Anti-Muslim prejudice unified European Christendom and was imported into American settler colonialism

Evidence

Since the First Crusade in 1095, European Christians viewed Islam’s supposed propagation of ignorance, violence, and sensuality as a threat to Christianity’s perceived light, knowledge, and reason. The juxtaposition of enemy Islam to Christianity created a collective Christian identity, a political unifier, after centuries of fighting within Christendom. As Tomaž Mastnak notes, Pope Urban II, who launched the First Crusade, “fixed the image of the Muslim as the focal point for Christian animosities.” With each Crusade’s call on Christians to take back Jerusalem and the Holy Land, Muslims were described as barbarians. As Europe came to represent the locus of Christendom, the Mahometan Turks became the enemy, and “exterminate the Turk in Europe” became a unifying slogan. The Englishmen who founded the United States imported these prejudices into their settler colonial project. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 490

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Crusades-bred anti-Islamic framing also present in readings on the holy war tradition as Western rather than Islamic. — connects to: Anti-Ottoman crusader attitudes were transferred onto Native Americans by English colonists — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 206
• ADDENDUM: The framing of constructed out-group enemies as political unifiers echoes the identity-signaling analysis already used in ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back.’