Anti-Islamic fear imagined Muslims colonizing America into apostasy from afar.
Evidence
Some warned that coercive conversions did not belong just to the past but may again menace Christians. For instance, in 1835 Eli Smith, an American missionary in Turkey, imagined for his audience in a Boston magazine that the dead ancient Christians of Western Asia warned American Christians today, “Hereafter, upon the fair face of your beloved America, as now upon that glory of all lands which was once our country, a night of apostacy may settle down, and hordes of yet unnamed barbarian invaders fasten deep the blight of some new Mohammedanism” [sic]. — Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg, Common Heritage, Uncommon Fear, 81
Categorization
- FICTION: Smith’s nightmare vision of America suffering Islam’s conquest reads like a forebear of modern ‘Eurabia’ speculative dread — usable in essays on how invasion fantasies recur.
- SEED: The 1835 Boston magazine passage is a striking early instance of the ‘they will come for us’ trope well before any Muslim presence in America — an essay angle on imagined rather than actual threat.
- XREF: connects to: Muslims are positioned as an external threat against America’s internal enemies.; Nineteenth-century Anglo-American observers feared a globally unified Islam centered on the Ottoman caliph — Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg, Common Heritage, Uncommon Fear:…, 67; American Islamophobia equipped China and India to persecute their Muslim populations. (+1 more)