Anti-Muslim and antisemitic persecution became racism when conversion was deemed biologically impossible.

Evidence

Centuries before those modern ideas we have come to call ‘racism’ … the move from religious antipathy to racism may perhaps be witnessed in post-Reconquista Spain when Jews and Muslims were forced to convert to Christianity or be expelled. At this stage, the oppression can perhaps be characterised as religious. Soon afterward, converted Jews and Muslims and their offspring began to be suspected of not being true Christian believers, a doctrine developed amongst some Spaniards that this was because their old religion was in their blood. In short, because of their biology, conversion was impossible. Centuries later, these views about race became quite detached from religion and in Nazi and related doctrines were given a thoroughly scientific-biologic cast and constitute a paradigmatic and extreme version of modern racism. — Nasar Meer, Tariq Modood, Refutations of Racism in the ‘Muslim…, 49

Categorization

• DEFINE: Provides a genealogy of how ‘religious antipathy’ becomes ‘racism’ — a biopolitical threshold that helps define the boundary between religious discrimination and racism.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s own knowledge of how ‘blood’ and biology-based definitions of group membership drive exclusion — parallels Foucault’s biopower and current debates over racialized religion (e.g. Muslims as a ‘race’ in the 2017 Runnymede turn). — connects to: Hostility to British Muslims predates modern biological racism and parallels antisemitism — A. Hussain, N. Meer, Framing Muslim Integration, 167; Anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish stereotyping operates through racialization rather than mere religious prejudice. — A. Hussain, N. Meer, Framing Muslim Integration, 700; Anti-Muslim signification is culturally constructed rather than biologically grounded. — Chris Allen, Islamophobia, 822 (+6 more)

Related

• Modern biological racism grew out of earlier religious antipathy toward converts (similarity 0.90)
• Anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish stereotyping operates through racialization rather than mere religious prejudice. (similarity 0.87)
• Anti-Muslim signification is culturally constructed rather than biologically grounded. (similarity 0.85)
• Racism scholarship’s biologistic paradigms long excluded anti-Muslim discrimination as unclassifiable (similarity 0.85)
• Hostility to British Muslims predates modern biological racism and parallels antisemitism (similarity 0.85)
• Bodily notions of inherited difference preceded fully secular modern racism. (similarity 0.84)
• Racism scholarship long confined itself to biological black-white and antisemitic models (similarity 0.83)
• Anti-Muslim racism is analytically parallel to European antisemitism against Jews as Jews. (similarity 0.82)
• Anti-Muslim racism has shifted from bodies to culture while keeping an essentialist logic (similarity 0.81)
• Religion gets racialized by ascribing inherited biological traits to a faith community (similarity 0.81)
• Modern scientific racism displaced religion from the race concept. (similarity 0.81)
• Medieval anti-Muslim prejudice was protoracism, not full modern racism (similarity 0.81)
• Suspicion of Britain’s Muslims predates modern biological racism (similarity 0.81)
• Muslims were told anti-Muslim racism cannot exist because Muslims are not a race (similarity 0.81)
• Nineteenth-century State racism reutilized older religious anti-Semitism for biological exclusion (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish stereotyping operates through racialization rather than mere religious prejudice. #expands (0.85) — A. Hussain, N. Meer, Framing Muslim Integration, 700
• Cultural racism targets Muslims’ beliefs and traditions as if they were inherited essence. #expands (0.82)
• Hostility to British Muslims predates modern biological racism and parallels antisemitism #corroborates (0.80) — A. Hussain, N. Meer, Framing Muslim Integration, 167
• Racism repositions its targets from repentable sinners to unregenerable vermin #expands (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 209
• Anti-Muslim signification is culturally constructed rather than biologically grounded. #qualifies (0.78) — Chris Allen, Islamophobia, 822
• Islamophobia operates as cultural racism rooted in religion, culture, and ethnicity rather than biology. #qualifies (0.75) — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 92
• Cultural racism substitutes cultural traits for biological ones in racializing groups. #expands (0.75)