Medieval polemicists invented a Muhammad who planned to rape the Virgin Mary

Evidence

Sexual violence, especially acts attempted or committed against the most innocent—virgins and children—is also ascribed to Muslim men. The writings of Eulogius include an invented biography of Muhammad, who “gave his soul to hell,” “fills the stomach of gods,” and “committed not only his own soul, but the soul of many, to hell,” and who planned to rape the Virgin Mary when he reached heaven. Eulogius writes, “I will not repeat the sacrilege which that impure dog [Muhammad] dared proffer about the Blessed Virgin, Queen of the World, holy mother of our venerable Lord and Savior. He claimed… that in the next world he would deflower her.” The fantasy of Muslim men raping women is a powerful one, and it has remained part of the social imaginary, exhibited today in anti-Muslim discourse from South Asia to Europe. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 133

Categorization

• XREF: The rape fantasy projected onto out-group men parallels the anti-Semitic stereotype of Jews as sexually predatory, both fig leaves for makers’ own anxieties.
• DEEPTHINKING: The invented detail (prophet of another religion planning to deflower the Virgin in the afterlife) shows theological slander manufacture at its purest—an image with zero contact with any real belief, only a container for its makers’ own dread of sexual pollution and divine motherhood.