American Islamophobia predates modern politics, rooted in mythologies of white utopia

Evidence

One of the reasons that early American history is an important part of the story of Muslim monsters is found in the mythologies of white America. Muslims, like American Indians and African-Americans, stand in opposition to the idea of the United States as a utopia. In the US imagination, Muslims are not white, and they certainly aren’t Christian. Their origins are murky and distant, as opposed to the ancestral Anglo-Saxon lands with which many white Americans still identify. Muslims have always been posited as an external threat that, in addition to America’s many internal enemies, including American Indians, African-Americans, Mexicans, queers, and feminists, threaten the American dream. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 575

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s own thesis on the Muslim monster as manufactured projection; also echoes Said’s Orientalism discourse-construction framework.
• SEED: An essay angle: how ‘murky and distant origins’ as a rhetorical marker maps across American nativist panics from Irish, Chinese, and Mexican immigration to Muslims.