Christian Spain’s self-definition required Islam to remain a monstrous external opposite

Evidence

The result of the metaphorical “rape” of Christian Cordoba is a kingdom in which difference both exists and does not exist. That is, the text and its narrator clearly distinguish the Christians and their defeated king from the rather overdetermined barbarous, violent pagan forces and their first leader: the “perfidious race of Saracens,” “the leader of a barbarian people,” “a man perverse and profane,” “a perverse tyrant.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 136

Categorization

• XREF: On the need for a constructed external enemy to maintain group identity—parallels the excommunication logic of defining orthodoxy against heresy.