Muslims in the Western Imagination

Abstract

Through research spanning 1,300 years, Sophia Rose Arjana presents a historicalgenealogy of monstrous representations of Muslims that haunt thewestern imagination and continue to sustain the contemporary bigotry of Islamophobia.The central question introduced in the first section, “Introduction:Islam in the Western Imagination,” is “How did we get here, to this place ofhijab bans and outlawed minarets, secret renditions of enemy combatants,Abu Ghraib, and GTMO?” (p. 1).To answer this question, Arjana highlights connections between historicalrepresentations of Muslims and monstrosity in imagery, literature, film, andpopular culture to produce a volume she describes as “an archive of Muslimmonsters” and “a jihad – an effort – to reveal Muslims as human beings insteadof the phantasms they are often presented as” (p. 16). This work is a timelycontribution that will benefit scholars researching anti-Muslim sentiment, Islamophobia,postcolonial and subaltern studies, the psychology of xenophobiaand genocide, or who are interested in historical manifestations of Islamophobia,antisemitism, and racism in art, literature, film, and media.In the first chapter, “The Muslim Monster,” the author argues that cultural“ideas of normativity are often situated in notions of alterity” and thatmonstrous representations of Muslims have functioned as an enduring signifierof alterity against which the West has attempted to define itself sincethe Middle Ages. Through the production of dehumanized and monstrousrepresentations, Muslims became part of a mythological landscape at theperipheries of Christian civilization that included dragons, giants, and dogheadedmen. The grotesque and uncanny attributes of monsters reveal theanxieties of the society that produces such images, and chief among thoseis the fear of racial contamination and the dissolution of culture through interminglingwith the foreign and the strange. Each of the following chaptersfocuses on depictions of Muslims as monsters in visual arts and literaturewithin a particular era or context.The second chapter, “Medieval Muslim Monsters,” introduces Muslimmonsters of the Middle Ages, many of which survived as tropes used to vilifyMuslims, Arabs, Jews, and Africans for centuries thereafter. This chapter introducesmonsters such as “the giant, man-eating Saracens of medieval romancesand the Black Saracens, often shown in medieval art executing saints,harassing and killing Jesus, and murdering other Christian innocents” (p. 19) ...