Medieval anti-Muslim rhetoric survives unchanged through the Enlightenment and into today

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

• DEFINE: Introduces Haydock’s term ‘Saracen doxology’ — a useful named concept for the reader’s own frames.
• XREF: Arguably the chapter’s core causal claim — doxology as continuity — connects to Said’s Orientalism and to the reader’s ‘fear without an object’ thesis about image preceding contact. — connects to: Anti-Muslim racism has no unbroken historical continuity from medieval to modern forms