Anglo-American observers explained Muslim expansion as violent coercion.

Evidence

Although Britons in India differed from Americans because of the active (if exaggerated) threat to their political order, both shared a conviction regarding two alleged qualities of Islam that made it a perennial menace: the proclivity of Muslims to spread their religion and to do so violently. In their reflections on the proselytizing power of Muslims – an issue among Europeans since at least the eighth century when predominantly Christian north Africa and Spain converted almost entirely to Islam – Americans and Britons almost universally explained mass conversion as the result of coercion. — Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg, Common Heritage, Uncommon Fear, 81

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the earlier extracted claim that anti-Muslim imagery dates to the eighth-century medieval monster archive — coercive-conversion narratives are the explanatory engine invoked whenever Muslims gained ground.
• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source