Medieval writers inverted Christ’s passion narrative to cast Muhammad as Antichrist

Evidence

Saracens are described in various accounts as the progeny of Hagar, of Muhammad, or of the Antichrist himself. While Saracen initially referred only to Arabs, it was soon applied to Muslims, Ethiopians, and Jews. In the medieval Christian world, Jews and Muslims were considered partners in crime. Situated in polemics against Islam that included narrations of Prophet Muhammad’s life are resonances of the account of Jesus’s betrayal by Judas. In some versions of the story of Muhammad’s death, we find that “[t] hese events of Mahomet’s death appear to be suggested by Judas’s betrayal of his Master, the Last Supper, Christ’s ascent of both the Mount of Olives and the Calvary, and the Resurrection.” Using the same narrative structure, but with differing outcomes, ensured that the audience would have a takeaway—Christ is risen and Muhammad is the Antichrist. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 155

Categorization

• XREF: This is the manufacturing mechanism the reader seeks — the narrative-template inversion. Connects to the reader’s question of which Western anxiety the monster carries: here Muhammad fulfills the Judas/Antichrist role, making Islam Christianity’s inverted double.
• DEEPTHINKING: The mechanism is subtle: not inventing a new story but reusing the Bible’s own structure with reversed outcomes, so the takeaway is implanted without argument — audience already knows the Passion, so Muhammad’s parallel death automatically reads as demonic parody. This is a genuinely instructive account of how religious polemic manufactures monsters.