Muslims in the Western Imagination

by Sophia Rose Arjana

Throughout history, Muslim men have been depicted as monsters. The portrayal of humans as monsters helps a society delineate who belongs and who, or what, is excluded. Even when symbolic, as in post-9/11 zombie films, Muslim monsters still function to define Muslims as non-human entities. These are not depictions of Muslim men as malevolent human characters, but rather as creatures that occupy the imagination -- non-humans that exhibit their wickedness outwardly on the skin. They populate medieval tales, Renaissance paintings, Shakespearean dramas, Gothic horror novels, and Hollywood films. Through an exhaustive survey of medieval, early modern, and contemporary literature, art, and cinema, Muslims in the Western Imagination examines the dehumanizing ways in which Muslim men have been constructed and represented as monsters, and the impact such representations have on perceptions of Muslims today.

The study is the first to present a genealogy of these creatures, from the demons and giants of the Middle Ages to the hunchbacks with filed teeth that are featured in the 2007 film 300, arguing that constructions of Muslim monsters constitute a recurring theme, first formulated in medieval Christian thought. Sophia Rose Arjana shows how Muslim monsters are often related to Jewish monsters, and more broadly to Christian anti-Semitism and anxieties surrounding African and other foreign bodies, which involves both religious bigotry and fears surrounding bodily difference. Arjana argues persuasively that these dehumanizing constructions are deeply embedded in Western consciousness, existing today as internalized beliefs and practices that contribute to the culture of violence--both rhetorical and physical--against Muslims.

Genres: Islam, History, Religion, Nonfiction, Politics, Philosophy

280 pages, Hardcover

First published December 30, 2014

Reviews

[Jeremy Garber · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dr. Arjana provides a rich, complex, and disturbing encyclopedia of the way that Muslims have been portrayed as other-than-human in Western poetry, art, film and television. Arjana skillfully uses Foucauldian genealogy and Said’s theory of Orientalism to carefully examine a wide range of how powerful white Christians saw Muslims and Jews as literally less than human beings. The scope of Arjana’s investigation and evidence is breathtaking, spanning from the earliest encounters with Muslims from “lands beyond the world,” through the portrayals of dog-headed black-skinned beturbaned monsters, through the image of the Muslim as savage uncultured warrior or effete supernatural demon. She also helpfully identifies the link between these monstrous Muslim images and anti-Semitic portrayals of Jews, whom the medieval and Renaissance authors often confused in the same passage. Most interesting were her interrogations of film such as Dracula, the portrayal of zombies and mummies, and Zack Snyder’s 300 series, proving that these ancient connotations continue through the age of 9/11. Arjana’s ultimate point, of course, is that these dehumanizing images permit violence and colonialization of Muslims by Western forces – and anyone who tries to reject her argument by pointing out Islam’s violence or “evil” simply makes her argument stronger. A must-read for students of religious studies, cultural and media studies, and philosophy.

[Fernando · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this book Sophia Rose Arjana compiles an archive of "Muslim monsters" that reside the Western imagination and cultural production. In doing so, the author discovers that the construction of the Muslim Other is anchored on racism and other prejudices deeply rooted in Western societies.

The theoretical framework of this research relies on Orientalism (Edward Said), teratology (study of monsters), genealogy (Michel Foucault) and post-colonial studies.

Arjana's work displays an extensive survey of paintings, literature and films spanning through centuries: Middle Ages, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romanticism, Gothic and the 21st century. In each period, she highlights imaginary monsters whose non normative characteristics point, in many cases explicitly, to the demonization and dehumanization of Muslims. The themes of the Muslim monsters varies along the fears and anxieties of the West; the phobia towards the Arab overlaps the anti-black Arab rhetoric, then shifts towards anti-Turk/Ottoman and finally to the current notion of the Muslim terrorist. Despite the centuries passed, the Western imaginary consistently evokes certain traits that depict negative views of Muslims, such as monstrosity, sexual depravation, unrestrained violence, savagism, speechlessness, infantilization and hybridization (human-animal).

The book makes you realize how time consistent and profound is the anti-Muslim sentiment. In the Western imagination there is a persistent line that can be traced from the Middle Ages to today. As the author points out, this goes far beyond Islamophobia, which is described as aversion to or anxiety of Islam. Instead, today anti-Muslim discourse is the result of an imaginary Islam that has been shaped over centuries, "Muslims are the monsters of the present". In this regard, Arjana's innovative research is a major contribution to Orientalist studies. She managed to keep this work both, scholar in its quality and accessible to the non academic readers.

At the end Arjana engages the question that drove her through this journey: "How did we get here, to this place of hijab bans and outlawed minarets, secret renditions of enemy combatants, Abu Ghraib and GTMO?". The answer is the Muslim monsters we've been creating since the Middle Ages. They acted as a safe valve to our anxieties, they allowed us to dehumanize the Muslim Other that comes to disturb the Western civilization's ordered sensibilities, and that justifies the extermination of the alleged threat. "The crimes of Abu Ghraib show us how powerful the discourse of Muslim monsters is", the author says; at a later NBIS interview she added: "be aware, the imagination is very powerful".

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you ever wondered how dehumanisation happens and how it may turn into the sadistic enjoyment of torturous American-style snuff pornography - such as was the case of Abu Ghraib in Iraq, post 9/11 - this is the book for you.

Absolutely disgusting yet highly enlightening reading. Reading Noam Chomsky and Manufacturing Consent at the same time and the mutually illuminating insights have been many. The conspiratorially minded people are topically on track, but they overplay the idea of a small elite pulling strings, rather it’s a multifaceted complex process of nudging and the convergence of aligned interests. We cannot underestimate the strategic sophistication and the subtle nature of their messaging.

Lay the story of (Hollywood) cinema next to the story of American wars, and you’ll see many political interrelations between the two, specifically in terms of narrative and framing, especially regarding who or what is to be conceptualised as the other, the enemy, the alien. From the soviets to the Arab Muslims of today, Hollywood and media conglomerates, intertwined with the military industrial complex, weaves a narrative of dehumanisation the justified the murder, genocide, rape and destruction of Muslims, as they succeed in injecting imagery into the imagination of the masses.

A lot of us knew that on some level already, but seeing it in such an explicit manner makes it undeniable. The historical context and pre-conditions outlined here was highly valuable as well.

[Nazar Ul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nazar Ul Islam Wani
Research Fellow, University of Kashmir.

Sophia Rose Arjana's "Muslims in the Western Imagination" is an exclusive study of Muslim monsters which exist in the Western imagination. It is an attempt to interpret the Western phobia, bias and hatred towards Muslims (juxtaposed at times with Jews), as documented in the genres and sub-genres of Western art and literature.
This exposition takes her to sail comprehensively through the stages of history; Medieval to Renaissance to Modern literature, art and cinema.
This book speaks about the teratology of Islam, artistic sarcasm and development of Muslims as subjects (Orientalism) 'transmogrified' on
the walls and paintings of Western art, the result of which are expressed in the Abu Ghraib and GTMO torture cells engineered by the haunted
ghost of the West. When placed against the backdrop of the long standing controversy between Islam and the West, the book is not the
first of its kind. However, as a genealogical and anthropological study of the dehumanisation of Muslims, Arjana's exploration through the
lenses of art, literature and film offers us a fresh perspective about how Muslims and their identities have been discursively constructed within
the Western imagination. Muslims in the Western Imagination begins with the study of Muslim monsters in medieval art, literature and paintings.

The study of the archive of Muslim monsters begins from the Middle Ages, the era in which anti-Muslim rhetoric is found, by dehumanising the first Muslim 'Prophet Muhammad as the progenitor of a Muslim monstrous race by the Christian polemics' (p. 19). The Church in the Middle Ages, according to the author, created an, 'episteme in which people were led to believe in an imaginary Islam (phantasm)' (p. 23).
The interesting argument of 'ethno-genesis' is a very good indicatorof understanding the author's medieval Muslim monsters. Such imagination' dominates the source of knowledge in every period
of history, like Islamic teratology, Jewish and Muslim demonology, Saracen doxology, Muslim and Jewish cannibalism, biased Egyptology and dangerous Turkish Physiognomy. The worst of this imagination about Muslims oozes with those subjects, and each subject is dominated by horrifying characters dedicated to Muslims. The author's analysis of characters like Dracula, Vathek, Croco-Sapien, Zofloya, Cynocephali,
hydra-monster Tamburlaine and most importantly Frankenstein's monster to show how they reflect Muslim characteristics, evokes in us a sorry feeling of such imagination. Throughout the book, the author has attempted to mull over the Western imagination and brilliantly discover depictions of Muslims as sexually perverted, paedophilic, necrophiliac, inhumane, barbaric, misogynist, rapist, man-eater, terrorist, and hence a monster.

The study of monsters proceeds genealogically through Renaissance, Enlightenment Gothic literature and post 9/11 literature, art and cinema. The author has dedicated a lot of time to surveying
the literature and semiology of monsters. Going through the author's gripping and fascinating account feels like watching a never ending
horror movie. The subjective correlative of Western emotions inscribed on the food items and paintings about the Jewish and Muslim monsters is extracted with distressing meanings by the author. The book is a challenge to the Western scholarship because the literary works from Marlowe to Shakespeare to Shelly and to Bram Stoker reflect prejudice against Muslims, with them being compared with dogs and other monstrous creatures with black and dark skin. This symbolism is extracted from the literary works about Turks, Saracens, Jews, and Africans.
The book, through the scope of its study, defines to the reader the somewhat odd history of the relations between Muslims, the West and Christianity.

The book is a must read for the students of religion and inter-faith relations. A must read for Islamic Studies European Studies and West Asian Studies.

[Pedro Barata · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very interesting book that explores how Muslims have been imagined in Western art, literature, and film through the figure of the “monster.” Sophia Arjana shows how these representations developed over centuries and continue to shape modern attitudes toward Muslims. While the book focuses primarily on Islam, it also draws connections to the portrayal of other marginalized groups, such as Jews and Indigenous peoples, highlighting broader mechanisms of exclusion. A valuable read for anyone interested in Islamophobia, cultural imagination, or the concept of monstrosity.

[Nandakishore Mridula · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book asks the critical question, how did we get here, to this place of hijab bans and outlawed minarets, secret renditions of enemy combatants, Abu Ghraib, and GTMO? It is not simply a result of September11, 2001, Madrid 2004, or London 2005, nor a culmination of events of the past decade or the past century. Terrorist attacks, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the increased movement of Muslim immigrants into northern and western Europe, and the visibility of Islam in general have contributed to a voicing of “the Muslim problem.” However, these concerns represent old anxieties that lie within a multiplicity of times and spaces on the pages of manuscripts and canvases of paintings, in works of great drama, poetry, and fiction, within travel diaries and government documents, and on the screens of movie theaters. To find the answer to the question posed here, we must look at numerous fields of cultural production; there, we find a vision of Islam that is both familiar and unsettling. Within it, we must seek what is common. What is common is the Muslim monster.

Sophia Rose Arjana begins her book, Muslims in the Western Imagination, thus: and it is indeed a worthwhile exploration of the image of the "Muslim Marauder" over the centuries.

The image of the Muslim as the infidel, the enemy of Christendom, is prominent from medieval times: and it is understandable, because for the Muslim, the Christian was the infidel. (They were competing for a limited number of souls, after all!) But what we find, as the author takes us through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and then on to modern times, is the image of the Muslim as a veritable monster persisting in literature, art, films and popular culture. From the phantasmagorical beings of medieval Europe to the bearded terrorist of popular culture today, the Muslim is marked by savagery, depravity and an insatiable sexual appetite.

Muslims exist as a diverse set of characters in the Middle Ages. As we shall see, Prophet Muhammad was at times cast as a heretic, at other times as a schismatic, or as the Antichrist, or a frightening monster. Muslims, called Saracens for much of the medieval period, were depicted as frightening hordes that signaled the End of Days, as a monstrous race, dog-headed men, demons, and more rarely, as the “chivalric counterparts of Christian knights.”

Muslims were not the only people who were demonised. The White Christian imagination, which influenced public opinion, had stereotypes for Jews, and later on, for Hindus and the Chinese. In fact, in olden times, Muslims, Jews and Africans were clubbed together as "Saracens" - they were depicted in art as black men wearing beards and turbans. In many paintings depicting the crucifixion or the martyrdom of saints, these Jew/ Muslim/ African hybrids are shown as the harassers.

This is how Guibert of Nogent, a Benedictine theologian and historian, writes about the death of Prophet Muhammad:

Let us now recount the end of this great and marvelous law-giver. I have already said that he was subject to attacks of epilepsy: one day as he was walking alone, he fell attacked by one of his convulsions,and while he was being tormented by it, some hogs, having come upon him, so completely devoured him that only his heels were found as remains. So thus this excellent law-giver is given over to the swine and eaten by them, so his evil rule was terminated as just, by a most vile end. And certainly, while his heels were left, it was without a doubt so that he could show those fools whom he hadmiserably seduced a witness of his perfidiousness and deceits.

Leave the ridiculous nature of the incident: think about the hatred that must have been there in the mind of this gentleman to write such vile drivel! Indeed, Muhammad was always singled out special treatment by these medieval "scholars".

Early medieval writings about Islam often focus on Prophet Muhammad, who is variously presented as a heretic, a schismatic, Satan, and a monster. In polemical writings, Muhammad goes by a number of aliases, including Mahomet, Machometus, Machmit, Mathomus, Maumette, Machomis, Mahmet, and Mahom.54 Most of the scholarship focuses on those polemics that describe the Prophet as a heretic or schismatic, a threat to the Church and its teachings. Scholars have placed less attention on other descriptions of Prophet Muhammad, who among other things, is cast as a demonic force, a human-animal hybrid, and a sexual monster with unending supplies of semen who harbored plans to rape the Virgin Mary in heaven. For medieval Christians, Muhammad was not considered a prophet, but rather as Homo totus lubricus, a sexual monster.

As we move away from the Middle Ages, the Saracen is replaced by the Turk as the monstrous being - maybe because of Christendom's successive failures to occupy the "Holy Land" through the crusades. One particularly gruesome tale is of King Richard the Lionheart, in the play Richard Cour de Lion, where the king beheads his Turkish captives and serve their heads up for dinner to their guests.

Richard “instructs the cook to behead the highest ranking captives in his prison, shave and boil the heads, and then serve them up, each with a little name label attached to its forehead and with the mouth stretched in ‘a hideous grin,’ ”...

This is actually a reversal of roles: Turks were blamed of cannibalism by many historians of the crusades. In Elizabethan England, Richard's unsavoury dish was symbolically represented in a pie.

The Turk’s Head is also the name given to a savory pie popular in Britain and France during the Elizabethan period that represented a cannibalistic feast of Turkish flesh. Typically, this pie was a grotesque caricature of a Turk or Saracen’s face. By eating it, Christians consumed the enemy in an act of symbolic cannibalism.

Later on, the Renaissance and Enlightenment muted this anti-Muslim rhetoric, but the image of the East as an exotic place remained. While Muslim men were feared for their violent sexual energy, Muslim women were desired for the same reason.

The author's analysis of the modern monsters depicted in horror movies and novels as symbols for Muslims, however, didn't quite jell for me. It seems to me that she could have concentrated on popular fiction which gives better examples.

But now we come to the crux of the book, the question the author posed at the beginning: how did we reach here?

The crimes of Abu Ghraib show us how powerful the discourse of Muslim monsters is. One interrogator at Abu Ghraib commented, “We thought they [the Iraqis] were animals,” revealing that soldiers thought Muslims were something only human-like. Some US soldiers likened Iraqis to animals, referring to them as “beasts.” There were “striking similarities between the lives of animals and the lives of prisoners captured on film at Abu Ghraib,” except the dogs used to torture the prisoners were treated better. Survivors of Abu Ghraib testified to the inhumane treatment they were subjected to. Haider Al-Aboodi recalled how he and others were “forced to walk like dogs on our hands and knees. And we had to bark like a dog,” Kasim Hilas told of the rape of an Iraqi boy by a male soldier that was filmed by a female soldier, and as Nori Al-Yasseri testified, “They treated us like animals not humans."

The Muslim "terrorist", a descendant of the Muslim "monster" of the Middle Ages, is definitely not human.

Abu Ghraib is part of the archive of Muslim monsters. Like the spectacle of foreign bodies formulated in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which continued to be seen during the colonial age, the images of Muslim bodies that emerged from the prison are situated in a mixed-up milieu of sexual desire and repulsion.

***

The relationship of the crimes detailed at Abu Ghraib in photographs— 1,800 or so images of naked, tortured, sodomized, bloody, and dead Iraqis—were interspersed with “selfies” of the soldiers performing sex acts on themselves and others. Abu Ghraib was essentially a set for snuff films, pornographic movies in which real people are murdered. Even those advocating torture recognized the pornographic aesthetic.

***

What lies behind these crimes? This question has received considerably less attention than the crimes (and their aesthetic resonances) themselves. The answer is found in the belief that Muslims are less-than-zero— post-human. The horrors of Abu Ghraib, which continue in some form at GTMO in the forced feedings and other governmental policies still underway, are acts that reveal that Muslims are not considered human. This is, I believe, what makes the existence of imaginary Muslim monsters in Europe and the United States such a serious problem. Something led the architects of the War on Terror to think that the indefinite detention, torture, rape, and murder of Muslims—no matter how “bad” these Muslims are—would be acceptable. Muslims are so dehumanized in public discourse that treating them as just bodies, Agamben’s “bare life,” has become, in fact, acceptable. Muslims are not just represented as monsters—they are monsters.

As I look at the bloodbath going on in Gaza with the blessings of the civilised world, I have to agree.

[Kürşat K. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mitolojiden sinemaya kadar geniş bir alanda Batı'nın Müslüman algısı hakkında ilginç detayları içeren iyi hazırlanmış bir kitap. Çok beğendim.

[Thom DeLair]

This book is about the existence of the Muslim stereotype throughout the West’s collective imagination. A short book, it focuses mainly male Muslim stereotype as a malevolent sexual predator. Published in 2015 and ending with a discussion on Abu Ghraib and GTMO’s media portrayal of Muslim bodies it makes a point statement about the West’s perception of Muslims in light of a post 911 world.

The book is short, following a narrow course of the Muslim monster through 1,300 years. The second chapter begins with the bumpkin European in the Middle Ages, having fantastically xenophobic ideas of other people from afar. The kind of mentality you might expect from a crusader marching to the Holy Land. This imaginary monster is combination stereotype of a s sexually violent Black/Jewish/Muslim. Since the book focuses on the male Muslim monster, it’s difficult to know about the broader or more pragmatic side of the European attitude toward Muslims.

It mentions that France during the Renaissance period had trade connections with the Ottoman Empire, but that didn’t change much of the public monstrifying Muslims. In Silk Roads by Frankopan, Queen Elizabeth’s reign saw her unsuccessfully attempt to expel “Black Moors” from England in 1597 while also “walking a fine line” in making trade alliances the Ottoman Sultan, establishing of the Levant Company. As of the time of writing this, a modern comparison could be President Trump’s support from his voting-base to have travel bans on particular Muslim countries, but he has also shrewdly held onto his partnership with Saudi Arabia for economic and realpolitik reasons.

There’s some discussion on Othello which I’ve heard a lot of different takes on the play especially because the main character is a moor and what that says about racial perceptions during the time. Arjana argues that Shakespeare presents the moors as a hopelessly doomed race. Others have been more positive about his image, while The Great Wave by Fischer presents it as among of plays of the era that reflected the bleak economic conditions.

By the early 1800s, with the emergence of Romanticism, the book leads to monsters and their relationship to these traditional Oriental stereotypes that pervade the European imagination, like vampire stories originating from an Anti-Semitic stereotype. The book felt written backwards, as it doesn’t seem to come in its own until the 20th century and a critique of Hollywood’s role in perpetuating the Orientalist or “Muslim” stereotypes. If you are a fan of the tv series Homeland or the movies 300, Indiana Jones or Star Wars, then be ready to blush and consider how they perpetual these Muslim Monsters in your imagination.

The book clearly states, in post 9-11 world, there all small numbers of Muslim terrorists, the vast majority of Muslims are not involved in terror plots against the US government. Through that narrative though, we should be aware of the long tradition of racist imagination in the west and carefully consider how these overblown fears of dangerous Muslim men can lead to irrational decision making.

[Noor Saadeh · Rating 5 out of 5]

İf you ever wondered why there is so much misinformation, stereotypes and rampant Islamophobia you will say "Why, no wonder!" after reading this book. I was shaking my head in 'shock and awe', if you will, and at other times laughing uproariously at just how ridiculous and incredulous our collective history can be. One chapter examines how Muslims are depicted alongside Jews torturing and crucifying Jesus in countless artworks of various periods. Surprising as Islam followed Christianity in chronological order, some six centuries later. And that's only the beginning. The various chapters are labeled Muslim Monsters in various eras and lands.

A very good treatise how the West dehumanizes 'the other' and has done so throughout its history and continues to do so today.

İt's academic and extremely well researched but all too easy to read.

[محمد سعيد · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dr. Arjana’s book is timely and illuminating, and will serve as an exceptionally helpful resource for educators, both at the high school and college level. Her book provides countless examples of “Muslim monsters” and traces their evolution throughout history.

She shows how the demonization of Muslims in the medieval period was tied to earlier European tropes that dehumanized Jews and black Africans, and highlights how those anti-Jewish, anti-black, and anti-Muslim tropes continue to intermingle up to the present day. I was particularly interested by the example of Dracula, a character who was an amalgam of Jewish and Muslim monster qualities. I never would have known, when watching Sesame Street, as a young child, the racist origins of the Count.

I was also fascinated by her chapter on Muslim monsters in the Americas, and the fears about Muslims that the early Europeans brought with them to the New World. I had never known that they sometimes referred to Native Americans as “New Moors,” their large cities as “Cairo,” and their houses of worship as “mosques.” Dr. Arjana also points out Americans’ later fascination and fear about “Barbary Muslims” and the cottage industry of captivity tales that arose at the turn of the 20th century and have persisted in America film.

Dr. Arjana is right to conclude that this centuries-old Western construction of Muslim monsters has contemporary consequences, a reality that became horrifyingly apparent in the abuses of Abu Ghraib. For teachers that want to better acquaint their students with the early antecedents of modern Islamophobia, this book will serve as a helpful guide.

[Mohammad Hossain · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author deserves applause for having the academic courage to explore a timely topic such as Muslim monsters in the Western imagination. Her book is undoubtedly a valuable contribution by an expert in the field. Having said that, the vast scope of 1300 years of negative Muslim characterisation in the form of teratology in the Western imaginaire necessitates a much more comprehensive study than this work offers. The work’s sometimes cursory treatment, especially in terms of discussion, belies the need for further extensive scholarship on the separate fields covered, such as literature, drama and the arts. Nonetheless, Arjana, through her nevertheless valuable contribution, has reiterated both the need and importance of further scholarly contribution in this field.

The full review here: icrjournal.org/icr/index.php/icr/arti...

[M- S__ · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is a brief and engaging read. perfect supplemental reading if you're already interested in the history of the muslim world or the history of media. i was particularly drawn in by the ways in which our current muslim paranoia retreads the same stale historical stereotypes and by the way in which "muslim" evolved expanded keeping pace with the changes in political power.

[S. Edwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

You don't know what you don't know about portrayal of Muslims in western culture. Beautifully written, informative, educational, and entertaining! It's been many years since I struggled to put down a nonfiction book. This is a really a great read for anyone interested in theology, culture, Islam, history, or film! Highly recommended!