Medieval passion plays made Muslims the villains who crucified Christ.

Evidence

Passion plays included Jewish characters praying to the “almighty Mahomet” and featured “hideously deformed and dark-skinned Saracens along with the usual Jews.” The Towneley Cycle featured Prophet Muhammad as “the god of the Jews,” a character that “embodies the fulfillment of Old Testament villains and a warning of the approaching Apocalypse.” The Towneley Crucifixion also included tyrants like Herod and Pilate, who instructed the audience to remove their hats and prostrate flat on the ground as if performing the Islamic prayer, in another reference to the tyrant’s god—Muhammad. In the same play, “the soldiers who crucified Christ invoke ‘Mahowne’ as if they were Moslems not Romans.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 167

Categorization

• QUESTION: The Towneley soldiers invoking Mahowne as if Muslims not Romans crucified Christ — worth chasing how this retrojection of Muslim enemies onto the Passion narrative manufactured the Muslim-as-Christ-killer archetype.
• SEED: An essay angle: the Passion plays as early prototype of swapping the actual historical enemy for the contemporary imagined one — the crucifixion as always already a Muslim crime.