Accusations of sodomy historically justified colonial conquest and enslavement

Evidence

Abu Ghraib is part of the archive of Muslim monsters. Like the spectacle of foreign bodies formulated in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which continued to be seen during the colonial age, the images of Muslim bodies that emerged from the prison are situated in a mixed-up milieu of sexual desire and repulsion. The fact that so many of the photographs are fixated on sodomy is not lost on scholars. As Nicholas Mirzeoff writes, “[that] the whole indigenous population was composed of sodomites served as a means of justifying and necessitating early colonial expansion in the Atlantic world,” which in discourse about the goods of slavery represented Jews and Africans as “sodomitical.” Muslims have often been viewed this way, as having a bizarre sexuality, or even being sexual monsters, what used to be described as sodomia. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 753

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the book’s core claim that the Muslim monster is a manufactured archive spanning medieval to modern times, continuous across eras.
• DEEPTHINKING: The image of the sodomite — a whole population defined by a perverse sexuality — serves as the justifying structure for violence across centuries: a projection that lets the colonizer/torturer cast his own acts as necessary responses to native depravity.