Filmic Barbary monsters are numerous, and include the 1975 Sean Connery-Candice Bergen movie The Wind and the Lion. The film is loosely based on the 1904 kidnapping of Jon Perdicaris and his father-inlaw, Cromwell Varley, who, when released by their captor, described their lodgings to the New York Times as “Mr. Perdicaris’s Summer Home.” Their captor Raisuli was described as “a tribal gentleman of the old school, lodging his captives in a magnificent tent and dining with them each evening.” In the film, these details are transformed, starting with “the balding businessman Joe Perdicaris,” who “is transmogrified into a nubile Candice Bergen.” The captor (played by Sean Connery) beheads people with a smile and a wink while uttering Arabic phrases like “Bismillah.”

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 593