Shakespeare’s Othello recycled the medieval Christian trope of Muhammad’s epilepsy.

Evidence

Othello is a pseudo-Mahomet, recycling an old trope about the Muslim prophet-that he was an epileptic. Christian writers often accused Muhammad of being epileptic (considered a mental illness), as in the story cited earlier of his consumption by pigs after a seizure. Othello is accused of being an epileptic, just like the Prophet: The Moor’s ordeal parodies the physical collapse that accompanies an episode of divine possession-he kneels with Iago, falls down, and then undergoes a seizure like those experienced by other “prophesying” victims of “the falling sickness,” a malady associated with both sacred and Satanic inspiration. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 320

Categorization

• DEFINE: Identifies epilepsy as a medieval pseudo-pathologizing marker used to frame both Muhammad and the stage Moor as mentally defective, carrying the reader’s monster-figure evidence.
• XREF: Ties the literary Moor directly back to the earlier pseudo-Mahomet traditions and the epilepsy-as-divine-punishment motif.