Apocalypse.” The Towneley Crucifixion also included tyrants like Herod and Pilate, who instructed the audience to remove their hats and prostrate flat on the ground as if performing the Islamic prayer, in another reference to the tyrant's god—Muhammad. In the same play, “the soldiers who crucified Christ invoke 'Mahowne' as if they were Moslems not Romans.”

XREF: Connects to the broader literature on medieval Christian perceptions of Islam and anti-Muslim polemic, as well as Orientalism's early roots.

Often the Jewish and Muslim hybrid characters that exhibited “diseased and debased bodies” were located in the same space, presented as partners in evildoings against Christian innocents. Guibert of Nogent's descriptions of Jews as being deformed and infectious and Dante's image of both Muhammad and Ali's bodily degeneration in hell are but two examples.

XREF: Connects to broader scholarship on medieval antisemitism and Islamophobia as mutually reinforcing — e.g., work by Nirenberg and others on shared scapegoating. QUESTION: Worth asking how this rhetorical pairing of Jewish and Muslim bodies evolved or diverged in later centuries, especially in colonial contexts.

As noted earlier, during the medieval period “Saracen” becomes a widely used pejorative term. One example is that of the Jewish Sarrazin or Saracen, suggesting that in some instances Christians conflated Jews and Muslims into one body. In an image from the Holkham Bible (Figure 2.2), Ishmaelites are labeled as “sarrazins” and are portrayed with dark skin and turbans.

XREF: Relates to medieval Christian constructions of the religious 'other' and how textual/visual labels homogenized distinct groups.

This is not only an example of transference, or commingling, in which anti-Semitism and anti-Saracenism are joined. The Jewish Sarrazin is an early example of the charge of Jews and Muslims as Christianity's eternal enemies, even more significant because these representations become stock characters in Renaissance paintings of the Crucifixion and the execution of Christian saints. The linkage of Jews and Muslims/Saracens was so common that it was "difficult to name the one group without conjuring up the other."

XREF: Connects to broader scholarship on medieval Christian supersessionism and the construction of religious others as interchangeable enemies. SEED: Potential essay angle: how Renaissance art canonized a fused anti-Jewish/anti-Muslim iconography that persists in visual culture.

Cannibalism is a common characteristic of medieval monsters, and it persists into the modern period, for instance, in cinematic adaptations of Bram Stoker's tale of Dracula, a Jewish and Ottoman monster who literally sucks the life out of his victims. Fictional cannibal narratives are featured in numerous adventure and horror fictions in the modern period. These are all stories designed to cast the Other as so uncivilized, so removed from the human community, that he or she enjoys the taste of human flesh. In the early modern period, these fantasies are an integral part of the European quest for territory, even in spaces that were exoticized, like Tahiti. Cannibal fiction is a genre that "has gained its entire meaning from within the discourse of European colonialism." However, the foundations of this genre are much older, situated in martyrologies and other medieval narratives.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and broader postcolonial critiques of how European narratives justify territorial expansion.

Medieval images of demons and monsters often feature the consumption of humans, typically in portrayals that show the dismemberment of Christians in some gruesome fashion. The fear of being consumed and ingested by the enemy is situated in medieval Christian beliefs surrounding the body of the saint, who, after Christ, functioned as the dominant symbol of resurrection through literary and visual media that communicated "potent fantasies of violent dismemberment and reintegration." In accounts of Christian travels in the Holy Land, the fear of bodily corruption was expressed in the Saracen monster, a figure that often enjoyed eating Christian flesh. These stories and images formulated the fantasies of Muslim cannibalism: "United by the appropriation of a metaphor, these writers deploy images of anatomical mutilation to symbolize mutilated subjectivities, identities whose borders have been unmade."

XREF: Connects to theories of dehumanization of enemies through projected violence, relevant to colonial and orientalist discourse studies.

The horror represented in this scene serves as the preface to a miraculous resolution—when Christ would restore the dismembered, burned, and destroyed bodies of true believers. The images of cannibalism found in both medieval writing and art are an expression "for Orthodox Christian believers ideas of what happened to people's bodies after they died," which were, "cast prominently in the imagery of cannibalism." Resurrection is the opposite of decay and regurgitation; it is a complete restoration of body and soul: "regurgitation, the reassembly of dispersed parts, the restoration of limbs (re-memberment), the returning of flesh to bare bones, the re-covering with skin. . . . The orthodox medieval Christian understood resurrection as involving the step-by-step reversal of cannibalistic destruction, with intact perfection of the body as the end result."

DEFINE: Clarifies how medieval Orthodox theology conceptualized resurrection as a step-by-step reversal of bodily destruction rather than mere spiritual survival.

Saracens are often described in medieval texts as cannibalistic giants. In some narratives this is subtle, such as the Torrent of Portyngale, where the giants are not named as Saracens but their identity is implied. In this story, the hero seamlessly "moves from killing giants to killing Saracens." The oppositions presented in Portyngale are fundamentally religious, creating a link among all of the non-Christian creatures the Christian knight encounters. Medieval romances present "a succession of defining cultural encounters where notions of the civilized and the bestial, the innocent and the guilty, the monstrous and the manly are brought face to face."

QUESTION: How did this rhetorical conflation of religious and ethnic others function politically in crusade-era Europe?

In other stories, Saracen giants, cannibalistic or not, were clearly identified. They were so large and dangerous that only the bravest knights, like Roland or Orlando, had a chance against one. A monster in Guy of Warwick is an example of a supernatural creature that was "hard to kill." As the text warns, "For if he looked on you with anger, sternly with his black eyes, so grim he is to see that no matter how bold you have been in the past, you don't dare wage battle on him, nor fight against him." Even Saracens who are not giants have monstrous qualities, such as the ability to regenerate. According to medieval tales, "[w] e cannot kill so many of them but what we find another," and, "[f]rom their tents they come forth like rain driven by the wind."

Ferrau is the Saracen giant most commonly featured in medieval romances. Alternatively called Ferraguto, Ferragus, Fernagu, and Ferracutus, the creature survives in some form into the modern period. Ferrau is a powerful monster that in several stories is finally killed by Roland or Orlando. In the Historia Karoli Magni et Rotholandi, Roland vanquishes Ferracutus. The source of the monster's strength is his navel; only by attacking his sexual organs can he be destroyed.

In medieval texts, female Muslim monsters typically appear as black, blue, or purple-skinned giants, equally as frightening as their male counterparts. These characters exemplify the "hybridization of misogyny and racism through a triple confluence of representations: the wild woman, personified vice, and 'death itself, la mort, feminized through grammatical gender.' " In contrast to later female Muslim characters, most of whom are desirable, most medieval monsters have zero sex appeal. Amiete, a Saracen giantess that appears in Fierbras, with her huge mouth and wide hips, is sexually monstrous but not "sexy"

QUESTION: What cultural or narratological shift explains the transition to desirable female Muslim characters in later works?

Medieval literature includes other types of female Muslim characters, many of whom figure prominently in conversion narratives. Saracen females who convert to Christianity are usually represented as white, a reversal of the dark-skinned or Black Saracen male monster. White Muslim females do not represent “a realistic portrayal of the medieval French view of the Saracen body but illustrate desire on the part of the white male authors of the text.” These characters are not realistic portrayals, but rather expressions of desire for the exotic Other, which was often situated in fantasies about racial and sexual difference.

Dark-skinned Muslims found in medieval psalters, paintings, poetry, and romances are not always monstrous, but their blackness indicates that they are evil. In an image from fourteenth-century France depicting a battle, the Muslim soldiers wear turbans and have dark eyes, but perhaps what is most interesting is the face on their shields—an African man. This is but one indication of how Muslims were related not just to Jews, but also to Africans.

QUESTION: How exactly did medieval artists map skin color onto religious/ethnic identity, and did this vary across regions or centuries?

The monster that encapsulated all three of these entities—Saracen, Jew, and black African—is the Black Saracen. This is a hybrid monster, an African (implicated as Satan by his dark skin), Jewish (depicted executing a saint), and Muslim (by the moniker “Saracen” as well as by the turban he often wears). With his black, purple, or brown skin, large lips, and curly hair, this monster is clearly meant to represent an Ethiopian, that is, a non-Egyptian African. Satan often masqueraded as a serpent, a dragon, or a human with blackened skin. The Black Saracen is but one of the many forms that Satan took, a symbol of evil walking the earth

DEFINE: Clarifies the medieval 'Black Saracen' as a hybrid monster conflating Saracen, Jew, and black African identities with Satanic evil.

Both Jews and Muslims are described as dogs and, as we shall see, are depicted as dog-headed men. The bestiary is one way in which monstrous identities are established, through Jewish symbols that are then transferred onto Muslim characters in Muslim cynocephalie.

QUESTION: What specific Jewish symbols were transferred onto Muslim characters, and how did this dehumanizing rhetoric function politically in the medieval period?

The bestiary is one way in which monstrous identities are established, through Jewish symbols that are then transferred onto Muslim characters in Muslim cynocephalie.

DEFINE: Introduces the concept of 'cynocephali' and explains how bestiary traditions established monstrous identities through symbol transfer.

The fox ( vulpes) is a well-recognized “hate sign” in the language of anti-Semitism that symbolizes the Jew’s deceptive nature. The stories told on the pages of these manuscripts typically show a fox tricking a bird, resulting in its capture. “The fox is a symbol of the devil, who pretends to be dead before those who live according to the flesh [the birds], whom he traps and devours.”

The hyena ( yena) is another anti-Semitic “hate sign” identified with the Jew, offering “one of the most straightforward allegories” of the Jew as the devil found in these texts. The hyena resembles the dog-headed man in its identification as a canine, and the hyena’s voice resembles a human. In the stories told about cynocephalie in battle against Christian soldiers, they are often described as whinnying, barking, and howling, as hyenas do. I would postulate that the hyena, a popular symbol of Jews, inspired the Jewish dog-headed men of medieval lore.

QUESTION: The author postulates but does not prove the hyena inspiration. Worth investigating whether contemporary texts explicitly connect hyenas to cynocephali before this claim settles. XREF: Connects to broader scholarship on animal symbols in anti-Semitic medieval and early modern imagery, and to bestiary traditions.

The cynocephalus, or dog-headed man, is a popular medieval monster that is identified as both a Jew and a Muslim in literature and painting. In the Middle Ages, human-animal hybrids are often connected to religious monsters, which are found in oppositional scenes with Christ, representing the cosmic struggle between evil and good, darkness and light. Hybrid monsters “operate [as a] major locus of the experience of horror,” thanks to their appearance as human and monster.

XREF: Connects to broader study of medieval monster lore, bestiary traditions, and how human-animal hybrids were used to define the boundaries of the human and the religiously orthodox. QUESTION: Why were dog-headed men specifically assigned to both Jews and Muslims — what made the cynocephalus a fitting emblem for both religious others?

Jewish dog-men appear in medieval texts with less frequency than their Muslim counterparts, which may be due to the threat that Islam posed militarily and politically, the social position of Jews in Christian communities, and the additional spaces in which anti-Jewish characters are found, including the bestiary.

XREF: Connects to broader medieval bestiary scholarship and the comparative representation of religious others in Christian Europe.

This image of Jewish cynocephalie as Christ-killers reinforces a common medieval trope about both Jews and Muslims as the executioners of Christ, because the existence of one, as I have argued earlier, conjured up the appearance of the other. In early Renaissance art, Jews and Muslims are often pictured together, present at the Crucifixion, as in Figure 2.6, a fifteenth-century painting of the Passion.

XREF: Connects to wider medieval Christian iconography of the Passion and anti-Semitic/anti-Islamic tropes.

Beginning with Pseudo-Methodius, both religious and secular writers associated or identified the followers of prophet Muhammad with the monstrous races. Throughout the protracted struggle (has it ever ended?), the Black Saracen is often depicted as a minion of the devil, a child of fornication, a crude outlaw covered with hair and wielding a club. In medieval sources, Muhammad himself becomes a Christian heretic who is thrown on a dung heap to be devoured by dogs and pigs. The mid-thirteenth century Pseudo-Turpin describes the Muslim Saracen warriors battling Charlemagne as “horned demonic Lares” (i.e., man-eating cynocephalics).

XREF: Links to broader medieval othering of non-Christian peoples, connecting to the monstrous races tradition and Orientalist discourse that continued into modern eras. Could also connect to postcolonial theory about dehumanizing the colonial/religious other. QUESTION: How did this medieval dehumanization evolve or persist in modern anti-Muslim rhetoric and policy? Also worth tracing the specific line from Pseudo-Methodius to later medieval depictions.

References to Muslim cynocephalie in medieval romances are quite common. In the Song of Roland, Saracens are described as “whining” and “yelping.” Other descriptions of Muslim monsters in the text include Plinian monsters, some with canine qualities. There are “the Milceni, with their large heads and piglike bristles,” “the Canaanites, who are simply ugly,” “giants from Malprose,” and “the Argoille, who bark like dogs.” Cynocephalie were often situated on the edges of medieval maps alongside Ipopodes, Agrophagi, and Ethiopians with four eyes—all monstrous races alienated from God and relinquished to the non-human edges of the world. They occupied the same space as Saracens.

The canine behaviors of Saracen dog-men strongly suggest anthropophagy. Muslim cynocephalie are cannibalistic, killing their enemy and consuming them, much like other Muslim monsters, including the Saracen giants with glaring white teeth and black skin who rip humans apart and eat them alive. While texts do not necessarily describe Muslim dog-headed men consuming Christian bodies, it is implied in the behavior exhibited on the battlefield. In some cases, Muslim cynocephalie are rendered speechless: “they could not speak or shout, but like hounds bared their teeth and barked.”

XREF: Connects to medieval bestiary traditions and the dehumanization of out-groups in crusade-era literature.

Jew-dogs were viewed as filthy, contaminating Christians, a belief that generated a number of rules surrounding Christian relations with Jews. Citing Paul [I Corinthians 6:12], Christian theologians argued that sharing a meal with Jews was paramount to “fornicating against one's own body.” In Renaissance paintings, dogs are often shown barking and sneering at Christ—symbolizing Jews.

The identification of Jews as dogs—ravenous, wild, and cannibalistic—continued for centuries. In the eighteenth century, Jewish dogs were accused of eating children, narratives based on late medieval and Renaissance paintings of Jews and Muslims killing Christian children. Even though the blood libel mythology attached to Jews was not applied to Muslims, the two appear side by side in artistic depictions of gruesome scenes in which a Christian, often a child, is tortured, killed, and eaten.

The year 1453 marks the beginning of Ottoman rule in a conquered Byzantium, a period that commences with the sacking of Constantinople. In writings from the period, Christians described the “ravishment” and “horrifying details” of the sacking of the former Byzantine capital, at the same time that charges against the “barbarian” North African Muslims were made, a descriptor summarily attached to the Turks in that year. At this point, Turkish monsters emerged alongside Arab/Saracen and African Muslim monsters. As the Ottomans increased in power, the Turk became an icon of difference and a symbol of monstrosity.

Renaissance studies that focused on the possible origins of the Turks frequently relied on medieval fables of monstrous races and mysterious lands. In some cases, the ancestry of the Turks was linked to the Scythians, one of the groups associated with monstrous races in Shakespearean dramas and other writings. Scythians were often featured in medieval writings about monsters, and a Scythian origin, when not explicitly linked to monsters, was still cited as an explanation of the Turk’s barbarism.

XREF: Connects to Western historiography of the Ottoman Empire and orientalist constructions of the Turk in early modern European writing.

The end of the Middle Ages, rather than resulting in a reduction in monsters, opened the door to all kinds of “scientific” studies of miraculous creatures living on newly discovered islands and continents. Fantasies about giants, Amazons, and others were fairly common, and while these subjects will be examined more fully in the subsequent chapters, it is important to say something here about the new opportunities for monster-making. When Europeans encountered these new territories, their imaginations went into overdrive; thus during the Age of Exploration numerous monsters were purportedly observed in the Americas, the South Pacific, and other colonial spaces.

As in the Middle Ages, Muslims in the Renaissance were viewed as creatures alienated from God, a fact demonstrated in the monstrous races featured in Shakespearean-era dramas. The role of imagination is a critical part of this story. The English had a particularly astute understanding of how this faculty functioned in relation to the mind; in fact, this understanding bears an uncanny resemblance to Bourdieu’s concern with fantasy masquerading as reality. According to this view, “[a] lways the imagination of fantasy is seen as a power operating in a framework of other faculties and functions. In a definite hierarchical order of communication, knowledge travels from the so-called 'outer' senses (the five primary senses), to the 'inner' (Common Sense, Imagination and/or Fantasy, Sensible Reason, and Memory, which occupy cells in the brain), and thus to the highest rational, incorporeal powers (the Intellect or Wit or Understanding, and the Will).” The internalization of fantasies about Jews and Muslims depended upon “the transmission of data through a hierarchy of powers.”

XREF: The hierarchy of sense-to-intellect faculties echoes early modern faculty psychology and connects to Bourdieu's concept of fantasy masquerading as reality. SEED: A possible essay comparing premodern faculty psychology to modern theories of unconscious bias and stereotype formation.

Some Muslim monsters—Saracen giants and Black Saracens, Jewish and Muslim cynocephalie—disappeared from texts and paintings. In particular cases, cultural types replaced the families of Muslim monstrous races that medieval artists painted. For example, the foreign characters in Giotto’s frescoes were patterned after Mediterranean and Asiatic peoples, “[i] n all these cases the representatives of historically and geographically distant countries no longer appear as monsters, masks, or puppets, but as human beings, sometimes of authentic portraiture.” However, this did not entail an end to Muslim monsters.

The portrayal of Jews with turbans may have also been due in part to the “Orientalizing” of both Jews and Muslims, who often appear side by side in Renaissance paintings wearing turbans. One case is found in Giovanni Antonio de Pordenone’s painting of the Crucifixion in Cremona Cathedral. Turbaned Jews appear in Renaissance paintings that lack Muslim characters, such as the Limbourg Brothers’ Nativity, which features a Jewish figure with a “bulky 'Turkish'-style turban.” Ivan Davidson Kalmar has examined the use of the turban on Jewish subjects in Renaissance paintings, such as the example in Rembrandt’s David and

Medieval and Renaissance narratives of the Passion co-identified Jews and Muslims, through such conventions as Jews praying to Mahomet and Muslims identified as Romans. These stories greatly impacted the art of the period.

XREF: Connects to pre-modern European religious othering and how artistic conventions flatten distinct groups into a generic enemy.

Muslim Turks were shown performing the biblical Massacre of the Innocents. A turbaned Pontius Pilate festooned a decorative balcony in Lorch in Upper Austria and elsewhere. Jesus's tormentors on his way to Calvary, along with the Pharisees and their henchmen, wore Turkish headdresses and brandished scimitars.

But of course this makes sense, given the medieval association of Jews and Muslims, seen in the charges that Muslims were "New Jews," the images of Jewish Sarrazins, and other examples of co-identification. In Renaissance painting, Jewish and Muslim figures often appear side by side, accompanied by symbols that further confuse the categories of Jew and Muslim. On a wall painting at the San Sacro Benedictine monastery in Subiaco, the flags surrounding the scene of Christ bearing the Cross include flags with Jewish badges and Muslim crescents.

XREF: Connects to scholarship on medieval and early modern co-identification of Muslims and Jews, and to Christian iconography conflating the two groups.

During earlier centuries, there was a fear of bodily mutilation and dismemberment, an anxiety that contributed to the resurrection narrative expressed in the cannibalism mythologies that dominated medieval narratives featuring Muslim monsters. During the years leading up to the Renaissance, in the period often identified by scholars as the proto-Renaissance, some of the taboos surrounding dissection and autopsies were lifted, resulting in the (purported) discovery of miracles hidden inside the bodies of saints and martyrs. These miracles served as proof that the miracle of Christ was evident in the mutilated bodies of his most devoted followers.

The claims made about Chiara's body suggest that mutilation and resurrection were evidence of "the association of dismemberment and sanctity [that] continued to permeate popular attitudes into the sixteenth century." Stories of mutilation and death at the hands of a religious enemy allowed the Church to suggest that the existence of miracles was inherent in the only true religion.

Although Turkish figures, typified by light skin and turbans, were commonly featured in Renaissance depictions of Christian martyrs, black Muslims make appearances as well. It is likely that this character is the Black Turk, a character as connected to the devil, much like his predecessor, the Black Saracen. In some cases, this character was identified as a "Moor," a word used as a general descriptor for all Muslims. Black Muslims were often featured in scenes that portrayed the devil. Following the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, there was a parade featuring a Black African as Charon, the ferryman who transported souls to Hades, as well as the occupant of the boat, an Ottoman, both symbols of Islamic damnation.

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of racialized religious symbolism in early modern Christian iconography and Orientalist imagery.

Black Muslim characters appear in venues other than painting, including the African Muslim monsters featured in Shakespearean-era drama and the Austrian theater masks depicting Satan as a Black Saracen. In some of these masks, the physiognomy of Satan was replicated in an exact fashion in a representation of a Black Muslim.

XREF: Connects to broader history of racialized demonization in European visual culture, and to simultaneous depictions of Black Muslims in painting.

Turcica, German collections of stories about Turks, include fantastic tales of perverse sexual behaviors and other disturbing stories of Ottoman life. The Turcica often focus on behaviors known as sodomia, a collection of acts that referred to any sexual act deviating from “normal” Christian practices. Stories narrated in these collections detail the victimization of innocents, including children, females, and dead Christians. In one story, Turkish soldiers have sex with corpses—Christians killed in the fall of Constantinople. Another tale claims that Muslims “have it off with those fish that possess sexual organs.”

XREF: Connects to Orientalist discourse and how colonizing/competing powers construct dehumanizing narratives about enemies. FICTION: The grotesque trope of enemies violating corpses could seed dark historical fiction or horror about propaganda and atrocity storytelling.

Negative depictions of Muslim characters featured in Elizabethan drama are numerous as well. Tamburlaine and Othello are representative of the monsters we are interested in here. As hybrids belonging to more than one monstrous race, they threatened notions of English racial purity.

XREF: Connects to postcolonial literary criticism and Orientalism scholarship on early modern representations of Muslims and Moors.

Tamburlaine is described as a “monster that hath drunk a sea of blood,” suggesting that he drinks the blood of humans. He is identified as a hydra, the multi-headed monster with the upper body of a woman and the lower body of a snake. He is a monster alienated from God

DEFINE: Explains the hydra imagery as a symbol of monstrosity and godlessness in Tamburlaine.

Othello is a hybrid monster of sorts, doubly cursed with African and other monstrous bloodlines. The belief that Africans were demons and monsters still dominated Europe during Shakespeare’s time. In Stephen Bateman’s study of monsters published in 1581, Africans are called “Black Monsters” and are described as such: “Ethiopes, a people in the West part of Ethiopia: also there are those black men, that have four eyes: and it is said that in Eripia be found very comely bodied men, notwithstanding they are long necked, and mouthed as a crane, the other part of the head like a man.” These fantasies were associated with all Africans, including Moors like Othello, whose black skin was associated with perdition and evil. In the twentieth century, Othello is more commonly associated with the tragic character portrayed on the stage by great thespians like Ira Aldridge and Paul Robeson, rather than with an African monster. However, Elizabethans “associated [Africans] in the popular imagination with monsters, so that the play’s numerous references to monstrosity would have resonated with Othello’s racial characteristics to establish his extreme difference to typical Europeans.” Elizabethans thought that Africans were monsters.

XREF: Connects to Othello scholarship covered elsewhere in the reader's Shakespeare/monstrosity research.

These reports about monstrous births reflect fears surrounding miscegenation. At the same time that Othello, a play about the mixing of races through the sexual union of Othello and Desdemona, is performed on the stage, such creatures were thought to exist. According to European sources from the era, the sexual union of different races and even distinct religions created horrible monsters. Ambroise Paré, a physician who lived in sixteenth-century France, wrote a book on these horrors, titled Des Monstres et Prodiges, in which he described the dangers of such relations:

XREF: Connects Othello to contemporary fears about miscegenation, showing Shakespeare's play engaged live anxieties rather than abstract themes.

While these images are identified as “Saracen,” Saracens, Turks, and Moors were interchangeable categories, exchangeable descriptors of the Muslim enemy. In most cases, “no clear distinction was popularly drawn between Turks and Saracens.” Much like the late twentieth century, when “the Arab” was often used as a symbol for all Muslims, the Saracen, Turk, and Moor served as fluid signifiers of Muslim identity in earlier centuries.

XREF: Parallels modern homogenization of Muslims/Arabs; echoes the comparison the text itself draws to late twentieth-century usage.

Business signage for pubs, coffeehouses, and tobacco houses often displayed a Turk, Saracen, or Blackamoor (“Black Moor”) wearing a turban and brandishing a scimitar. Modern renderings of these signs are still used, typically at pubs and restaurants in Great Britain, such as the one at Waltham Abbey. These more recent renditions are tame in comparison to the extinct signs of Elizabethan England, which included portrayals of the Turk, Saracen, and Blackamoor as a monster. Written sources provide clues about what Elizabethan-era renderings of monstrous Saracens, Turks, and Moors looked like. One source describes an image of a Saracen in the following manner: “[he had] a Sarazins face, his nose too long for his lips, his cheeks like the jawes of a horse, his eyes like a Smithes forge.”

XREF: Connects to early modern European attitudes toward Islam and racialized caricature in public imagery, relevant to colonial and orientalism studies.

The Turk’s Head is also the name given to a savory pie popular in Britain and France during the Elizabethan period that represented a cannibalistic feast of Turkish flesh. Typically, this pie was a grotesque caricature of a Turk or Saracen’s face. By eating it, Christians consumed the enemy in an act of symbolic cannibalism. Its roots lie in a fictitious narrative of Christians eating Saracens in the medieval romance Richard Couer de Lion.

FICTION: A historical pie crafted as an enemy's face and eaten as symbolic victory is a vivid, usable detail for historical or horror fiction — could seed a scene of ceremonial consumption and enmity made edible.

This recipe is a key part of the story of the monstrous Turk, especially in the use of a pig’s skin. There is no evidence that the skin used in a Turk’s Head pie ever came from an actual Turk, but the stomach casing is significant in its reference to the Islamic prohibition against eating pork, which Europeans knew well. By using swine to create an image of a Muslim, one symbolically insulted Islam through a culinary act.

DEFINE: Explains how the Turk's Head pie's pig-skin casing functioned as deliberate anti-Muslim symbolism, leveraging the Islamic prohibition on pork.

In 2010, I visited Schönbrunn Palace, the summer residence of the Hapsburgs, where I made an unexpected discovery—a painting in Maria Theresa’s “Carousel Room” that depicts the carousel game (see Figure 3.4). In this case, there is a curious addition, the decapitated head of a man floating in the background—a “Turk’s head.”

These carousels, the entertaining successors of medieval tournaments, were exceedingly popular in the Baroque era. Ladies’ carousels continued to be performed in the Winter Riding School until the end of the nineteenth century. As the programme for the ceremony of 1743 days, the participants in the carousel, all ladies of noble birth, were dressed as “amazons” and wore leather trousers underneath their dresses. Like at medieval tournaments, figures, which were “in part Moors, in part other mythological figures,” and had heads of clay which had to be knocked off with lances by the riders on horseback and with epees by the ladies driving in the carriages, were put up in the manege of the Winter Riding School. The ladies also had to demonstrate their skill with the pistol and the javelin.

The ghostly figure in the background of the painting in Austria represents the clay effigy of a Turk's head, an object that, although already decapitated, was knocked off its pedestal. This description from a Habsburg emissary of an Ottoman military commander suggests how Turks were viewed by the Austrians: “A thick bodied eunuch with sallow complexion, he had, 'a sour look, scowling eyes, broad shoulders that stuck up, from which his head extruded as from a valley. With two teeth like boars' tusks dominating his mouth [and] his voice, hoarse. . . he was the Fourth Fury.”

DEFINE: The Habsburg emissary's caricature illustrates how propaganda dehumanized the enemy by portraying a Turk as a Fury-like creature.

Carl Linnaeus, the famous Swedish Enlightenment scientist, classified a species of beings— Homo monstrous—monsters that were delineated from human beings. Homo monstrous was then divided into three types of monsters— Homo troglodytes, Homo caudatus, and Homo marinus. Linnaeus influenced later generations of scientists, including those who traveled on voyages of exploration. Many monsters were purportedly observed on these voyages, including some in regions of the globe that Europeans only “discovered” in the fifteenth century and after.

QUESTION: How did Linnaeus's Homo monstrous classification reconcile with his later taxonomic revisions of human varieties?

This affected the way monsters were created in profound ways. Because of the Enlightenment, not all monsters were theologically constructed. Many monsters were the result of the scientific imagination. Still, the past continued to influence the present in numerous ways:

These centuries continued to see the production of fantastic Muslim characters, including monsters. Several prominent philosophical, intellectual, and artistic movements affected the production of Muslim monsters, including the Enlightenment, Orientalism, and Romanticism, with its rich offshoot, the Gothic, resulting in an episteme of continued anti-Muslim rhetoric that was largely situated in fantasies that first emerged in the Middle Ages. The Enlightenment's focus on science, for all of its rationalism, included a rebirth of teratology, the study of monsters inspired by "monstrous births."

XREF: Connects to the broader theme of anti-Muslim rhetoric spanning from medieval fantasies through the Enlightenment, despite that era's rationalism.

The Enlightenment's focus on rationalism and science did the opposite of what might be expected, inspiring new legions of monsters in domestic and foreign spaces, rather than eradicating them. This makes sense if we accept Charles Taylor's argument that evil became even more generalized in modernity, which was further impacted by Protestantism's suppression of iconography. All of this inspired new categories of monsters that emerged as a way for the imagination to express itself in socially acceptable ways that did not offend religious morals.

XREF: Connects to the broader paradox that secularism and enlightenment did not eliminate superstition, echoing themes about how modernity generates its own mythologies.

European monsters were also situated in anxieties outside of gender. One famous example is the tales of beasts that roamed the Massif Central region of France, an area known as Gévaudan. Like many other monsters of the late eighteenth century, these beasts (probably wolves that attacked women and children tending sheep) were explained as a consequence of Divine unrest. Beliefs in witches and fairies, satyrs, and other hybrids (including dog-men) were accompanied by stories of supernatural animals that could create sickness or death by glancing at their victim. One theory of the Gévaudan monster(s) was that it came from the East—a monstrous Simian from Malaysia. It was also identified as a hyena, a beast long associated, as we have seen, with Jews.

XREF: Connects to the hyena's long-standing antisemitic associations noted earlier in the book.

Monsters also continued to appear abroad, often in colonial spaces that functioned simultaneously as sites of desire and repulsion, expressions of the European mindset of the time, a "proto-anthropology with racist and political overtones." Exotic monsters, from the giant cannibals of Fiji to the croco-sapiens of Egypt, continued to populate the imaginations of tourists, explorers, and the even the most brilliant scientists. Unfamiliar landscapes inspired new monsters, a result of the European (and later, American) attitudes surrounding untamed places, places that were scary in and of themselves. "But forests and mountains—and with them deserts, jungles, even islands—need not to be populated to be fearsome. It was enough that these places were wild: that was the trigger to the terror."

XREF: Connects to postcolonial readings of empire and the 'savage' landscape in Gothic and adventure literature. SEED: Angle: how perceived wildness itself—not monsters—drives colonial horror fiction, and what that reveals about settler attitudes.

Muslims were not the only people depicted as monsters. Exotic locales inspired treatments of the inhabitants that were more sensual than monstrous, such as Tahiti and Hawai'i, where frightening descriptions of the territories and peoples emerged. Europeans and Americans described the gods of Polynesia as monstrous characters, even demonic. The goddess Pele, from the perspective of indigenous Hawaiians, serves as the ruler of a dangerous environment. For haole (white) missionaries and scholars, however, she was often represented as a horrendous monster, a hideous old hag who murdered for pleasure.

XREF: Connects to broader Orientalism/colonial discourse studies — the demonization of Pele parallels how colonizers caricatured other indigenous belief systems as savagery.

The Enlightenment started in the seventeenth century and ended in the late eighteenth century; the Romantic period ran from 1798 to 1824, ending with the death of Lord Byron. I am less concerned with the details of periodization than with the fact that both the Enlightenment and Romanticism inspired new Muslim monsters. As mentioned above, Enlightenment monsters were often framed as a result of science, such as the creatures purportedly seen by explorers. In contrast, Romantic and Gothic monsters represent the chaos in the world, often reflecting pre-modern sensibilities, including a reliance on medieval narrative structures and imagery.

DEFINE: Distinguishes Enlightenment monsters (framed as scientific products) from Romantic/Gothic monsters (embodying chaos and pre-modern sensibilities). XREF: Parallels the reader's likely existing knowledge of how literary movements shape cultural representations of the Other.

For Enlightenment philosophers, there is evidence of what Benedict Robinson has called a "crisis of representation," the struggle between humanism and the imagination evident in the treatment of Muhammad and Islam in general, which wavers between a measured rationalism and polemical superstition. Leibniz was one of several philosophers who faced this crisis in his writings: Was Muhammad an enlightened thinker, a medieval humanist, or a force of destruction and evil?

DEFINE: Explains Robinson's 'crisis of representation' — the tension between humanist reason and polemical imagination in how Enlightenment thinkers portrayed Muhammad.

In the history of Western responses to Islam, what is fascinating about Leibniz is that he exemplifies a certain ideological overlap, a peculiar transition between a theological repudiation of Islam (Muslims as enemies of Christ) and an early Enlightenment rejection of the "Mohammedan" (Muslims as enemies of reason and civilization). Sometimes Leibniz's Mohammedan is the Erbfeind or hereditary enemy/ritual foe, other times he is elevated to the status of mere barbarian, whilst on rare occasions he is even grudgingly acknowledged to be the professor of a natural (though still errant) philosophy.

XREF: Connects to broader scholarship on Orientalism (Said) and the Enlightenment's framing of Islam as opposed to reason.

Often, Islam was employed as a symbol of Catholicism (or religion in general), a way to disguise contempt for Christian dogma: "the encyclopedists used Oriental difference as a structuring trope to criticize their own society."

DEFINE: Clarifies that Orientalist references served as rhetorical camouflage for criticizing Christian dogma, not as genuine engagement with Islam.

Voltaire's play Le Fanatisme ou Mahomet le Prophete, despite its title, represents Muhammad as a rational thinker and a romantic figure. In his Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire was strongly critical of the stereotypes surrounding Islam as a sensual religion, "I tell you again, ignorant imbeciles, whom other ignoramuses have made believe that the Mohammedan religion is voluptuous and sensual, there is not a word of truth in it; you have been deceived on this point as on so many others." He also charged that Christians have projected their own idolatrous practices on Muslims: "I conclude by noting that in the times we named the Middle Ages, we called the country of the Mohammedans heathendom. We qualified as idolaters, image-worshippers, a people who have a horror of images. We must admit once more that the Turks would be more pardonable to take us for idolaters when they see our altars loaded with images and statues."

XREF: Connects to broader Enlightenment-era European views of Islam and the common tendency to project one's own vices onto other cultures.

In a few cases, Muhammad is compared to other famous historical characters. Two Enlightenment philosophers, Chevalier de Jaucourt and Voltaire, compare him to Alexander the Great. De Jaucourt is primarily known as an encyclopedist, and in his comparison with Alexander he writes, "He had a lively and powerful eloquence, stripped of reason and logic, which was necessary for the Arabs; an air of authority and insinuation, animated by piercing eyes and a good physique; the intrepidity of Alexander; the liberty, and the sobriety that Alexander needed to become a great man." Voltaire, never one to mince words, compares Muhammad to Jesus in a biting critique of Christianity: "At least his lies were more noble, and his fanaticism more generous. At least Mahomet wrote and fought; Jesus did not know how to write nor how to defend himself. Mahomet had the courage of Alexander. . . and your Jesus sweated blood and water as soon as he was condemned."

XREF: Connects to broader Enlightenment-era discourse on Islam and Muhammad, and to comparisons of prophetic and imperial figures. Voltaire's critique of Jesus also links to his wider anti-Christian polemics.

The Enlightenment was populated with fantasies about magical lands occupied by foreign monsters, including Muslims. Until James Cook's second voyage during the years 1772–1775, the myth of terra australis incognito remained a formative influence on European map-making. The theory was that this continent, located in the Southern Hemisphere, balanced the earth so it would not tip over. Even when this myth was disproved, others emerged—for instance, of the perfect humans who lived in Otaheite (accompanied by exaggerated reports of public orgasmic rituals and massive cannibalistic occasions), the giants of Fiji, and other magical places and peoples.

QUESTION: Interesting that Enlightenment map-making still invoked a balancing-continent theory — worth exploring how unproven cosmologies shaped colonial exploration rhetoric.

Miscegenation, an anxiety rather pronounced when it came to many exotic locales, is often absent in Polynesian romances, which frequently include a white man romancing a Tahitian, Hawaiian, or other Polynesian maiden. The fantasies associated with the South Pacific influenced some of the ways in which Muslims were represented, especially in Romantic fiction, such as the novellas penned by Pierre Loti. Loti wrote himself into many love stories with foreign, nubile, young women, including both Polynesian and Muslim maidens. In The Marriage of Loti, he falls in love with a Tahitian named Rarahu, and in Aziyade, with a Turkish girl. These two excerpts, which describe the two characters, demonstrate how Polynesian and Muslim females functioned as almost identical objects of desire in Romantic fiction

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and broader scholarship on Western exoticization of non-European women.

Like Oceania, the Orient was represented as a place of dreams and nightmares, which were often expressed along gender lines. Miscegenation, an anxiety rather pronounced when it came to many exotic locales, is often absent in Polynesian romances, which frequently include a white man romancing a Tahitian, Hawaiian, or other Polynesian maiden. The fantasies associated with the South Pacific influenced some of the ways in which Muslims were represented, especially in Romantic fiction, such as the novellas penned by Pierre Loti. Loti wrote himself into many love stories with foreign, nubile, young women, including both Polynesian and Muslim maidens.

Romanticism contributes to the Western imaginaire surrounding Islam, even today. Fantasies about maidens and monsters influenced the ways in which Orientalism constructed Jewish and Muslim men and women. Polynesian men were sexually objectified, at times as much as their female counterparts, and the same was true for Muslims. In the genre of Romantic Orientalism, we find descriptions of the East as a "terrain of bitumen pools, river-bores, whirlpools and rainbows in moving waters."

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and the broader literature on how colonial-era tropes persist in contemporary representation of Muslim and Polynesian subjects.

The fantasies generated about South Pacific islands situated in Romantic ideals like the uncorrupted man—the noble savage—emerged out of environmental determinism. In colonial accounts of Otahiete (Tahiti), beautiful men and women frolic in turquoise lagoons, greet foreigners with garlands of flowers, and have large sex orgies in public. The desire for Tahitian women resulted in the growing value of nails from European ships as an important commodity traded for sexual favors. In contrast to the numerous depictions of Polynesians as perfect, unspoiled humans, Arabs were seldom represented as noble savages.

XREF: This connects to Orientalist scholarship on how Western representations selectively romanticized some colonized peoples while demonizing or ignoring others.

The dictates of nature in the heart of the honest Pagan [i.e., the Arab nomad], constantly employed in long, lonely and dangerous voyages, awakened him often to reflect who that Providence was that invisibly governed him. . . . Possessed of charity, steady in his duty to his parents, full of veneration for his superiors, attentive and merciful even to his beasts; in a word, containing in his heart the principles of the first religion, which God has inculcated in the heart of Noah, the Arab was already prepared to embrace a much more perfect one than what Christianity, at that time, disfigured by folly and superstition, appeared to him to be.

XREF: Relates to Enlightenment-era primitivism and the 'noble savage' theme, contrasting natural virtue with corrupted institutional religion. Also connects to Gibbon's treatment of Islam.

European travelers in the Orient also claimed that human/animal hybrids roamed the land and water. In Egypt they claimed to have observed a human/crocodile hybrid, which is not the only Muslim monster that occupies the Orient. With a few exceptions, the monsters of Orientalism are radically different from their predecessors—human-animal hybrids, sea monsters, and the like were replaced by images of Muslim men as morally depraved and hyper-violent villains.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and the discourse of Western stereotyping of the Muslim world.

The consequence of this [Enlightenment] critique is not the disappearance of the monster. During the Enlightenment, teratological galleries will remain an important category of the imagination. However, the monsters of modernity do not possess the same radical alterity of their classical and medieval predecessors but are rather the excrescence of an almost domestic world, mere deviations from the figures of normality. The sciences of physiognomy and criminology begin to describe, instead of sinners against God and nature, a constellation of degenerates, such as rapists.

The noble savages of Romantic Orientalism soon faded away, to be replaced by degenerate and evil Arab men—characters determined, in part, by a desire for the Muslim female. Although these are not the imaginary, non-human monsters examined thus far, Oriental villains strongly influence the monsters found in Gothic horror fiction and later in horror films, which make them an important part of the archive of Muslim monsters.

With the invasion of Egypt by Napoleon in 1798, the French embarked on a grand colonial project that, as one of its effects, established Orientalism as the colonial and scholarly movement that survives to this day.

QUESTION: What specific scholarly and colonial practices from 1798 still shape Orientalism today?

The framing of the Orient as a wild and uncontrolled environment helped to explain why the Oriental was viewed as "irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, 'different' "—the opposite of the European, the American, the Christian. In literature, art, and cinema, such characterizations are seen in the Muslim despot (who cannot help but be violent because he is a product of his environment and religion, both unrestrained and violent) and the Oriental landscapes found in Gothic horror, which feature blood-streaked skies and medievalesque subterranean chasms that swallow the innocent victims of Muslim monsters.

Typically, Romantic Orientalism features a negative male character suffering from arrested development and, in many cases, a villain, often a Turkish despot, reflecting the ongoing anxiety posed by the Ottomans and Islam in general. Islam seemed to Southey to be dominated by tyranny and submission. From the sources available to him on the Near Orient, he could hardly have perceived Islamic society as being otherwise.

Shelley described the Turks as a race that would "reign in hell." His poem Hellas describes the rape of virgins and impaling of soldiers by Turkish soldiers, "Go! Bid them pay themselves / With Christian blood! Are there no Grecian virgins / Whose shrieks and spasms and tears they may enjoy? / No infidel children to impale on spears?"

To the great modern system for the classification of cultures Said gave the name Orientalism and viewed the hierarchies of this system as marking the presence of a "reconstructed religious impulse, a naturalized supernaturalism." The emergence of this modern classification of cultures does not represent for Said "a sudden access of objective knowledge" but rather "a set of structures inherited from the past, secularized, redisposed, and re-formed by such disciplines as philology, which in turn were naturalized, modernized, and laicized substitutes for (or versions of) Christian supernaturalism."

DEFINE: Clarifies Said's core thesis that Orientalism is not objective knowledge but a secularized, naturalized heir to religious classification systems.

The nexus of knowledge and power creating "the Oriental" and in a sense obliterating him as a human being is therefore not for me an exclusively academic matter. Yet it is an intellectual matter of some very obvious importance. I have been able to put to use my humanistic and political concerns for the analysis and description of a very worldly matter, the rise, the development, and consolidation of Orientalism. Too often literature and culture are presumed to be politically, even historically innocent; it has regularly seemed otherwise to me, and certainly my study of Orientalism has convinced me (and I hope it will convince my literary colleagues) that society and literary culture can only be studied together. In addition, and by an almost inescapable logic, I have found myself writing the history of a strange, secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism.

XREF: Connects to Said's broader thesis in Orientalism and to postcolonial critique methods that insist on the political embeddedness of culture.

Like Jews, Muslims are described as a racial type, represented by the Arab in Orientalist “scholarship.” An article on the Arab personality type describes Muslims as members of a pariah community, characterized by “irrationality or emotionalism, rigidity of thought, extreme suspiciousness and mistrust, free-floating hostility. . . fatalism, laziness, [a] lack of cooperative spirit, and [finally] authoritarianism.”

QUESTION: Which specific article on the 'Arab personality type' is being cited here? Worth tracing the source. XREF: Connects to McVeigh's work on anti-Jewish racial stereotyping and Said's Orientalism critique.

In the genre of fiction known as “The Arab of the Desert,” the desert “symbolized the alleged unproductive, fossilized nature of the Arab and Muslim world,” which was in need of European stewardship. Because of their arrested development, the Arab, Turk, and African could not take care of themselves and needed outside help.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and the broader discourse of colonial justification through alleged cultural superiority. SEED: Potential essay angle on how literary genres historically encoded imperial ideology and legitimated colonial intervention.

Orientalist descriptions of Muslim women are an extension of the Orient as a commodity. Muslim women were described as exhibiting a “revolting immorality,” and exhibiting their unrestrained sexuality in public, much like the depictions of other desirable non-European females. In one description, Muslim dancers perform in “a blaze of Oriental vice,” “heads and breasts now thrown back, now thrown forward to within a hand’s breath of my face, their flesh quivering.”

DEFINE: Illustrates how Orientalist discourse functioned as a tool of commodification, framing Muslim women's portrayal within colonial power structures.

In contrast, the Jewess exists as a seductive and desirable commodity that European and American men longed to possess. The sensuality of Oriental women was one of the main themes in French representations of the Orient, and Jewish women were included in this imagery. . . . Men from disparate fields such as Hugo and the painter Eugene Delacroix—as well as the lesser known writer Charles Didier—all found in the Orient and its Jewess something that was sufficiently distant to be idealized and made mysterious, but which nonetheless retained elements of familiarity. All contributed to the ambiguous image of the Jewess who was both spiritual and carnal: beautiful, sensual, and knowing."

Female Muslim monsters, like their male counterparts, were symbols of fear. Anxieties surrounding race, sexual desire, and identity found a place for expression in these characters, even the ones who were human-like. Take, for example, Jane Eyre's Bertha, the West Indian wife of Rochester: "What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it groveled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal; but it was covered with clothing; and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a man, hid its head and face."

XREF: Bertha as a figure of colonial/racial anxiety connects to wider postcolonial readings of Jane Eyre, like Spivak's.

Many Oriental monsters were related to the Turks, while others were attached to Arab, African, and Persian bodies. Attitudes toward the Ottomans continued to generate fantastic stories about non-Turkish Muslims living under Ottoman rule. In the eighteenth century, English travelers in Egypt claimed that a creature existed that was part crocodile and part human. According to one account, "their [sexual] members [were] like" those of humans. A century later, another croco-sapien appeared in an anti-Catholic comic in an American newspaper, a case in which fantasies about Hindus sacrificing their children to crocodiles were placed upon Catholic bodies—proof of the power of Orientalist monsters.

XREF: Connects to Said's Orientalism and the transferability of monstrous stereotypes across targets.

The Egyptian croco-sapien is an example of the construction of marvelous fictive creatures that were situated in fantasies about Muslims. It is worth remembering here that fantasies about Muslim sexual monstrosity have a long history; one only needs to recall the claims of Prophet Muhammad's sexual superpowers, the reports of gargantuan Muslim penises that Jews and Christians would have to carry into heaven, or the wild stories contained in the Turcica. The croco-sapien is but another example of a wild and fantastic monster that emerged out of the habitus of Muslim monsters:

XREF: Connects to broader Orientalist discourse and Edward Said's critique of how the West constructed the Muslim Other. QUESTION: Worth tracing how these sexual-monstrosity fantasies evolved from medieval to modern Islamophobia.

Crocodiles were clearly a different thing: actually existing creatures from far distant areas, especially dangerous ones of monstrous size that inhabit both land and water, might well have seemed to cross between human and animal orders. Nor, perhaps, should it be surprising that sexual difference was a specific site of such contravention since it was fondly imagined that the lands ruled by the Ottomans were a place where all manner of bizarre and un-natural forms of sexuality could be found.

Another way in which people experienced the Orient was through literature, exemplified in Bram Stoker's adoption of a travel diary as a narrative device in Dracula. Stories were often set in an Oriental locale (also the case with Dracula, set in former Ottoman territory), exotic lands fraught with dangers, as in Beckford's Vathek, whose central character is a Muslim ultimately damned for his numerous sins, including homosexuality and mass murder of a group of naked young boys. Gothic horror, a subgenre of Romantic literature that will be examined in the following chapter, was aligned with the growing popularity of Orientalism.

XREF: Connects Orientalism (Said's framework) to Gothic horror genre studies, an underexplored intersection worth tracing.

Gothic monsters differ from their predecessors by virtue of their mobility (among other features). These creatures often travel to London and other European sites, violating the borders that keep Christians safe. Gothic's resurrection of medievalism is seen in its storylines, characters, settings, and accoutrements. Gothic Muslim monsters have a "diabolic monstrosity" similar to the Muslim monsters examined in earlier eras. They enjoy the hunt and the kill.

Dracula, a hybrid Jewish-Turkish vampire, is pallid, a condition based on his endless need for more human blood, an affliction situated in part in mythologies of Jewish male menstruation. He is sexually ambiguous and opportunistic. Possessing a harem but still unsatisfied, he victimizes men and young children as well as European women. As the book begins, the Englishman Jonathon Harker departs the civilized world of Vienna and Munich, "leaving the West and entering the East," and enters the wasteland of Transylvania, passing through a town that still bears the marks of a seventeenth-century war (it is arrested in time, like all of the East), with roadside shrines and "peasants meeting him with warnings or charms and gifts to ward off evil." This landscape is "primitive, sublime, and horrifying." The wasteland of Transylvania functions as a character in Stoker's text, a malevolent monster that entraps and terrorizes (and often kills) all those who enter it.

Gothic monsters are often sexual monsters. Zofloya is a Moorish Satan. Seductive and attractive, he is simultaneously repulsive and desirable. Vathek is queer, and when egged on by his dark-skinned Indian lover (a monster with green teeth and pasty, discolored skin), he becomes a sadomasochistic pedophile, murdering young naked boys in a homoerotic carnival of horror. Dracula sucks on the flesh of his victims, both male and female, adult and child, and his copulation with humans, like Othello's with Desdemona, always carries the threat of monstrous offspring.

XREF: Connects to literary tradition linking the Gothic's monstrous figures with transgressive desire, from Walpole through Dracula.

William Beckford, the eccentric author of Vathek, took his fascination with the medieval so seriously that he became delusional, building a medieval retreat that included the highest spire in England (which collapsed while he was away in London), a 12-mile wall, and a pack of wild dogs reminiscent of the pack of wolves that surround Dracula's castle. On one occasion an "uninvited visitor (the cousin of the painter W. P. Firth) was treated graciously by Beckford, then informed of the dogs that evening as he was ushered out the door. He spent the night in a tree." Beckford incorporated Orientalism into his medieval lifestyle, calling himself "the caliph" and referring to his estate, Fonthill, as "Bagdad," and identifying with his title character, Vathek. In his writing, Beckford was inspired by the darker imagery associated with Orientalism. In Vathek, "the monstrous, threatening genii found in The Thousand One Nights (more commonly known as The Arabian Nights)," were replaced with skies streaked with blood, a demonic Indian, and a monster named Vathek who commits numerous crimes, including the immolation (in a fiery pit resembling the hell-chambers seen in medieval painting) of 50 children.

SEED: The image of a guest spending the night in a tree after being shown the dogs is a striking anecdote — could anchor an essay on the psychology of obsessive historical reenactment or gothic eccentricity. FICTION: Beckford's self-styled life as 'the caliph' in a medieval estate, complete with wild dogs and a collapsed tower, is ready-made gothic character material.

The landscapes of Gothic horror reflect these foreboding spaces. Zofloya's victims occupy cavernous and dark homes and creepy and labyrinthine forests. Vathek's kingdom is a shop of horrors, with a giant eye that follows every move, skies full of human blood, and hellish chasms in which masses of innocent children are sacrificed. Dracula lives in Transylvania, a land that even today is associated with monsters. The desert is important because it was the original wasteland. It is the space that inspired these other environs of horror.

Zofloya tells the story of the spoiled, malicious, and vengeful Victoria, who is led by a dark-skinned Moor named Zofloya to commit numerous crimes. As in many Gothic tales, the subconscious plays a central role in this text. Dreams are moments of revelation that "influence one's waking life and reveal an inner psychical or spiritual awakening." Victoria's sexual desire for the Moor, who at the story's conclusion reveals his true identity as Satan, is one of the secrets hidden in the subconscious.

XREF: Connects to broader Gothic literature conventions and psychoanalytic readings of 19th-century fiction.

It should be pointed out that Victoria is an unsavory character. Although Zofloya/Satan is the catalyst for her growing hysteria and the murders that ensue, Victoria's selfishness, jealousy, and malice are highlighted in the text.

Zofloya's knowledge of black magic and miraculous powers also point to his demonic nature. When he returns from his disappearance, Zofloya reports that he was saved from certain death by his "possession of a secret transmitted to me by my ancestors." These ancestors are Moors, African Muslims who dabbled in black magic. In addition to sorcery, Zofloya is telepathic, able to read Victoria's mind, a power that Dracula and other monsters also possess.

XREF: Connects Zofloya's telepathy to Dracula and other gothic monsters, showing a shared convention in gothic literary tradition.

Reflecting a pattern common to many Gothic horror tales, including Dracula, the nightmarish environment in this text functions as a character, another monster in the story. In Beckford's tale, the other two prominent monsters are Vathek and the Indian. Vathek's mother is also evil (remember, most Gothic horror texts have a malevolent woman), but she plays a secondary role in the story.

XREF: Connects to the Gothic tradition running from Dracula through contemporary horror, where environment is never merely a backdrop.

Like Dracula, Vathek is polysexual. He likes women, men, and young, nubile children. Vathek's homosexuality was likely influenced by Beckford's own relationships, which included a lengthy affair with a young male aristocrat. It is significant that monstrosity is a central part of this text because, although the act of anal penetration between Vathek and the Indian is not specified, it is intimated. During this period, “the term 'monstrous' was used as a constructive synonym for the bodies and desires of queer men.” When Vathek kisses the Indian, lip on lip, it is presented as a queer and grotesque act: “In the transports of his joy, Vathek leaped upon the neck of the frightful Indian, and kissed his horrid mouth and his hollow cheeks, as though they had been the coral lips and the lilies and roses of his most beautiful wives.” This kiss is the Gothic equivalent of sodomy.

XREF: Connects to broader Gothic literature scholarship on queerness in texts like Dracula and Frankenstein.

One of the interesting complexities in this text is that Vathek, identified as an Arab Muslim, is persuaded to reject Islam and follow the path of Satan. Beckford's treatment of the Muslim male is predicated on the idea that he is essentially evil, a homosexual, a pedophile, and a child murderer.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and the broader Western literary tradition of Orientalist stereotypes about Muslim men.

The shadow cast by Anglo-Saxon racism on Stoker's work, especially Dracula, cannot be discounted. Stoker clearly harbored some anxieties that were rooted in his Anglo-Irish identity, but he was also inspired by American racial mythology. Stoker personally knew Buffalo Bill Cody, the Western showman whose shows expressed "the regeneration of the white race through frontier conflict and technological progress." The character Quincey Morris (who is a casualty in the fight against Dracula) was based on Cody, and like the American entertainer, Morris uses Western technology (in the form of guns and a frontiersmen Bowie knife) in the crusade against the count.

XREF: Connects to scholarship on race and colonial anxiety in gothic literature; pairs with postcolonial readings of Dracula.

"Vampires are represented as sexually predatory immigrants who infect and enslave the weak and the unwary. Vampires contaminate flesh and blood; they disrupt national and racial certainty."

XREF: This echoes literary readings of Dracula as a metaphor for Eastern European immigration and anxieties over national/racial purity in Victorian Britain.

Across the Danube lie the Balkans; Western European perception of these lands aids in the portrayals of Europeans as heroes and everyone else as villains through a process that treated "the Balkans as the site of the primitive, archaic, and irrational," in which "the strategy of exoticization renders the vampire story more plausible."

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and the broader framework of how the West constructs the East as exotic 'other' to justify its own heroism.

The Balkan state of Transylvania is a site of racial degeneration referred to in the text as the “whirlpool of European races.” Its inhabitants are “infected” with Turkish bloodlines. The theme of racial pollution, as noted earlier, is a central part of the story, and the vampire’s cannibalism is a symbol of the threat of miscegenation. Stoker, an Irish Protestant, was, like many of his compatriots, fixated on the dangers posed by Irish Catholics:

DEFINE: Frames Dracula's cannibalism as a symbol for miscegenation and racial pollution fears. XREF: Connects the vampire's racial threat to the broader British/Irish anxieties of the Victorian era.

For LeFanu and Stoker, both members of the Protestant Anglo-Irish ruling class of nineteenth-century Ireland, these legends [of vamps, vampires, necrophiles, and necrophilles] were at once local folklore and metaphors for their class’s anxieties about the unhyphenated Irish, who were emerging from centuries of suppression to demand political and economic power. The Anglo-Irish feared intermarriage with the Irish, which would lead to racial degeneration, and the loss of power which would inevitably follow letting the Irish gain ownership of land. These anxieties underlie such works as Carmilla and Dracula.

XREF: Connects classic horror to colonial-postcolonial readings of Gothic literature, resonating with other interpretations of Dracula as a colonial anxiety text. DEFINE: Establishes vampire legends as political metaphor for the Anglo-Irish ruling class's anxieties rather than mere folklore.

The Count is s hybrid monster, and his identity as a Christian further complicates things. He is both a “hybriditian Ottomanized European” and “a dissonant figure fitting uncomfortably, a blasphemous Christian hero.”

Dracula is a Turk. He admits his Ottoman bloodlines when he laments, “Woe was it that his own unworthy brother [a Dracula ancestor], when he had fallen, sold his people to the Turk and brought the shame of slavery on them!” The Count functions as a symbol of the weakened Ottoman Empire: he is a “composite figure straining to represent coherently all the social forces that the disintegrating Ottoman Empire brought to light.” Dracula admits his Muslim bloodlines when he says the invaders of Transylvania, whom his ancestors were mingled with, were of “the blood of those old witches” that joined “with the devils in the desert.” His Jewish-Muslim-witch-devil nature makes him monstrous because, in addition to the anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim identities, he is of a mixed race, which makes him even more degenerate.

During the writing of Dracula (1894–1896), the British press often reported on Turkish massacres of Armenians, contributing to the anxiety surrounding Ottoman power. Dracula is inspired by this and other Orientalist discourse: “The Count’s transgressions and aggressions are placed in the context, provided by innumerable travel narratives, of late-Victorian forays into the ‘East.’ ”

XREF: Connects to broader Orientalist discourse and how imperial anxieties filtered into Victorian fiction beyond Stoker.

Dracula has an aquiline nose, a common attribute of Muslims found in numerous writings, including another of Stoker’s Muslim vampires. In The Mystery of the Sea (1902), the villain Don Bernardino is described as having this feature: “Don Bernardino, with his high aquiline nose and black eyes of eagle keenness, his proud bearing and the very swarthiness which told of Moorish descent.” Later in the story, it is revealed that this Moor, like Dracula, is a monster.

XREF: Connects to Orientalist literary tropes and how physical stereotypes coded villainy in Victorian fiction beyond Dracula. Also echoes how racialized features were used to signal moral corruption.

Dracula’s female vampires comprise his harem. As David Glover argues, “Jonathon’s. . . seduction by the Count’s three ‘brides’. . . reinforces Dracula’s identification with the mysterious East, for it is modeled upon the conceit that the influence of Turkish culture on Vlad the Impaler, following his youthful days in Istanbul, would have led him to keep a harem.” The encounter between Jonathon and these female creatures is one of the most sexually explicit in the text. It is yet another example of the Western idea of the harem as a den of delight, a site of unimaginable pleasures.

Dracula provides a model, replicated in later works, for the emergence of hybridity as the character of the future and of modern experience. In this regard, the mixed blood of Mina Harker’s child at the book’s end is comparable to the mixed character of the foetus carried by Lilith Lyapo, the protagonist of Octavia Butler’s science fiction novel Dawn (1987), after her sexual encounters with an alien. It is an open question whether the cultural anxieties that underlie both Dracula and Dawn have altered or abated significantly in the past hundred years.

XREF: Connects Dracula's hybrid figure to Butler's Dawn, showing a cross-century literary lineage around cultural otherness.

As Bellah points out, American identity is rooted in a sense of divine agency and Christian destiny. “Behind the civil religion at every point lie Biblical archetypes: Exodus, Chosen People, Promised Land, New Jerusalem, Sacrificial Death and Rebirth. But it is also genuinely American and genuinely new.”

XREF: Connects to Robert Bellah's civil religion thesis; relevant to discussions of American exceptionalism and national mythology.

Early colonists from England and elsewhere in Europe were also engaged in a slightly different project from their ancestors. Concerned with the conquest of land and the elimination of its inhabitants, they were also engaged in the project of formulating a new identity based on notions of Christian destiny, Anglo-Saxon mythology, racism, and Gothic sensibilities rooted in the medieval episteme.

Consider the John Vanderlyn painting The Death of Jane McCrea, which shows two Indians murdering a white woman. One holds her head while the other raises a hatchet. The murderers are not simply enemies but monsters, giants twice as wide as their victim. The story of Jane McCrea was retold numerous times in works of frontier fiction, in which Indians are described as “monsters, only human in outward form.” Captivity narratives, rape fantasies, and rescue stories, while originally focusing on American Indians, are later applied to Africans, Muslims, and African-Americans.

In the US imagination, Muslims are not white, and they certainly aren't Christian. Their origins are murky and distant, as opposed to the ancestral Anglo-Saxon lands with which many white Americans still identify. Muslims have always been posited as an external threat that, in addition to America's many internal enemies, including American Indians, African-Americans, Mexicans, queers, and feminists, threaten the American dream.

The typical image of the cannibal-monsters was that of the cynocephalus. The first references to fantastic dog-headed peoples living in Asia date from the pre-Socratic period. They then come to inspire the medieval imagination. Marco Polo discovers, on an island, anthropophagi with dog’s heads. Columbus is the first to mention the presence of man-eaters in the New World, whom he claims have dog’s heads.

XREF: Connects to themes of monstrous humanoid races in classical and medieval travel literature, e.g. Pliny's Natural History and other paradoxography traditions.

In his journals, Columbus claims to have witnessed, “men with one eye only, and others with faces that were man-eaters, accustomed upon taking a prisoner to cut his throat, drink his blood and dismember him.” This landscape was occupied with Plinian monsters, demon-worshippers, Amazons, a race of humanoid creatures with tails, and dragons. A dragon was reportedly killed by a gallant (explorer) knight in one of numerous tales about the Americas that was modeled upon medieval romances, which are stories, as we well know, populated with Muslim monsters. The importance of chivalry is reflected in the journals of numerous explorers, an example of the medieval episteme that framed colonial adventures. Giants, another type of monster featured in medieval tales of chivalry, were spotted in Brazil and Patagonia during the sixteenth century.

XREF: Connects to broader themes of preconceived narratives shaping empirical observation, such as how explorers see what their cultural frameworks expect.

Explorers constructed a complex narrative about the people they encountered. This included claims that they were devil-worshippers, as if American Indians were lapsed Christians. American Indians were also identified with Muslims. These New Moors were “imagined as extensions of either the defeated Moors or the still-troublesome Moriscos.” They were also punished as if they were Muslims.

So interchangeable were Muslims and Indians in the conquistador’s minds that they called Indians ‘Muslims’ and Indian temples ‘mosques.’ At one time, according to Bernal Diaz’s account, the Spaniards even considered naming the first city they saw as Great Cairo. Aztecs were often associated with the Moors, so much so that when battling the Indians, ‘the Spaniards often invoked the aid of holy figures such as the Virgin Mary or St. James, known in Spanish as Santiago Matamoros, patron saint of Spain against the Moors’ (rechristened Mata-indios to better suit his new or renewed role).

XREF: Connects to the framing of the Reconquista being transposed onto the New World, a pattern also seen in other colonial encounters.

During the American colonial era, stories of monsters were not uncommon. This is not surprising, given that early colonists were from the very places that invented or sustained the fantasies of monsterdom: “They were all at home in an intellectual terrain that was literally swarming with monsters.” Lands far away or recently discovered by Europeans were thought to be especially ripe for encounters with non-human creatures. Familiar Muslim characters, including monsters, also continued to reappear in the later centuries of modernity. In 1727, a popular Portuguese book described a frightening Turkish monster—a gargantuan figure whose breath caused a giant, eerie light to appear.

DEFINE: Clarifies the historical context: early American colonists' monster beliefs were imported from European intellectual traditions that already teemed with such fantasies.

Even without foreign monsters, America was a landscape filled with imaginary characters. Frontier monsters in rivers, forests, deserts, and caves populated the American imagination. It is not accidental that these monsters inhabited the same spaces as American Indians. Stories of water monsters in the Ohio and other rivers were often described as “demonic” due to their proximity to American Indians or otherwise related to an indigenous narrative, often implicating American Indians with some kind of maleficence. The language of savagism employed in such narratives excluded American Indians from the human family. Savagism is a language situated in notions of monstrosity: “Images of the Indian as a beast drew on legends of monsters, wild men, and quasi-human creatures that had long been part of the European tradition.”

XREF: Connects to broader settler colonial rhetoric that dehumanized indigenous peoples through monstrous imagery, echoing similar dynamics in other colonial contexts.

By the end of the American Revolutionary War, a new monster dominated the imagination about Islam—the Barbary Muslim. Fantasies of African monstrosity, including sexual abnormality, contributed to the ways in which Africans, and later African slaves and African-Americans, were constructed in the American imaginary. Accounts of African apes and their great sexual organs were attached to the men and women of Africa, who were characterized as being “as libidinous as apes,” related to Satan, and the consorts of witches. Depictions of African Muslims incorporated the same ideas.

DEFINE: Explains how the 'Barbary Muslim' figure drew from existing racist constructions of African sexuality in the American imaginary.

In addition to the published historical accounts of slavery in North Africa, the Barbary captivity topos appeared in at least four early American novels, nine early plays, ten dime novels, and almost a dozen Hollywood movies. The Barbary captivity scenario even provided adventures for Tom Swift and for the sharp-shooting cowboy Tom Mix, as well as sailing into the modern romance novel under such titles as Barbary Bride and Angelique in Barbary. Barbary slave galleys were used to sell the Packard Custom Eight De Luxe automobile in the 1930s, and children could even play the “Pirates of the Barbary Coast” board game.

XREF: This connects to broader literature on Orientalism and how colonial/slavery themes recur across popular media forms.

Filmic Barbary monsters are numerous, and include the 1975 Sean Connery-Candice Bergen movie The Wind and the Lion. The film is loosely based on the 1904 kidnapping of Jon Perdicaris and his father-inlaw, Cromwell Varley, who, when released by their captor, described their lodgings to the New York Times as “Mr. Perdicaris’s Summer Home.” Their captor Raisuli was described as “a tribal gentleman of the old school, lodging his captives in a magnificent tent and dining with them each evening.” In the film, these details are transformed, starting with “the balding businessman Joe Perdicaris,” who “is transmogrified into a nubile Candice Bergen.” The captor (played by Sean Connery) beheads people with a smile and a wink while uttering Arabic phrases like “Bismillah.”

In horror film, a symbiosis exists between the dreams of the filmmaker and the nightmares of the audience—this is the “fusion made by the shared structures of a common ideology.” In some cases, monsters are culturally neutral, failing to express a particular identity. In other cases, however, monsters have a pronounced ethnic, religious, or racial identity. Paul Wegener’s 1920 film, The Golem: How He Came into the World, is an example of the latter, by altering the golem legends situated in Jewish folklore to create a monster that threatens German Christians. This Jewish monster is ultimately destroyed by an Aryan hero.

QUESTION: How do culturally-coded monsters function differently from neutral ones in their ideological impact on audiences? XREF: Connects to broader ideas about how art encodes political anxieties, and how horror functions as ideological projection.

This movie is an Orientalist phantasmagoria, a collection of horrifying images that symbolize the terrible East: “Siamese architecture and boats in a lagoon [with] shots of a turbaned man leading an elephant,” “a mansion with Mediterranean, Spanish colonial, and California motifs,” a “monkey and a Thai doll against a backdrop of leopard skin draped on a wall,” the “throne of the Siamese prince and princess [with] two women wearing Egyptian costumes,” and “scenes of Buddhist priests with shaven heads preparing to sacrifice a lamb. . . with shots of teeming alligators below.” The fact that Buddhists are shown sacrificing lambs expresses the film’s Orientalist contours. The lamb is a well-known symbol of Christ, and Buddhists are vegetarians. None of this matters, for Orientalism often focuses less on details and more on exoticism.

The banquet at the palace of the child maharajah, whose Muslim-Hindu name is Zalim Singh, is a feast with live baby snakes that emerge from a giant snake when sliced open, giant beetles, and eyeball soup (from what animal one is left to wonder). The chilled monkey brains—the featured dessert—demonstrates a complete ignorance of Hindu dietary restrictions. There is a double irony here: first, regarding the vegetarian diet of Hindus; and second, the Hindu god Hanuman’s assumption of the form of a monkey. As Nirej Sekhon writes, “In the second Indiana Jones film, the hero’s pseudo-archaeological misadventures land him in an unnamed part of India. After consuming a typical Indian feast of live vermin, eyeball soup, and monkey brains, the decidedly non-Indian Indy discovers a subterranean ‘temple of doom,’ where he is left to cringe in horror as the natives tear the heart out of a living human.” The unmapped village of Mayapore suggests that “civilization” (the West) has not reached it.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and postcolonial critiques of Hollywood's depiction of non-Western cultures.

Other films in the Indiana Jones series feature stock Muslim characters, including an obnoxious, fat Egyptian that is the comic relief, but Temple of Doom and its Oriental horrors say the most about Hollywood’s treatment of the East. As a trilogy, the three Indiana Jones films mirror the Arthurian form, “from a knight’s interpellation into the Arthurian court, through his demonstration of that interpellation by such actions as rescuing maidens and annexing kingdoms, to his final turning to the spiritual values of the Grail quest,” retold “as American history.” The Indiana Jones films are not the only creations of George Lucas that reflect both Orientalism and medievalism. The theme park is today’s equivalent of an eighteenth-century tour down the Nile. Disneyland’s Indiana Jones “Adventure” ride features a tour of Oriental horrors, including “caverns of bubbling death, screaming undead mummies, erupting lava, evil wraiths and giant snakes.”

XREF: Connects medievalist studies of the Arthurian tradition with postcolonial film criticism of Hollywood Orientalism.

In a haunting scene from the first Star Wars film, Luke expresses his desire to fight the Empire through his training as a pilot, a desire prohibited by his uncle. The young Skywalker walks outside and, in an iconic shot, looks out at the desert at two suns in the distance. In Shi’a thought, the sighting of two moons symbolizes the coming of the Mahdi, the Twelfth Imam, who will restore the world as it should be—a place of justice and peace. Luke is not the Mahdi, but another character holds an uncanny similarity to this religious figure—Ben Kenobi. Like the Mahdi, he disappears, but he materializes again and displays incredible powers. In the end, before disappearing into the air, Kenobi reminds Vader that striking him down will only make his power stronger. Like the Mahdi, he gives messages to his deputies (R2D2, Luke, and others) and sets in motion a series of conflicts that eventually ends in the restoration of justice. Clearly, Lucas incorporated Islamic elements into several of his storylines.

XREF: Connects Star Wars narrative to Islamic religious eschatology, paralleling Lucas's known borrowing from diverse religious traditions like Joseph Campbell's hero's journey and Buddhist themes.

Valentino plays an Arab sheik—or does he? This character is more complicated than he appears, as a “sheik” who is a European dressed like an Arab who commits Arab crimes (kidnapping, rape). The sheik is also appealing because he encompasses some aspects of Romantic Orientalism (exotic dress, grand gestures, objectified beauty), but he is not really Arab. If he were a “real” Arab, the film would end with the rescue of Diana by a white hero, who would kill the “sheik” and preserve the Western frontier. The Valentino films are examples of the “sheik-in-drag,” similar to the European adventurers who posed as Muslims to “experience” Mecca during the hajj.

XREF: Connects to orientalism discourse and cultural appropriation studies about Westerners performing the exotic other.

In the first sheik film, Ahmed kidnaps and rapes his white captive Diana, who, despite the sexual assault(s), falls in love with him and becomes his wife (or one of his wives). In the second film, the two appear as a happily married couple, with Diana giving some measured advice to her wild husband, still posing as an Arab, when their son—also named Ahmed—rapes the dancing girl Yasmin—an act of revenge for her suspected involvement with Ahmed’s kidnapping and torture by a band of criminal Arabs. Before Ahmed Junior rapes Yasmin, he exclaims, “I may not be the first victim, by Allah, I shall be the one you remember!” This suggests that Ahmed will be as brutal as possible in the assault. Despite this, in the end, the two ride off into the desert, mirroring the rape-marriage portrayed in the first film. These two films set the standard for how Arab men (and by extension, all Muslim men) are portrayed in movies—as uncontrollably violent individuals.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and broader studies of racialized media representation of Arabs and Muslims.

In Son of the Sheik, two characters cross over to the monstrous—Ghabah the Moor and an unnamed Arab dwarf. Ghabah the Moor is a hideous and sinister criminal whose “crimes outnumber the sands.” He and the dwarf take great pleasure in threatening to rape Yasmin, as well as in torturing Ahmed by beating him and burning his feet. Ghabah and the dwarf behave like monsters; Ghabah grimaces and makes faces at the camera and the dwarf prances around like a ghoulish troll. These are the authentic Muslim monsters of the first Sheik film.

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of racial caricature in early film representations of non-Western peoples.

According to the colonial narrative, the entire world needs the West: Not only has the Western imaginary metaphorically rendered the colonized land as female to be saved from her environ/mental disorder, it has also given prominence to more literal narratives of rescue specifically of Western and non-Western women—from polygamous Arabs, libidinous Blacks, and macho Italians.

XREF: Connects to Spivak's 'white men saving brown women from brown men' trope in postcolonial theory.

Hollywood films often feature Muslim “savages” who are exterminated like flies. In True Lies (1994), Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a CIA agent who fights a legion of Arab terrorists who are killed with impunity. To be clear, these are not Muslim monsters: they are human characters (bad humans, but humans nonetheless). Still, the punishment of the Arab bodies is disturbing. Avi Nesher, a former Israeli commando who works in Hollywood as a consultant, “incensed by the sick humor of a scene in which an Uzi tossed down a flight of stairs inadvertently mows down a roomful of Arabs,” had this to say about the scene: “You were supposed to laugh? I fought Arabs and I had Arab friends, but this was completely dehumanizing a group.” This type of film narrative dehumanizes Muslims and helps validate the claim that we have a right to be violent toward the Other. Talal Asad calls this “the right to kill,” which is “the right to behave in violent ways against other people—especially citizens of foreign states at war and toward the uncivilized, whose very existence is a threat to the civilized order.”

Several years ago, I remember seeing a picture of Osama bin Laden that ominously foretold the tragedy that would come in 9/11. The picture showed bin Laden, with his typical slothful and indifferent look, sitting while gripping his Kalashnikov with neatly organized and impressive-looking books filling the background. . . . With very few exceptions, bin Laden’s library contained no works by modern writers; nearly all the books were heavy-duty, profound, works on premodern Islamic law and legal theory. . . . With his paltry and rustic furniture, Kalashnikov, and tradition-oriented library, bin Laden symbolized a rebellion against the prevailing paradigms of postcolonialism and the culture of modernity.

The language of normative humanity is English; the language of the Other, the foreigner, and the monster is babble. This is especially true of Arabic, which when included in a film is presented as “an indecipherable murmur.” This is a “hallmark of the Orientalist project,” seen in the numerous Oriental and Muslim characters that grunt, cannot speak at all, or have an obvious physical deformity. The films of Ray Harryhausen include numerous examples of these conventions.

XREF: Relates to Said's Orientalism and postcolonial film theory about how representation encodes power through language.

As we have seen, the vampire originated in the anti-Semitic and anti-Turkish/Muslim discourse that was a result of British preoccupation with racial purity. The mummy, a creature that represents the mystery and darkness associated with both Africa and Islam, is a product of Orientalism and Egyptomania. The zombie’s genesis was formulated by the fictionalization of African religion and was inspired by the mummies of Egypt. These monsters of modernity, including the Muslim monsters identified in the following pages, express the “social anxiety toward Islam and Muslim cultures that is largely unexamined by, yet deeply ingrained in, Americans.”

XREF: Connects monster tropes to postcolonial theory and Orientalism (Said). QUESTION: How directly is today's zombie and vampire media still drawing on these racialized origins?

Much in this episode of dramatic history can be designated by the word “Gothic,” and when one bears in mind that by 1800 the Gothic novels were in high favor with the reading public, it will be seen that native as well as foreign influences may have operated to produce it. Furthermore, many of these Gothic novels had reached the stage. But an examination of these dramatized versions discloses the curious fact that their authors seem to have taken pains to minimize the horrors of their originals rather than to utilize them for dramatic effect. Nor were they content with even this. They frequently perverted the terrors into comedy, by the way of a concession to a public which was not yet willing to suffer a romanticized theater.

Formulas from Gothic literature established the dominant narrative expressed in horror film—the entrapment of the protagonist in a space where the universe contracts. These entrapments, which include “the corridors of uncounted castles, the dark warrens of Victorian slums, sewers, and mines, the fog shrouded streets of Jekyll’s or Jack the Ripper’s London, and the labyrinth that leads to Dracula’s castle,” are recycled or re-expressed in countless suspense, horror, and slasher films.

XREF: Connects to general knowledge of horror genre history and Gothic literature influence on cinema.

Dracula holds a Moroccan lantern in his hand, a detail that is not incidental. Transylvania is a former Ottoman territory, and Dracula, as discussed earlier, is a hybrid monster with Turkish blood coursing through his veins. The "Eastern" lantern is a familiar visual trope, appearing in numerous writings, paintings, advertisements, movies, and other forms of cultural production. Oriental lanterns are one of the commodities inspired by the East and fashionable in Europe and North America that gained popularity during Stoker's time.

XREF: Connects to broader Victorian Orientalism and the fashion for Eastern commodities mentioned throughout the analysis.

Several scenes in the film depict sexual acts between humans and monsters. The first of these is the orgy at Dracula's castle between Jonathon and a trio of female vampires, whom Coppola represents as a harem. The vampiresses perform oral sex on Jonathon; they are half-naked, dressed in belly-dancing costumes with head veils in the style of early Hollywood Arabian Nights films.

XREF: Connects to Orientalism in early Hollywood — the Arabian Nights visual vocabulary mapping Easternness onto exotic/transgressive sexuality.

Yet however one chooses to judge the persisting of Crusading ideology, it is essential to consider as well a discourse that is inextricably bound up with it, one remarkably uniform throughout the centuries, an ideology we might dub the Saracen doxology to emphasize its descent from medieval ways of constructing the Saracen other as well as its perdurable, almost catechistic character.

XREF: Connects to postcolonial criticism and Edward Said's orientalism, and to the reader's broader work on discursive constructions of the other. DEFINE: Introduces and defines the concept of the 'Saracen doxology' — a catechistic, centuries-long ideology constructing the Saracen as other.

The opening scene of 300 shows a young boy training to be a Spartan warrior. When he goes to battle against a giant wolf, the narrator introduces the threat against “sacred” Sparta: the Persian “beast. . . awaiting the meal to come.” The Persian Empire is literally a monster, and Sparta, playing the role of the hero, is “the world’s one hope” for “justice,” an oppositional relationship portrayed through the presentation of the normative, human Spartans and the monstrous Persians, whose alterity is represented through deformed physiognomy, racial difference, and deviant sexual practices.

XREF: This connects to Orientalism scholarship and postcolonial media analysis of how Western narratives represent Eastern adversaries.

The monstrosity of the Persians is primarily based on racial difference, although hideous sexual behaviors also come into play. They are monsters that deviate from bodily normativity. Ephialtes’s monstrosity is predicated on his physical disability, but he is only one of many deformed and punished bodies. In B. J. Chaplin’s excellent study of the film, he argues that disability is used in 300 to represent “ 'particular bodies in particular societies' and 'moral deficiency.' ” King Xerxes wins Ephialtes over (to the dark side) when the two meet at the king’s harem, in a carnivalesque scene of disfigured lesbians, disfigured Persians (including Persians missing limbs), a human with a goat’s head, lots of moaning, and a good dose of Orientalist costumes and nudity. Xerxes promises “all the pleasures of the world” to Ephialtes, who agrees, kneels before him in a suggestive pose and then issues a series of grunts before he sets off to betray the Spartans.

XREF: Connects to wider scholarship on Orientalism in Western film representations of Persia/the Middle East.

The Persians are also racial monsters. In an early scene, an African messenger from the Persian court, reminiscent of a cross between a giant and a Black Saracen or Black Turk, arrives at the Spartan court. Wearing a human garland of skulls, he is accompanied by other Persians wearing turbans and face veils. He has a vile hatred for women that is expressed in his behavior toward Queen Gorgo, played as an emancipated Western woman. King Leonidas refers to the Persians as “philosophers and boy lovers” (an ironic charge given the sexual history of Sparta) before the Black Persian and his companions are killed, pushed into a bottomless pit.

SEED: Potential essay angle: how 300's Persian caricature intertwines racial stereotypes with gendered and Orientalist tropes, and the irony given Spartan history.

King Xerxes towers over King Leonidas, much like the giants of medieval lore who terrified Christian knights. Other giants in the film include the 10-foot tall Persians with lobster claws and filed teeth who show up at the final battle, and the giants with missing arms and metal prosthetics carrying dwarfs (who serve as archers) on their backs. Xerxes represents a long list of medieval tropes about Muslims: they are giants; they have black or brown skin; they are bisexual; they like men, they have sex with boys; and they are generally creepy.

XREF: Connects to orientalism as a continuing visual language in contemporary film, echoing Said's framework.

The Persians are all monsters, a collection of deformed hunchbacks, giants, sexual deviants, and other weirdos. Persians are all bad: “Black people. Brown people. Disfigured people. Gay men (not gay in the buff, homoerotic Spartan fashion, but in the effeminate Persian style). Lesbians. Disfigured lesbians. Ten-foot-tall giants with filed teeth and lobster claws. Elephants and rhinos (filthy creatures both).”

XREF: This dehumanizing caricature of the enemy echoes other historical propaganda and othering rhetoric, both ancient and modern.

Once clearly identified as aggressive, or implacable, or too “different” to coexist peacefully with an enlightened humanity, then the Other becomes a legitimate target. It is at this point that the process of stereotypical manipulation in SF, when faced with the Other, often defeats its own attempts at heroism. To create a resourceful enemy, the alien is endowed with a varied and heterogeneous degree of intelligence. However, it is rarely an intelligence that humans would find incomprehensible and, most significantly, it is hardly ever an intelligence superior to humankind’s. From a postcolonial perspective, the misrepresentation of the Other is almost complete. The alien first exoticized and distant, then identifiably different, has now become a quantifiable and dangerous known, sufficiently intelligent to pose a danger but never sufficiently superior to overcome the wiles of Homo sapiens.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and postcolonial readings of science fiction, as well as theories of the Other in cultural criticism. DEFINE: Clarifies the postcolonial concept of 'Othering' and its specific operation within SF alien representation.

In the 1950s, movies about “aliens” were cautionary tales about the Communist/atheist threat, but with the end of Soviet power, a new danger emerged—Islam.

XREF: Connects to Cold War film history and shifting cultural anxieties in American popular media.

Stephen King once remarked that we create horrors to deal with the anxieties that exist in the real world, and chief among these is our fear of mortality, which is heightened during times of conflict or fear of conflict. The idea that “[w] e should fight for our humanity, and ‘not go gentle into that good night’ ” has political implications. This is precisely why the history of movies is tied to political events, something seen in the increased production of science fiction films during the Cold War and the precipitous rise in apocalyptic films since 2001.

XREF: Connects to the broader claim that movie history tracks political events, echoing the Cold War sci-fi boom and post-2001 apocalyptic surge.

In Chronicles of Riddick, the monsters kill humans who do not agree to “convert” to the Necromonger religion; when they do convert, the humans kneel down in the Muslim stage of prayer known as sujud. The Grand Marshal of the Necromongers goes on a pilgrimage and returns as a monster. He lives in a Moorish-style palace where Riddick is repeatedly tortured. The Grand Marshal constantly orders captives to “convert,” “convert or fight,” or “convert or die”—some of the language in which this film reflects contemporary political discourse surrounding Islam.

SEED: Could become an essay angle: how ostensibly non-political sci-fi franchises absorb and code contemporary Islamophobic discourse into their alien religions and villains.

This image of the zombie as an automaton with no feelings of guilt or remorse, on a mission to kill and kill again, has a political correlate. In addition to the post-9/11 spike in zombie films, there are countless disaster, millenarian, and apocalyptic movies that do not feature these monsters but exploit the fear and anxiety that the attacks created. These movies all focus on a post-2001 sense of dread that we are never safe, amplifying the anxiety Americans feel: “It does not take much of a stretch to see the parallel between zombies and anonymous terrorists who seek to convert others within society to their deadly cause. The fear that anyone could be a suicide bomber or a hijacker parallels a common trope in zombie films, in which healthy people are zombified by contact with other bodies and become infected.”

XREF: Connects horror genre tropes to political/historical context, echoing work on how genre fiction encodes cultural anxieties.

The setting is an interior, with a pedestal, cupboard doors, and a painted backcloth decorated with a mummy case, statues, canopic jars, plinths, busts, and figurines—a veritable Victorian fantasy of the Egyptian burial chamber. An old curio dealer, leafing through his catalog, is startled by the sudden appearance of a disembodied hand with a wand (or a sword), and then of a skull wearing an Egyptian headdress. Cupboard doors fly open, and the skull flies off the table and leftward to a shelf, where it turns into a woman’s upper body and head. While the shopkeeper closes the cupboard, the woman’s lower body enters from the left and attaches itself to her waiting upper half. The woman dances, and as she turns she turns she becomes a black woman—or rather; a white woman in blackface—with black gloves. Horrified, the dealer shuts her in the cupboard, but as she closes it she turns white again, and then she appears as a ghost outside the cupboard. He opens the cupboard again to discover a mummy, which changes into a man in ancient Egyptian tunic and headdress.

XREF: Connects to historiography of Egyptomania in popular culture and early film's encoding of race.

The most obvious similarity between the vampire and zombie is that both creatures extinguish vitality and introduce a state of zombification, at times through biting their victim, and at other times by attacking the body in another way. We might think of vampires and mummies/zombies as "psychic vampires," creatures who "flourish not by sucking blood but by draining vitality, will, and even experience from their victims." The standard zombie narrative introduces a monster, or monsters, who steal life from the innocent, much like the Muslim terrorist who is the neo-dead, asleep to the vitality of the living, who takes life in an intimate, "deadly embrace."

XREF: Connects monster tropes (vampires, zombies) to the author's ongoing framing of terrorists as 'neo-dead' and 'psychic vampires,' a recurring political metaphor.

Here, it is revealed that the virus renders one emotionless; the infected are zombie-terrorists with no emotions, no morality—beings solely focused on the destruction of human life. … This is where the film gets really interesting. Ben tells Carol that it is no use to resist, that "they" offer a new world absent of pain, war, and suffering. "We were wrong to fight them," Ben argues, insisting they offer "a world without war, poverty, hate. . . rape," then suggesting, "You know it's true. Our world [that is, their world] is a better world." This vision of the world is very millenarian—the old will be wiped out and a new order will take place. Like the vision of Islamicate Universalism, everything will be just and peaceful.

XREF: Parallels millenarian revolutionary rhetoric generally, and the text explicitly links it to Islamicate Universalism's promise of a just and peaceful new order.

One interrogator at Abu Ghraib commented, "We thought they [the Iraqis] were animals," revealing that soldiers thought Muslims were something only human- like. Some US soldiers likened Iraqis to animals, referring to them as "beasts." There were "striking similarities between the lives of animals and the lives of prisoners captured on film at Abu Ghraib," except the dogs used to torture the prisoners were treated better. Survivors of Abu Ghraib testified to the inhumane treatment they were subjected to. Haider Al-Aboodi recalled how he and others were "forced to walk like dogs on our hands and knees. And we had to bark like a dog," Kasim Hilas told of the rape of an Iraqi boy by a male soldier that was filmed by a female soldier, and as Nori Al-Yasseri testified, "They treated us like animals not humans."

In the Middle Ages, there was an identification between the page (or canvas) and the body, inscribing human bodies with meaning. As one fellow scholar puts it, "[l] iterary production takes place on bodies." This made human subjects the "conveyors of words or, more generally, signs." During the medieval period, Jewish, Muslim, and African bodies functioned as signs of Satan, demons, monsters, sin, and monstrosity within a system of meaning that continued to be in force in the Renaissance and later centuries. We see these signs in medieval texts and drawings, dramas such as Othello, great works of art, and later in the fiction of Romanticism and Gothic horror, the travel journals of explorers, board games, dime-store novels, and the movies.

XREF: Connects to literary studies of race in Othello and Gothic fiction, and to how racial signs migrated from medieval theology into later cultural forms. QUESTION: What specific medieval texts and drawings codified this identification, and how did the system persist into modern media?

Why would the same not be true today? Television and movies occupy an important place in American culture, serving as dominant influences on the way people think and behave, determining the habitus. Even excluding the 1,300-year archive of Muslim monsters exposed on the pages of this book, when we focus only on contemporary representations, a bleak picture emerges. Since 9/11, Muslim men, a group historically maligned in American cinema, became even more vilified. Showtime's Homeland series, a critical and popular success that has garnered numerous accolades and awards, features Muslim characters so sinister and cruel that they are almost ridiculous.

Homeland is not alone in its horrid depiction of Muslims, and if it was not accompanied by dozens of other television productions, movies, books, and other media, perhaps it wouldn't be lauded, showered with praise and awards. It is not the exception to the rule—it is the rule. This is what makes Homeland and other shows and movies that feature atrocious representations of Muslims acceptable and loved. They are familiar, retelling stories familiar to us from a childhood and a history filled with such characters.

SEED: An essay on how media depictions gain acceptance through repetition of childhood-familiar tropes could be compelling. DEFINE: Clarifies why problematic portrayals persist: familiarity, not exceptionalism, is the rule.

103. Viennese coffee came into existence after the Battle of Vienna, when Austrians discovered a bag of coffee left by the Ottoman forces after their retreat in 1529.

QUESTION: Is this origin story historically verifiable, or more legend than documented fact? Worth checking whether Austrians genuinely adopted coffee immediately after 1529 or later.

9. Ibid., 20, 37. Reports of human-animal hybrids were common in Europe during this time, and included a girl with the head and feet of a monkey, a porcupine man, and a wolf-child (p. 37).

XREF: Connects to broader histories of early modern marvels, wonder cabinets, and how pre-scientific societies categorized the unusual. QUESTION: Why did such hybrid reports gain credibility in this era, and what social or scholarly functions did they serve?

33. Australia, although a large landmass, is no longer believed to balance the earth. However, this myth was only dispelled some two hundred years ago. … 34. Otaheite was renamed Tahiti, an island that remains under colonial rule hundreds of years later. The Fijians are often described as cannibalistic giants in colonial-era literature.

XREF: Links to histories of cartography and how colonial knowledge shaped perceptions of the Pacific and its peoples.

135. Frankenstein's creature is yet another example supporting Halberstam's claim that skin is the organ that most commonly represents monstrosity. Here, the monster's skin is yellow, while in other cases, such as the Black Saracen, as mentioned earlier, it is blue, purple, or black.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of monstrosity and racialized representation of 'otherness' in gothic literature and cultural criticism.

210. Baron De La Motte Fouque, The Magic Ring, or, The Castle of Montfaucon, tr. Robert Pearse Gillies (Chicago: Valancourt Books, 2006), 5. This work was the inspiration for many tales featuring the themes of chivalry and knighthood, including The Lord of the Rings series.

XREF: Connects to Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and the broader tradition of German Romantic chivalric fantasy.

It is difficult not to see the similarity to Dracula's transformation in Coppola's film here, where the catalyst for his transformation into a monster is due to the Ottomans.

Much like medieval monsters, who were often described as incapable of human speech, Muslim characters in films often speak a non-language, such as jibberish.

The werewolf, although not examined here, is a monster representing the uncivilized country folk of Europe—a symbol of primitivism, illiteracy, racial impurity, and the importance of social class.

DEFINE: The werewolf is defined here as a symbol of primitivism, illiteracy, racial impurity, and class anxiety in European folklore. SEED: Could be developed into an essay tracing how folkloric monsters encode social hierarchies and rural-urban tensions.

The Hills Have Eyes was shot near Ourzazate, which has become a popular locale for filming scary films located in the desert, including The Mummy (1999).

Eli Roth's 2004 film Saw was released the same year as images from Abu Ghraib. Later films, however, worked in imagery from the Iraqi prison.

SEED: A compelling angle on how real-world atrocity imagery leaks into genre film — could be a cultural criticism piece on the ethics of horror borrowing from war crimes.