Shakespeare recycled the epileptic-Muhammad trope onto Othello
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
Category: Connection Points
- XREF: Directly demonstrates the manufacturing machinery: a Christian anti-Muhammad slander recycled onto a literary Moor, showing the stored vocabulary of defamation being re-deployed. Load-bearing for the reader’s thesis.
- QUESTION: Worth tracing the full genealogy of the epilepsy accusation from Byzantine polemic through medieval vita to Shakespeare.