The evil desert motif precedes and outlives its specifically Islamic associations

Evidence

The trauma of World War I and the Age of Anxiety influenced this poem, but there is something else—the evil that has always been associated with the desert. “The desert yields not the Son of Man but the horror, the heart of darkness; a place not of indifference, but of malign terror.” This vision of the desert is found in several genres of fiction outside fantasy and science fiction, most notably the Western. In Cormac McCarthy’s Blood … Meridian (1985), we find “a chilling, raw restatement of the American West” that is “amoral, apocalyptic—steeped in the surrealism and nightmare of Dante, de Sade, and the art of Hieronymus Bosch.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 696

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the reader’s thesis that the image precedes contact: the malign desert is a pre-existing European category that then gets attached to Muslim lands, not derived from them.