Antebellum American attitudes to Muslims were elastic, not fixed
Evidence
As more travelers visited the lands ruled by Muslims, they found even more evidence to show that enslaved people there were not treated as poorly as they were in the US South. Thus, if abolitionist arguments began by comparing American slaveholders to the “tyrants” of Turkey, they shifted their tone when they encountered evidence of its relatively benign nature in Muslim ruled regions. In the 1840s, the Bey of Tunis and the Sultan of Turkey took aggressive steps to end slavery. This was reported in American newspapers and lent credence to the abolitionists’ arguments. It also challenged the trope of Islamic lands as static and unchanging and of slavery as being endemic to Islamic culture. Thus, antebellum US attitudes toward the Turks and North African Muslims were not fixed but changed at different historical conjunctures and varied by multiple constituent groups within the nation. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 229
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- SHARE: For a friend of comparative slavery studies: evidence that 1840s Tunisian/Turkish antislavery steps were covered in US papers and used by abolitionists.
Related
- Antebellum American views of Muslims shifted with historical circumstances (similarity 0.84)
- Actual evidence of Muslim practice can break negative stereotypes (similarity 0.82)
- American racism against Muslims extends back to enslaved Africans (similarity 0.80)
- Actual encounters with Muslims could dissipate American negative stereotypes (similarity 0.80)
- American rhetoric repeatedly fused Muslim identity with fanaticism (similarity 0.79)
- American Islamophobia stems from slavery and anti-Black racism, not just Orientalism. (similarity 0.79)
- Asian and American Islamophobia diverged according to each society’s domestic situation (similarity 0.78)
- Northern anti-slavery whites still held blacks to be alien to America. (similarity 0.78)