Medieval writers identified Muhammad’s followers with the monstrous races

Evidence

Beginning with Pseudo-Methodius, both religious and secular writers associated or identified the followers of prophet Muhammad with the monstrous races. Throughout the protracted struggle (has it ever ended?), the Black Saracen is often depicted as a minion of the devil, a child of fornication, a crude outlaw covered with hair and wielding a club. In medieval sources, Muhammad himself becomes a Christian heretic who is thrown on a dung heap to be devoured by dogs and pigs. The mid-thirteenth century Pseudo-Turpin describes the Muslim Saracen warriors battling Charlemagne as “horned demonic Lares” (i.e., man-eating cynocephalics). — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 222

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s guiding question about which Western anxiety the monster figure carries; the ‘fear without object’ image precedes contact via Pseudo-Methodius, the same source structure as the anti-Semitic tropes above.
• DEFINE: Establishes cynocephalics/the monstrous races as the pictorial-analytical category the reader needs, plus the Black Saracen stereotype’s stock features.