Medieval monsters were created along the contours of the Classical imagination, which is why we find early Muslims, often called Saracens, depicted alongside Plinian creatures including Blemmyae, Amazons, Cyclops, Panotii, and Ephiphagus, creatures that often regenerated as new monsters in the modern period. One example is the cynocephalus, a dog-headed man that dates from the Classical period and was identified as a Jewish and Muslim monster in the Middle Ages. Medieval Muslim monsters were often located in faraway lands, a strategy that helped identify Christians with the lands they themselves occupied and further identified these lands as not controlled by the foreign creatures who dwelled nearby. Jews, Europe's internal enemies, were often conflated with Saracens and other foreigners despite their location within, or on the edges of, European communities. Identity was often shaped by ethnogenesis—a sense of origins situated in a limited understanding of geography that dominated much of the Middle Ages.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 54