Empire served as a dumping ground for Europe’s undesirables and repressed desires

Evidence

By this point, however, Muslims were no longer one enemy among many; the other pagan raiders (such as the Normans and Magyars) that had relentlessly invaded Christian Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries had been converted and integrated. The only enemy that remained was the Muslims. This is not to suggest, however, that Europe was united and at peace. Rather, Islam became a convenient “other” to mobilize support for the territorial ambitions of various rulers. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 60 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Europeans project their repressed evil onto the racialized Other; Ottoman-ruled lands were imagined as sites of unnatural sexuality; Colonial conquest history planted rape fantasies in European dreams about Algerian women (+4 more)

Related

• Islam became the convenient enemy to mobilize Europe’s territorial ambitions (similarity 0.86)
• Islam served as Europe’s constitutive outsider against which its civilization defined itself (similarity 0.84)
• European Islamophobia frames Muslim migration as soldiers in a renewed crusade. (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial prejudices sexualized and dehumanized the Algerian Muslim (similarity 0.80)
• Muslims were constructed as equals only while their empires could not be dominated (similarity 0.80)
• The oppressed-Muslim-woman trope emerged in 18th-19th century Europe, not earlier (similarity 0.79)
• Ottoman-ruled lands were imagined as sites of unnatural sexuality (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial conquest history planted rape fantasies in European dreams about Algerian women (similarity 0.79)
• Europeans once considered the Ottomans ethnically European (similarity 0.79)
• The papacy manufactured Muslims as a holy-war enemy to unify Christian Europe (similarity 0.79)
• Europe projected onto the Orient its own repressed desires to escape bourgeois constraint (similarity 0.79)
• Europeans regarded Ottomans as equals before Orientalism’s hierarchy emerged (similarity 0.78)
• Religious war imagery about Islam is revived for specific imperial needs (similarity 0.78)
• The medieval monster narrative of Islam was cemented by colonialism and Orientalism (similarity 0.78)
• Anti-Muslim tropes depicting Muslims as inferior, subservient, and in need of saving were deployed to justify Western colonialism and imperialism, rooted in medieval depictions of Muslims as monsters. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Europeans project their repressed evil onto the racialized Other #corroborates (0.90)
• The Orient served Europe as a site for sexuality regulated out of metropolitan life #corroborates (0.85)
• Islam became the convenient enemy to mobilize Europe’s territorial ambitions #qualifies (0.80) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 60
• Ottoman-ruled lands were imagined as sites of unnatural sexuality #exemplifies (0.75)
• Colonial conquest history planted rape fantasies in European dreams about Algerian women #exemplifies (0.75)
• Colonial prejudices sexualized and dehumanized the Algerian Muslim #exemplifies (0.75)
• Ottomans were seen as a political threat rather than a religious one #contradicts (0.70) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 76