African Muslims inherited older ape-based sexual monstrosity stereotypes in America

Evidence

By the end of the American Revolutionary War, a new monster dominated the imagination about Islam—the Barbary Muslim. Fantasies of African monstrosity, including sexual abnormality, contributed to the ways in which Africans, and later African slaves and African-Americans, were constructed in the American imaginary. Accounts of African apes and their great sexual organs were attached to the men and women of Africa, who were characterized as being “as libidinous as apes,” related to Satan, and the consorts of witches. Depictions of African Muslims incorporated the same ideas. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 590

Categorization

• XREF: Sexual-abnormality-as-monstrosity echoes the reader’s framework of what each monster figure carries as a buried Western anxiety.
• SEED: The Barbary Muslim as 18th-century new monster is a concrete figure for the reader’s first guiding question - the specific recurrence carrying a specific anxiety (sexuality).