Orientalist monster fantasies transferred freely across religious and ethnic enemy groups

Evidence

Many Oriental monsters were related to the Turks, while others were attached to Arab, African, and Persian bodies. Attitudes toward the Ottomans continued to generate fantastic stories about non-Turkish Muslims living under Ottoman rule. In the eighteenth century, English travelers in Egypt claimed that a creature existed that was part crocodile and part human. According to one account, “their [sexual] members [were] like” those of humans. A century later, another croco-sapien appeared in an anti-Catholic comic in an American newspaper, a case in which fantasies about Hindus sacrificing their children to crocodiles were placed upon Catholic bodies—proof of the power of Orientalist monsters. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 418

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly extends the ‘Othering dress/morality panics’ theme - here the same monstrous projection (crocodile-human sacrificers) migrates from Hindus to Catholics, showing monster templates are reusable.
• XREF: Powerful evidence for the reader’s core thesis that the ‘Muslim monster’ is a free-floating container detachable from actual Muslims - interchangeable with any desecrated group. — connects to: Orientalist stereotypes project producers’ fears rather than describing their targets; the MOC “The Enemy-Making Machine: How Ourselves, the True, and Every Other Are Built from War”