American writers conflated the worldwide Muslim community with desert Arabs

Evidence

In 1892, the American Catholic priest Charles C. Starbuck cautioned that this Muslim “Pope” might yet unite all Muslims whom he characterized as “simply a vast agglomeration of disconnected atoms, like its own sand-wastes,” conflating Muslims with the people of the desert. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 136

Categorization

• XREF: Conflation of a global, diverse religion with one desert people echoes the move the title’s ‘anatomy of intolerance’ dissects elsewhere; connects to Said’s Orientalism.
• SEED: A discursive-history angle: how describing a world religion by its geography’s barrenness rhetorically justifies domination.