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.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 420