Harris notes that automata such as the Mechanical Turk were referred to as mammets, a word deriving from the proper name Mohamet or Mohammed. He adds that “medieval Christian theologians used the word 'mechanicum' as a synonym for Muslim sorcery: they regarded Islam as a mechanical religion incapable of true life and of a meaningful future, and thus consigned it to a dead, unusable past. Benjamin's Turkish chess-playing machine eerily replays this typological gambit.”

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 947