Orientalist writers framed Muslim women as commodified sexual objects to be acquired

Evidence

Orientalist descriptions of Muslim women are an extension of the Orient as a commodity. Muslim women were described as exhibiting a “revolting immorality,” and exhibiting their unrestrained sexuality in public, much like the depictions of other desirable non-European females. In one description, Muslim dancers perform in “a blaze of Oriental vice,” “heads and breasts now thrown back, now thrown forward to within a hand’s breath of my face, their flesh quivering.” Classification and acquisition were key processes in the Orientalist project, and “the desire to sexually possess the other” was a key “part of [the] colonialist heritage.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 409

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s core thesis about the Muslim monster as projection - here the female Muslim becomes a sexualized commodity for possession rather than a monstrous demon, showing gender split in the imagined Muslim. — connects to: Victorian-Europe discourse reduced Muslim women to harem objects or helpless slaves
• ADDENDUM: Parallels the ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ piece - the Orientalist gaze on Muslim female sensuality extends that cross-cultural moralizing about dress and sexuality into colonial imagery.