Christians read Saracens through the biblical figure of Ishmael.

Evidence

These beleaguered Christians took what little they knew of these new invaders and tried to make sense of them by poring over the ethnographic, historical, and religious categories of the Bible and of Isidore, Augustine, and others. They would find a series of images of Saracens, or Arabs, who are descendants of a common ancestor, Ishmael. Ishmael is variously portrayed in these sources as bastard son of Abraham, the first idolater, a magician, and especially “a wild man” whose “hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him.” — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 164

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the general phenomenon of mapping newcomers onto preexisting scriptural archetypes — the same reflex seen in the reader’s notes on how gendering or other categories get imposed.