The desert was imagined as a cursed wasteland testifying to divine displeasure.

Evidence

The desert is the prominent wasteland in Orientalist writings. One description of Egypt calls it a cursed land, much like the Saracen territories of the Middle Ages, a place where “every blade of grass, and every tree, every drop of water, and every grain of dust, man and beast, and holy light… all… testify in a wonderful degree the displeasure of the Almighty.” In another text, the Sphinx is described as a “malevolent yet seductive beast-woman” that is the cause of “decay, mortality, the fall of cities, and the death of the gods.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 478

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s thesis that Western desert imagery sanctified the Muslim monster figure; pairs with the colonial gaze literature on Egypt and North Africa.
• SEED: Possible angle: how a landscape (the desert) is moralized before any people are described — the environment prefigures and authorizes the monster who inhabits it.