Medieval Christian texts fabricated Muslim sexual superstitions that persisted into colonial-era mythology.

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: Directly supports the reader’s monster-figure analysis: here the monster type is the hypersexual deviant whose pathology is inscribed onto the body itself — genital morphology as moral marker.
• QUESTION: The author cites the ‘seventy Christians and seventy Jews’ claim and the croco-sapiens tales without source footnotes — worth chasing the original texts to verify exactly how these fabrications circulated and got elaborated.
• SHARE: The croco-sapiens detail — colonial-era Europeans believing the Nile held crocodiles with Egyptian genitalia — is exactly the kind of grotesque specificity a scholar of colonial race science would relish.