Mahomet/Mohammed

Military or cultural invasions commonly generate blasons populaires , or popular stereotypes, and semantic derogation in the form of nicknames or distortions of proper names. The Moorish expansion and conquest of parts of Europe from the eighth century generated xenophobic animus against Muslims, especially in two ways. The first was the predictable application of such terms as heathen, pagan , and infidel to these peoples. Less expected were the various corruptions of the name of the prophet Mahomet that came to be used throughout the Middle Ages.

From the Christian perspective Mahomet was a false prophet, who in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary was “in the Middle Ages often vaguely imagined to be worshipped as a god.” The name Mahomet in the sense of “an idol” is recorded from about 1205. Furthermore, the name itself is used as a plain insult by Walter Kennedy in The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy (1553): “Sarazyne, symonyte,… Mahomete, mansuorne” (“Saracen, simonite [trafficker in relics],… Mahomet, oath-breaker”) (l. 526). Most common among the corruptions of the name was the form Mahounde , used in an abusive fashion to mean variously, “a devil,” “a false prophet,” or “a monster.” Swearing by Mahounde became a specialty of the evil or benighted characters in the medieval mystery plays. In the Coventry Play Herod the Great , the infanticide Herod enjoys the “report-back” from the soldiers sent to massacre the innocents, saying: “Be gracious Mahound more myrth never I had” (“By gracious Mahound I never had so much joy,” l. 209). Mahounde is sometimes transformed into a dramatic figure, often related to and confused with Termagant, defined by the OED as “a violent and overbearing personage representing a deity supposedly worshipped by Muslims.” In his satire “Why come ye not to Court?” directed at Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, John Skelton wrote in 1522: “Like Mahound in a play, / No man dare him withsay” (ll. 594-95). Mahound survived the Middle Ages, appearing in Alexander Pope, Sir Walter Scott, and other literary contexts up to the mid-nineteenth century.

An earlier form is mawmet , meaning “a false god” or “idol,” recorded from about 1205, and its related variant mawmetrie , “the worship of false gods,” “idolatry.” Sir Thomas More wrote in his Dialoge (1529) of “the idolles and mamettes of the pagans.” However, the iconoclastic impulses generated by the Reformation, leading to the mass destruction of religious images, resulted in the term being used by extremist Protestants to stigmatize the images of Christ and the saints. In his work Reliques of Rome (1553) Thomas Becon even used the proper name in this Christian context, referring to “Idols and mahomets” (88). In due time these originally xenophobic senses were applied to Catholic ritual and lasted for centuries, especially in the demeaning sense of a doll or puppet. The OED has a reference to a “Guy Fawkes momet” (an effigy of the Pope) dated as late as 1892. All these terms are now obsolete, also showing the semantic trend of generalization, a common feature of xenophobic terms.