The Muslim-monster tradition predates and differs 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: Defines the key distinction between ‘imaginaire of Islam’ (the longue-duree monster tradition) and contemporary political Islamophobia, giving the reader the precise vocabulary for the whole study.
• SEED: An essay contrasting the recent Swiss niqab-ban imagery against the ancient monster imaginaire could frame Islamophobia-as-presentism for a general audience.
• XREF: connects to: the MOC “The Enemy-Making Machine: How Ourselves, the True, and Every Other Are Built from War”