Abu Ghraib abuses stem from centuries-old anti-Muslim monster imagery, not aberrance

Evidence

These locations—Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Base, GTMO—function as spaces in which the fantasies of Muslims as non-human are played out on real bodies. The crimes committed at Abu Ghraib and at other sites, despite their description as aberrations (“a few bad apples”), result from the historical continuities displayed in anti-Muslim discourse that features an imagery of horror and death. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 35

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The central claim that torture is the material endpoint of a discursive tradition — that fantasies of the monster get enacted on real bodies — is the paradigm-shifting payoff of the whole book’s argument.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s third guiding question: what the monster lets its makers avoid seeing about themselves; also resonates with Foucault’s disciplinary power and the spectacle/punishment literature.
• SEED: An essay tracing the direct line from medieval bestiary monsters to Abu Ghraib photographs — the argument that dehumanizing imagery is not merely descriptive but performatively violent.