Americans feared Muslims before any meaningful Muslim presence existed in the hemisphere

Evidence

Gottschalk and Greenberg dwell at length on how Islam became perceived as a threat in America, despite the lack of any recognized Muslim presence in the Western hemisphere (since enslaved African Muslims were not normally counted). … It was evidently only after the 1857 Indian revolt (largely blamed on the Muslims and the last Mughal emperor) that British officials began to subscribe to a paranoid suspicion of a Muslim threat to their dominion, and American missionaries went along with fears of a global Muslim conspiracy. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 39

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reading purpose of anatomizing the frightened subject rather than the feared object; parallels the project’s guiding question about how fear functions for the fearer. — connects to: Antebellum American views of Muslims shifted with historical circumstances
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what did the 1857 revolt actually look like as an event in British colonial paranoia, independent of the Muslim-centered narrative?