The Muslim-as-monster imaginaire predates and is distinct from political Islamophobia.

Evidence

An imperative point regarding the vocabulary used in this study is that the history of Muslim monsters is distinguished from what we think of as “Islamophobia,” the particularistic attitude toward Muslims that scholars have often described as an aversion to or “anxiety of Islam.” Much of the scholarship has argued that contemporary Islamophobia is situated in political neoliberalism and the vision of the world it wishes to create, seen perhaps most vividly in the political discourse surrounding the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the War on Terror, which highlighted the Good Muslim/Bad Muslim trope by suggesting that any opposition to American militarism was tantamount to supporting the enemy. I am concerned here with the West’s imaginaire of Islam: the idea of the Muslim as a frightening adversary, an outside enemy that doesn’t belong in modernity, who, due to an intrinsic alterity, must be excluded from the American and European landscapes. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 22

Categorization

• DEFINE: Key conceptual distinction: the ‘imaginaire’ of the Muslim monster vs. contemporary political Islamophobia.
• SEED: The distinction between the long-shadow imaginaire and recent political Islamophobia is a natural spine for an essay on how deep cultural substrates shape modern policy.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s guiding question about image preceding contact; also echoes Said’s Orientalism framework.