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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal – Vol. 10, No. 9

Publication Date: September 25, 2023

DOI:10.14738/assrj.109.15253.

El Fida, B. (2023). Exposing Feminist, Orientalist Western Literary Portrayals of Islam and Muslims: From the Monstrous ‘Saracens’

to the Oppressed Muslim Women. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, 10(9). 249-262.

Services for Science and Education – United Kingdom

Exposing Feminist, Orientalist Western Literary Portrayals of

Islam and Muslims: From the Monstrous ‘Saracens’ to the

Oppressed Muslim Women

Brahim El Fida

Moroccan High Schools, Mohammed I University, Morocco

INTRODUCTION

Burning the Qur’an, the holy book of the Muslims, attacking the Prophet Muhammad and

Muslims with Muslim background any time it is convenient for political ends (Presidents E.

Macron and D. Trump as examples) and the question of the oppression of the Muslim women

are among the heated debates and issues about what is commonly called the ‘Muslim question’

in the West. Hence, there is no man on earth who has been ‘fabricated,’ demonized, used,

misused and dehumanized as Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). His life and biography were

deployed by Christian and Western polemicists and authors for centuries to attack him as the

central figure in Islam. He was used theologically to discredit him and ‘his false religion.’ He was

equally used to denote allegedly ‘political despotism’ and concurrently criticise Western

practices and ruling elites for their ‘potential tyranny.’ He was also employed to depict social

tyranny and ‘show’ how he ‘managed’ to seduce ‘easily-deceived Arabs’ to believe in his new

‘founded’ religion without providing sound miracles. He was depicted as suffering from epileptc

seizures and sexual potency by medieval authors and monks. He succeeded, according to many

accounts, to preach ‘his religion’ by treachery, violence and the sword. This was done to

‘demonstrate’ his supposed despotism and pervert sexuality. ‘Muhammadan paradise’ or

‘Muslim paradise’ was also a preoccupation for some theologians and authors. These

(mis)conceptions were born in theological treatises and polemical writings and then found

shelter in other means of expression like poetry, drama and novels. The road map here is to

trace how Muhammad was portrayed in theological and literary productions. This permits the

argument that these portrayals are still prevalent and enduring in some Western narratives.

In Islamic tradition, however, Muhammad is the seal of the Prophets sent by Allah to preach His

Religion. The Religion in Islamic tradition is but Islam from Adam to Muhammad. He is the

beloved Prophet and Messenger of Allah praised and followed by billions of Muslims

throughout the ages and in different corners of the globe. He came with the last message of

mercy and ethics to deliver to humankind. He is the model for all Muslims wherever and

whenever they might be. He is much admired and followed. His name is always mentioned in

sermons where prayers go after his mention. In Muslim communities and families, it is quite

common to find boys and men named Muhammad or its derivations (Muhamadayn,

Muhammadi or even Ahmed). Muhammad’s role, as John Tolan (2019) observes, is viewed as

essential to this “self-definition : the shahada, or Muslim credo, first attested during the

Umayyad period, affirms “there is no God but God, and Muhammad is the prophet of God.” The

belief in Muhammad’s stature as prophet became the essential element that distinguishes

Muslims from non-Muslims” (8). One wonders why it remained till the later ‘Umayyad period’

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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal (ASSRJ) Vol. 10, Issue 9, September-2023

Services for Science and Education – United Kingdom

since it had been present in the early days of the Prophet’s message. However, since the task

here is to uncover Western conceptions of Islam and Muslims (Muhammad included) the

Islamic tradition is less discussed for this study does not discuss how the two traditions vary or

contradict. It does not equally intend to challenge those conceptions. The study uncovers the

earlier mythologies since the Medieval Ages that initiate and distort the legacy of the Prophet

(PBUH).

MEDIEVAL DISTORTING MYTHOLOGIES

One of the reiterated themes and images concerning the portrayal of Prophet Muhammad

revolves around ‘sexual’ images and ‘debauchery.’ Sexual imagery has been constructed around

Prophet Muhammad’s sexual energies that are incomparable. The latter was associated with

tales on Turkish soldiers having sex with killed Christians after the fall of Constantinople

(Arjana 69). The genealogy of this imagery is to be found in the early medieval ages, from the

eighth and ninth centuries when ‘Muslim monsters’ appeared in the Christian imagination.

“Christian polemics, which often focused on Prophet Muhammad as the progenitor of a

monstrous race of Saracens, among other things,” notes Arjana, are a significant initial basis for

later “Muslim monsters” (19). Muhammad was depicted as seducing and seduced Prophet

suffering occasional epileptic seizures by Guibert of Nogent. In the latter’s account, Muhammad

is devoured by hogs for his wicked deeds and perfidious manners (Arjana 27-28). The bases of

Muslim monsters are positioned in “these fantasies of early Muslims, specifically in the

mythologies surrounding an Arab merchant named Muhammad” (32). To belittle the Prophet

and reduce the perplexing success and expansion of Islam, some earlier authors attacked

Muhammad. These medieval authors rendered ““Mahomet” as a wholly human founder of a

new, deviant version of Christianity, a heresy. Through preaching, magic tricks, and false

miracles, this charlatan hoodwinked the naive and lustful Arabs into taking him for a prophet

and making him their leader,” states Tolan in his Faces of Muhammad (10). They equally wanted

to reassure their audience that “Christians were nevertheless favored by God, and that

Mahomet had proffered nothing more than a crude caricature of true religion, which appealed

to the Saracens because it gave them license to indulge in violent conquest and sexual

debauchery” (Tolan 10). These early writings concentrate on Muhammad who was variously

depicted as “a heretic, a schismatic, Satan, and a monster” and was “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” (Arjana 32). According to this narrative, he was “the

first Muslim individual cast as a monster, influencing many of the characters that followed him,

especially the ones who exhibit hyper-sexuality and violent behaviors” (32). This was later

addressed to the ‘cruel,’ ‘violent’ (Ottoman) Turks and the ‘Moors.’ In the text Newes from

Vienna the 5 Day of August, one finds a significant “narrative of torture, sexual deviancy and

barbarity to the growing body of material that surrounded the ‘turke’ in early modern thought,”

asserts Dimmock in his New Turkes (72). Irrational cruelty, violence and barbarity as

conceptions and images are transferred from the Prophet in the early Medieval Ages to the

‘terrible Turks’, the ‘Moors’ and the ‘Berbers’ as constructed ‘people’/characters in the

sixteenth century up to the nineteenth. They are also encountered in Elizabethan drama. In

Elizabethan era, depictions of Muhammad built on previous medieval writings and images

“resulting in characterizations as a heretic and sexual pervert” (Arjana 69). It is here that the

Prophet took the following form of a monster, a dreaded beast, or as a “Mungrell born” creature

with a scalded head ...by Shakespeare’s time, the Turk had replaced the Arab as the dominant

symbol of Islam, a shift that impacted representations of Muslim characters, whether of a

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El Fida, B. (2023). Exposing Feminist, Orientalist Western Literary Portrayals of Islam and Muslims: From the Monstrous ‘Saracens’ to the Oppressed

Muslim Women. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, 10(9). 249-262.

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/assrj.109.15253

human or monstrous nature” (Arjana 69). Moreover, in William Painter’s poem, The Palace of

Pleasure, the Turk is presented as “‘wicked’ and ‘cruel,’ with beastly attributes : the sultan’s

‘madness’ is more terrifying than ‘a wild lioness,’ and his ‘beastliness’ far exceeded [that of]

beasts” (qtd. In Arjana 69). In Elizabethan drama, there are other countless negative portrayals

of Oriental Muslims-Arabs such as Othello and Tamburlaine.

Some of these images are also abundant in the nascent American narratives and imagination

during the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. These images are still encountered today.

Shakespeare’s Othello also reflects the European anxieties, concerns, some of which signal that

“the sexual union of different races and even distinct religions [can create] horrible monsters”

(Arjana 74). It is claimed that Leo Africanus’s text Geographical Historie of Africa, which

discusses how Muhammad claimed conversing with angel Gabriel to explain his epilepsy, was

in circulation and that Shakespeare might have read it. Epilepsy is another theme much

discussed by earlier Christian polemicists to discredit Muhammad. Daniel Vitkus notes in his

Turning Turk (2003) how “Othello’s epilepsy” evokes that of the “ur-Moor, Muhammed.

Christian polemics against Islam, printed in Shakespeare’s time, frequently allege that

Muhammed was an epileptic who falsely maintained that his seizures were ecstasies brought

on by divine possession” (85-86). This myth, or what literary critics call trope, is also employed

to target and discredit Muhammad, to prove he is no Prophet.

Both Suzanne Akbari and Janice Hawes discuss the ‘Saracen body’ and its depictions and

transformations that it was subject to in earlier narratives such as the Chansons de geste, in

Fierabras, King Horn, The Song of Roland, The Siege of Milan and other Middle English romances

and poems. These works feature Muslims (‘Saracens’ then) as giants, fearsome and monstrous

creatures. They are dehumanized and demonized, which permits either their conversion or

extermination. That earlier discourse is crucial in this regard since it can be read as a pre- Orientalist scholarship. In Fierabras, the king/emir Laban is the father to both Fierabras (son)

and Floripas (daughter). The story can be summarized as follows: the emir Laban (in other texts

called Balan) of Spain returns home with his son Fierabras after looting the Church of Saint

Peter’s in Rome bringing the relics of the passion with them. To recover the relics, Charlemagne

attacks Spain and deploys his companion knight Oliver to fight Fierabras. The latter is defeated

and successfully converts to Christianity as does Floripas who falls in love with another known

knight of Charlemagne’s, Guy of Boulogne (Akbari 158). Laban the emir/king, however, proves

resistant to assimilation and conversion. Laban stands for the elder generation of resisting

figures in face of the power of conversion and assimilation. As for the siblings, it signals the

“transformative power of the Christian community” (158). The theme of conversion was

widespread in medieval writings and literature. Those who converted to Christianity

underwent sometimes both physical and personal transformation. Dark skin and bodily

deformation would ‘miraculously’ turn into lovely whiteness and good shape. This proved the

healing power of Christianity and the wishful thinking of those earlier Christian authors.

During the fourteenth century, argues Akbari, “the opposition of northern and southern bodies

had come to be associated with a different binary opposition, that of East and West...the Orient

came to be characterized as a place of torrid heat and irascible, lascivious inhabitants, while the

West came to be seen as a place of temperate climate and rational souls” (156). One should bear

in mind that binary opposition is a cornerstone of the orientalist scholarship. Therefore, in

accordance with what the Greeks thought of the Orientals as cruel, despotic and undemocratic,