Victorian horror fiction projected white racial anxieties onto female Muslim figures

Evidence

Early Orientalist horror is full of female Muslim monsters such as the ape-like creature in She, a “two-thousand year old demonic half-goddess, whose beauty literally blinds her beholders, and whose touch kills them.” Authored by Henry Rider Haggard, She (1886) is an interesting text, reflecting gender and racial insecurities in Victorian England. The monster, whose name is Ayesha (the name of one of the Prophet’s wives), self-identifies as an Arab, at one point exclaiming, “for Arabian am I by birth, even ‘al Arab al ‘Ariba (an Arab of the Arabs), and of the race of our father Yarab, the son of Khatan… of the true Arab blood.” In this tale of horror, Ayesha has complete control over men, which she uses to infect and pollute the pure bloodlines of the white race. Ayesha (Aisha), one of the Prophet’s wives, is described in Christian polemics as being particularly sensual, as this character is. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 416

Early Orientalist horror is full of female Muslim monsters such as the ape-like creature in She, a “two-thousand year old demonic half-goddess, whose beauty literally blinds her beholders, and whose touch kills them.” Authored by Henry Rider Haggard, She (1886) is an interesting text, reflecting gender and racial insecurities in Victorian England. The monster, whose name is Ayesha (the name of one of the Prophet’s wives), self-identifies as an Arab, at one point exclaiming, “for Arabian am I by birth, even ‘al Arab al ‘Ariba (an Arab of the Arabs), and of the race of our father Yarab, the son of Khatan… of the true Arab blood.” In this tale of horror, Ayesha has complete control over men, which she uses to infect and pollute the pure bloodlines of the white race. Ayesha (Aisha), one of the Prophet’s wives, is described in Christian polemics as being particularly sensual, as this character is. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 416

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s guiding question about which Western anxieties each monster figure carries — here the female monster carries racial pollution and sexual fear.
• SHARE: The detail that Ayesha shares Aisha’s name and that Christian polemics described Aisha as sensual is a narrow, specific tidbit for someone working on Orientalist fiction or early Islamic history.
• DEFINE: Shows how the name Ayesha/Aisha was weaponized - the historical wife of the Prophet repurposed as a polluting seductress figure.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 416