Blackness coded Muslim evil in medieval art, linking Muslims to Africans.

Evidence

Dark-skinned Muslims found in medieval psalters, paintings, poetry, and romances are not always monstrous, but their blackness indicates that they are evil. In an image from fourteenth-century France depicting a battle, the Muslim soldiers wear turbans and have dark eyes, but perhaps what is most interesting is the face on their shields—an African man. This is but one indication of how Muslims were related not just to Jews, but also to Africans. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 201

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: The reader’s shared interest: Muslim monster as container for multiple others (Jews, Africans) in a single projection system.
• SEED: The African face on the Muslim soldier’s shield is an image worth building an essay around on the confluence of medieval antisemitism, anti-blackness, and anti-Islam.

Related

• Blackness itself, not monstrosity, signified Muslim evil in medieval imagery (similarity 0.94)
• The dark-skinned Muslim monster persisted from medieval iconography into American imaginations (similarity 0.88)
• Dark skin signified sin and the devil in Christian theology from the fifth century. (similarity 0.87)
• A medieval haircut could mark a man as betraying his ethnic community (similarity 0.87)
• Dark-skinned Muslim monsters encode Western anxieties about Africans and Muslims together (similarity 0.86)
• Blackness itself is criminalized as a threat irrespective of acts (similarity 0.85)
• Blackness symbolizes Evil and Ugliness in white thought (similarity 0.84)
• Muslims were identified with darkness as the antithesis of Christ’s light. (similarity 0.83)
• Muslim males in Gothic horror are framed as essentially evil, deviant, and child-murdering (similarity 0.83)
• Renaissance art linked dark skin to Satan and Muslim villainy (similarity 0.82)
• Jews and Muslims were interchangeable demonic figures in the medieval Christian imagination. (similarity 0.82)
• Medieval Christians conflated Jews and Muslims into shared monster figures (similarity 0.81)
• Medieval Christians classed non-Egyptian Africans with Saracens as monstrous races (similarity 0.81)
• Dark-skinned Muslim monsters carried African anxieties into modern imaginaries (similarity 0.81)
• Medieval Christian chroniclers racialized dark-skinned Muslims as diabolical and deceptive. (similarity 0.81)