Cinema’s appealing sheik is always secretly European, never authentically Arab

Evidence

Sheik films are the original Easterns, established by the Valentino films The Sheik (1921) and Son of the Sheik (1926). Valentino’s status as a sex symbol confuses the characters in the two films. Consider the first film, released in 1921. Valentino plays an Arab sheik—or does he? This character is more complicated than he appears, as a “sheik” who is a European dressed like an Arab who commits Arab crimes (kidnapping, rape). The sheik is also appealing because he encompasses some aspects of Romantic Orientalism (exotic dress, grand gestures, objectified beauty), but he is not really Arab. If he were a “real” Arab, the film would end with the rescue of Diana by a white hero, who would kill the “sheik” and preserve the Western frontier. The Valentino films are examples of the “sheik-in-drag,” similar to the European adventurers who posed as Muslims to “experience” Mecca during the hajj. The sheik’s true identity is obscured by his dress and behavior, and by his adopted name—Ahmed. When Diana remarks, “His hand is so large for an Arab,” Ahmed’s French friend replies, “He is not an Arab. His father was an Englishman, his mother, a Spaniard.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 613

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘sheik-in-drag’ performing Arabness for the West parallels the earlier European hajj impostors and hints at an uneasy Western desire enacted through the monstrous Other.
• QUESTION: Does the seductive sheik-in-drag serve the same projection function as the medieval Western crusader-monks who adopted Sufi aesthetics? The line between fear and longing for the Orient keeps blurring.
• SEED: The sheik who ‘is not really Arab’ is pure dress and gesture — an empty costume the white imagination fills. Essay angle: cinematic Orientalism as drag performance exposing that the West’s Muslim is a mirror, not a person.