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.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 323