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.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 84