Medieval and colonial Europeans projected obsessive sexual-masculinity fantasies onto Muslim men

Evidence

Claims of Muslim sexual monstrosity were not restricted to polygamy and pedophilia. Fantasies of Muslim sexual power included Prophet Muhammad’s superhuman sexual abilities and energy, which influenced later mythologies, including claims of abnormally large genitalia possessed by Muslim men. One Christian text claims that upon entering heaven, Muslim males were rewarded with a penis so long that it required “seventy Christians and seventy Jews to carry it before him.” Many centuries later, during the colonial era, Europeans claimed that croco-sapiens roamed the Nile, crocodiles with Egyptian—that is, Muslim—genitalia. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 137

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ article on cross-cultural moral panics — sexual-panic projections recur as a manufactured-other theme. — connects to: European portrayals of the harem projected fantasy rather than observed reality — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 306
• SEED: Could anchor an essay on how sexual-othering of a group runs continuous from medieval theology to colonial-era pseudobiology (croco-sapiens).