An 1808 polemic seeded modern American terrorist depictions of Muslims

Evidence

Islam as a political enemy was also theologically grounded. Throughout the Reformation, Protestants and Catholics portrayed Islam as evil and Mahometans as incapable of exercising human reason. The English Protestant cleric John Foxe, in his 1563 Book of Martyrs, depicted Mahometan Turks as cruel despots whose atrocities against Christians were comparable to the Romans’ violence centuries earlier. During the nineteenth century, the English churchman Humphrey Prideaux claimed Islam was not a religion but rather a political scheme hatched by Muhammad to take over Arabia. In his influential 1808 book, The True Nature of Imposture Displayed in the Life of Mahomet, Prideaux argued that Islam was an imposter religion because it served carnal interests, was led by wicked men, used craft and fraud, and was spread by force. Prideaux’s book mainstreamed the notion that Prophet Muhammad was a militant zealot who forcibly spread his political ideology by the sword. This theme would later animate depictions of Muslims as terrorists in American political discourse starting in the 1970s. Notably, the demand for Prideaux’s book in North America was so high that it was published in eight editions. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 495

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism thesis and to the genealogy of anti-Muslim framing in American discourse the reader has been tracking.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did Prideaux’s 1808 book circulate so widely in North America, and through which channels — evangelical networks? Reprint runs?
• DEFINE: Defines the ‘imposter religion’ polemical framework that structured centuries of Western anti-Islam discourse.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes…, 495