Even real distant creatures became Muslim monsters through imagined sexual monstrosity

Evidence

The Egyptian croco-sapien is an example of the construction of marvelous fictive creatures that were situated in fantasies about Muslims. It is worth remembering here that fantasies about Muslim sexual monstrosity have a long history; one only needs to recall the claims of Prophet Muhammad’s sexual superpowers, the reports of gargantuan Muslim penises that Jews and Christians would have to carry into heaven, or the wild stories contained in the Turcica. The croco-sapien is but another example of a wild and fantastic monster that emerged out of the habitus of Muslim monsters: … Crocodiles were clearly a different thing: actually existing creatures from far distant areas, especially dangerous ones of monstrous size that inhabit both land and water, might well have seemed to cross between human and animal orders. Nor, perhaps, should it be surprising that sexual difference was a specific site of such contravention since it was fondly imagined that the lands ruled by the Ottomans were a place where all manner of bizarre and un-natural forms of sexuality could be found. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 419

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s article on ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ which already documents the long Western history of sexualizing the Muslim Other.