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.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 389