The Muslim monster in Western fiction fuses murder with sexual pleasure

Evidence

The first is that for the Muslim, the taking of life is an enjoyable act. As Dani Cavallaro argues, “The idea of the child as disposable Other meant to feed the insatiable desire of a tyrannical adult goes hand in hand with the notion of the East as the West’s Other: a depraved, irrational, sultry incarnation of both the Western fear of and fascination with cultural and geographical alterity.” However, there is more to the West/East paradigm than the disregard for life. In this scene, the victims are stripped naked, then are viewed by Vathek, the Indian, and others in an episode of pornographic violence. As the children are thrown into the fiery pit, Vathek is stripping himself, eventually becoming naked with the children, suggesting at a minimum that Vathek and the Indian are enjoying moments of sexual titillation—moments heightened by the exclamations of “more! more!”—rather obvious referents to an act of sexual copulation. The mass murder of these children is told in the form of a sexual narrative—there is foreplay, undressing, penetration, and ecstasy. Vathek, like other Muslim male characters of the past, is a sexual monster. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 515

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s guiding question about which specific anxieties each monster figure carries — here the Muslim as sexual predator, a trope that persists into contemporary Islamophobic discourse.