Fictional Muslim characters shape Americans’ view of living Muslims as violent

Evidence

Barbary villains informed the Muslim characters that become popular in film and other forms of entertainment. Cartoons like “Ali Baba the Mad Dog of the Desert,” “Hassan the Assassin,” and “Desert Rat Hordes” feature similar characters, influencing the ways Americans think about Muslims as violent, frightening, foreigners. The Muslim characters from films, cartoons, dime store novels, and television contribute to the archive of Muslim monsters, revealing both a fascination with the exotic as well as a repulsion toward Muslims. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 594

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• SEED: The observation that cartoons like ‘Desert Rat Hordes’ influence real-world perceptions of Muslims is the seed for an essay on the entertainment pipeline from fiction to prejudice.

Related

• Fascination and repulsion jointly drive American Muslim caricatures from cartoons to film (similarity 0.88)
• Negative Muslim film characters span Arab, Persian, Turkish, and African identities (similarity 0.81)
• Cinema is now the primary generator of Muslim monster imagery in America (similarity 0.81)
• Dark-skinned Muslim monsters encode Western anxieties about Africans and Muslims together (similarity 0.78)