Hollywood has depicted Muslim men as medieval villains since the 1920s

Evidence

In the majority of Hollywood films, Muslim characters are depicted as villains harassing, kidnapping, raping, terrorizing, and killing innocents, often Americans or Europeans. These depictions often reflect two worlds—the world of the West and the world of the East. Beginning with the Valentino films The Sheik and The Son of the Sheik in the 1920s, Muslim men have been depicted as medieval and have been juxtaposed with white Christian moderns. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 596

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘medieval Muslim vs. white Christian modern’ binary carried over into the modern era connects to broader ‘fear without object’ thesis arguments across this book and to Edward Said’s Orientalism framework. — connects to: National Geographic and Hollywood were prime twentieth-century vehicles of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 216