Hollywood canonized the Muslim man as an uncontrollably violent rapist.
Evidence
In the first sheik film, Ahmed kidnaps and rapes his white captive Diana, who, despite the sexual assault(s), falls in love with him and becomes his wife (or one of his wives). In the second film, the two appear as a happily married couple, with Diana giving some measured advice to her wild husband, still posing as an Arab, when their son—also named Ahmed—rapes the dancing girl Yasmin—an act of revenge for her suspected involvement with Ahmed’s kidnapping and torture by a band of criminal Arabs. Before Ahmed Junior rapes Yasmin, he exclaims, “I may not be the first victim, by Allah, I shall be the one you remember!” This suggests that Ahmed will be as brutal as possible in the assault. Despite this, in the end, the two ride off into the desert, mirroring the rape-marriage portrayed in the first film. These two films set the standard for how Arab men (and by extension, all Muslim men) are portrayed in movies—as uncontrollably violent individuals. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 614
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: Feeds the reader’s inquiry into what anxiety the rapist-monster carries: the threat of violating the white female body.
Related
- Early Hollywood sheik films normalized the violent Arab rapist as a romantic archetype (similarity 0.93)
- Classic Hollywood Sheik films framed Arab male rape as romantic pursuit (similarity 0.91)
- Classic Hollywood romances eroticized the rape of white women by Arab men (similarity 0.84)
- Hollywood has depicted Muslim men as medieval villains since the 1920s (similarity 0.79)