Christians imagined Muslim lands as cursed, sunless wastelands before encountering them

Evidence

Non-Christian territories were sinister spaces—far more dangerous than Christian territories, whatever monsters dwelled there. Muslim lands were dark and foreboding landscapes separated from the natural world. According to one medieval account, Saracens lived in a land “[w] here the sun does not shine, not any grain grow. There falls no rain or dew. There are no stones that are not all black. Some say devils dwell there.” In a medieval Muslim island referenced in Aliscans, the lost island is so far removed from human society that it lays “outside the known world.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 119

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• SEED: A concrete example for the ‘fear without an object’ thesis: the entire geography of Muslim lands was pre-fabricated in Christian imagination as anti-nature, a dark inverse of the known world.

Related

• Medieval accounts imagined Muslim lands as sunless devil-haunted spaces (similarity 0.89)
• Muslim monsters were located in distant God-forgotten lands beyond the borders. (similarity 0.88)
• Medieval literature equated Saracens with demons condemned to hell (similarity 0.85)
• Medieval Christians mapped monsters onto dark wild and borderland places. (similarity 0.84)
• Medieval Christians imagined demons prowling everywhere, even often disguised as dark-skinned foreigners (similarity 0.81)
• Pre-modern monsters were geographically contained while Saracens inhabited sunless evil lands (similarity 0.80)
• Christian depictions of Islam emerged from literary mythology, not lived contact (similarity 0.80)
• The imagination, not contact, was the dominant source of medieval knowledge about Muslims (similarity 0.80)
• The desert was imagined as a cursed wasteland testifying to divine displeasure. (similarity 0.79)
• Muslims were identified with darkness as the antithesis of Christ’s light. (similarity 0.78)
• Saracens were mapped at the edges of known Christian space as boundary monsters (similarity 0.78)