The Saracen cannibal fiction is a projection of Christian fragmentation anxiety.

Evidence

The fear of being consumed and ingested by the enemy is situated in medieval Christian beliefs surrounding the body of the saint, who, after Christ, functioned as the dominant symbol of resurrection through literary and visual media that communicated “potent fantasies of violent dismemberment and reintegration.” In accounts of Christian travels in the Holy Land, the fear of bodily corruption was expressed in the Saracen monster, a figure that often enjoyed eating Christian flesh. These stories and images formulated the fantasies of Muslim cannibalism: “United by the appropriation of a metaphor, these writers deploy images of anatomical mutilation to symbolize mutilated subjectivities, identities whose borders have been unmade.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 175

Categorization

• QUESTION: The ‘identities whose borders have been unmade’ line is dense — worth chasing what specific historical ruptures (schisms, crusader defeats?) the mutilation metaphor encodes.
• DEEPTHINKING: The mapping of anatomical mutilation onto ‘mutilated subjectivities’ is a paradigm-level claim about how the monster image mirrors the makers’ own identity crisis.