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.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 52