Orientalist monster imagery freely migrated onto entirely different religious targets

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

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: The migration of Hindu-crocodile fantasy onto Catholic bodies is strong evidence that monsters are free-floating containers, not tied to their original target — supports the reader’s projection thesis.
• SEED: An essay angle: the croco-sapien as proof that the monster travels independently of its referent — the same monster can be recycled for Hindus, Muslims, and Catholics within a century.
• QUESTION: Why did Muslim/Egyptian fantasy attach to Catholic bodies here — does this reveal the deeper logic is anti-primitive/anti-ritual rather than specifically anti-Islamic?

Related

• Orientalist monster fantasies transferred freely across religious and ethnic enemy groups (similarity 0.96)
• Even real distant creatures became Muslim monsters through imagined sexual monstrosity (similarity 0.85)
• Orientalist monsters shifted from animal hybrids to demonized Muslim men (similarity 0.84)
• European Orientalist travelers claimed human-animal hybrids roamed Egypt (similarity 0.83)
• Muslim sexual monstrosity fantasies persisted from medieval claims into the colonial croco-sapien (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalist monsters could migrate across religious and ethnic targets at will (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalism sustains the credibility of preexisting Muslim monster images (similarity 0.79)
• Medieval Christian texts fabricated Muslim sexual superstitions that persisted into colonial-era mythology. (similarity 0.79)
• European travelers claimed Egypt held human-crocodile hybrids (similarity 0.78)
• Orientalism sustains Muslim monster imagery without originating it (similarity 0.78)
• Medieval and colonial Europeans projected obsessive sexual-masculinity fantasies onto Muslim men (similarity 0.78)
• Ottoman-ruled lands were imagined as sites of unnatural sexuality (similarity 0.78)