Confessor also framed Muslim conquerors as subhuman beasts, not religious rivals

Evidence

Other church leaders took a similarly dim view of their new overlords. Maximus the Confessor, in a letter written from Alexandria between 634 and 640, bemoaned the losses inflicted by the barbarian invaders: “What could be more dire than the present evils now encompassing the civilized world? To see a barbarous nation of the desert overrunning another land as if it were their own, to see our civilization laid waste by wild and untamed beasts who have merely the shape of a human form.” These “beasts,” for Maximus, are Jews and followers of Antichrist; this is all he says about their religious orientation. Repentance by Christians is what is needed to repulse the invaders. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 299

Categorization

• XREF: Pre-dates the ‘barbaric beast horde’ dehumanization trope found in modern Islamophobic discourse by over a millennium — a strong genealogical anchor for the reader’s mapping.