Medieval anti-Muslim imagery persists unbroken into modern Western culture
Evidence
One of the arguments I make, which is supported by this claim, is that medieval notions of alterity continue to impact the ways in which the West thinks about Islam and her followers. Nickolas Haydock calls this the Saracen doxology: “The medieval portrait of the Saracen in general and of Mohammed in particular survives humanism, continues largely unabated through the Enlightenment, gains renewed and altered vigor during the nineteenth-century revival of chivalry and medievalism, and continues to surface unabashedly across Western culture today.” The Middle Ages is the era in which anti-Muslim rhetoric is founded, later to be resurrected by the Gothic movement and sustained and legitimized by Orientalism. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 76
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- SEED: The ‘Saracen doxology’ is the exact genealogical spine of the reader’s inquiry — the unbroken chain from medieval monster to modern Islamophobia, worth building an essay around.
- DEFINE: Introduces the ‘Saracen doxology’ as a named concept for the persistence of medieval Muslim imagery across four eras.
Related
- Medieval anti-Muslim rhetoric survives unchanged through the Enlightenment and into today (similarity 0.95)
- Anti-Muslim racism has no unbroken historical continuity from medieval to modern forms (similarity 0.88)
- Modern Muslim monsters rest on medieval fantasies (similarity 0.80)
- Medieval monster imagery persists in modern political discourse about Muslims. (similarity 0.79)
- Medieval anti-Saracen imagery still persists in Spanish festivals of Moors and Christians (similarity 0.79)
- The Muslim monster image first emerged in eighth-century Christian polemics about Muhammad (similarity 0.79)
- Medieval Muslim-monster imagery persists today through Gothic horror and Orientalism (similarity 0.79)
- Medieval literature equated Saracens with demons condemned to hell (similarity 0.78)