The devil was pictured as dark-skinned long before Muslims became Western Christianity’s enemy

Evidence

More usually, however, in earlier and later literature the demon has the appearance of a black man, an Ethiopian, or “an Indian boy.” In older Greek legend ghosts were sometimes “of a horrid black color,” and, in his paintings of the underworld, Polygnotus depicted the demon Eurynomous as blue-black. An early reference to the Devil as black occurs in the Life of St. Anthony, and a demon cast out of an image in the Acts of Bartholomew is “like an Ethiopian, black as soot.” Pope Gregory the Great describes the black demons that carry off wicked souls to Hell. This became one of the most common aspects of demons through the Middle Ages. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 203

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s guiding question #1 about which Western anxiety the demon carries, and question #2 on image preceding any real contact.
• QUESTION: What specific non-Muslim populations initially carried the blackness-as-evil marker, before it was transferred to Muslims?