Non-Christian territories were sinister spaces—far more dangerous than Christian territories, whatever monsters dwelled there. Muslim lands were dark and foreboding landscapes separated from the natural world. According to one medieval account, Saracens lived in a land "[w] here the sun does not shine, not any grain grow. There falls no rain or dew. There are no stones that are not all black. Some say devils dwell there." In a medieval Muslim island referenced in Aliscans, the lost island is so far removed from human society that it lays "outside the known world."

XREF: Connects to medieval cartography and the othering of foreign peoples, and to Edward Said's orientalism framework.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 119