Dark-skinned Muslim monsters encode Western anxieties about Africans and Muslims together

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

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s guiding question of which recurring figures carry which Western anxiety - dark skin here carries anxieties about both African and Muslim alterity.