Many Oriental monsters were related to the Turks, while others were attached to Arab, African, and Persian bodies. Attitudes toward the Ottomans continued to generate fantastic stories about non-Turkish Muslims living under Ottoman rule. In the eighteenth century, English travelers in Egypt claimed that a creature existed that was part crocodile and part human. According to one account, "their [sexual] members [were] like" those of humans. A century later, another croco-sapien appeared in an anti-Catholic comic in an American newspaper, a case in which fantasies about Hindus sacrificing their children to crocodiles were placed upon Catholic bodies—proof of the power of Orientalist monsters.

XREF: Connects to Said's Orientalism and the transferability of monstrous stereotypes across targets.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 418