Dark-skinned Muslim monsters carried African anxieties into modern imaginaries

Evidence

The Muslim with dark skin is one of the consistent images that we find in the history of Muslim monsters. It is sustained by numerous anxieties surrounding Africans and Muslims, including the Moors of Spain and North Africa, and later, the Barbary beasts that populate the North American imaginary. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 161

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• SHARE: The direct lineage from Black Saracen paintings to ‘Barbary beasts’ in the American imaginary is a clean, narrow point worth sending to someone writing on orientalism or early American racial imagery.

Related

• Dark-skinned Muslim monsters encode Western anxieties about Africans and Muslims together (similarity 0.94)
• The dark-skinned Muslim monster persisted from medieval iconography into American imaginations (similarity 0.86)
• Barbary pirates were recast as monsters linking Islam to anti-African hatred (similarity 0.85)
• African Muslims inherited older ape-based sexual monstrosity stereotypes in America (similarity 0.83)
• Medieval Christians imagined demons prowling everywhere, even often disguised as dark-skinned foreigners (similarity 0.82)
• Imaginary monstrous Muslims shaped the Western construction of the real Muslim (similarity 0.81)
• Medieval Muslim monsters were assembled from classical, biblical, and ethnic-other sources (similarity 0.81)
• Blackness itself, not monstrosity, signified Muslim evil in medieval imagery (similarity 0.81)
• Muslim monster imagery derived from fantasies about Muhammad, not real Muslims (similarity 0.81)
• Even racialized portrayals of Muslim enemies carried Islamophobic overtones (similarity 0.81)
• The Muslim monster image first emerged in eighth-century Christian polemics about Muhammad (similarity 0.81)
• The medieval monster narrative of Islam was cemented by colonialism and Orientalism (similarity 0.81)
• Blackness coded Muslim evil in medieval art, linking Muslims to Africans. (similarity 0.81)
• Modern Muslim monsters rest on medieval fantasies (similarity 0.81)
• New World monsters repeated medieval Other-anxieties rather than reflecting observed reality (similarity 0.81)