The early cinematic sheik was a European disguised as an Arab.

Evidence

Sheik films are the original Easterns, established by the Valentino films The Sheik (1921) and Son of the Sheik (1926). Valentino’s status as a sex symbol confuses the characters in the two films. Consider the first film, released in 1921. Valentino plays an Arab sheik—or does he? This character is more complicated than he appears, as a “sheik” who is a European dressed like an Arab who commits Arab crimes (kidnapping, rape). The sheik is also appealing because he encompasses some aspects of Romantic Orientalism (exotic dress, grand gestures, objectified beauty), but he is not really Arab. If he were a “real” Arab, the film would end with the rescue of Diana by a white hero, who would kill the “sheik” and preserve the Western frontier. The Valentino films are examples of the “sheik-in-drag,” similar to the European adventurers who posed as Muslims to “experience” Mecca during the hajj. The sheik’s true identity is obscured by his dress and behavior, and by his adopted name—Ahmed. When Diana remarks, “His hand is so large for an Arab,” Ahmed’s French friend replies, “He is not an Arab. His father was an Englishman, his mother, a Spaniard.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 613

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: The ‘sheik-in-drag’ who poses as a Muslim connects to earlier chapters on European adventurers who ‘experienced’ Mecca in disguise — a direct line from medieval imposture to the Valentino films.
• BMF: The European hidden inside an assumed exotic identity evokes the character of Ahmed in Naqvi’s ‘Home Boy,’ a Muslim American navigating the manufactured Muslim monster imagery in post-9/11 New York.
• DEEPTHINKING: The sheik-in-drag collapses the very distinction the Orientalist genre pretends to police: the ‘Arab’ is actually the European, so the monster the genre must destroy for white civilization is ultimately white himself — the frontier must be ‘preserved’ from a threat that is projected.

Related

• Cinema’s appealing sheik is always secretly European, never authentically Arab (similarity 0.95)
• Muslim film characters were depicted as medieval from the 1920s onward (similarity 0.86)
• Hollywood has depicted Muslim men as medieval villains since the 1920s (similarity 0.84)
• Classic Hollywood romances eroticized the rape of white women by Arab men (similarity 0.83)
• Early Hollywood sheik films normalized the violent Arab rapist as a romantic archetype (similarity 0.81)
• Classic Hollywood Sheik films framed Arab male rape as romantic pursuit (similarity 0.81)