Anti-Muslim racial templates were transferred to justify African slavery

Evidence

As Islam and Muslims were eclipsed in European politics in the scramble of competing imperialisms, slavery took over the space they left open. Early on, black Africans were placed into a logic that paired them with Moors, Indians, and Jews. In the context of the American colonies, and then of the formation of the United States, religion was not far from the construction of the logic of nation and race. Racialized ideas about Muslims were transferred to African slaves to justify enslavement via claims of benevolent domination (e.g., the Hamitic hypothesis, which re-emerged in nineteenth-century and twentiethcentury narratives of black Muslims in the U.S.) and, indeed, the forced migration of African Muslims to the Americas. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 190

Categorization

• XREF: The Hamitic hypothesis connects to the reader’s broader knowledge of racial theory and will likely echo material on race-science elsewhere. — connects to: Europeans saw enslaved African Muslims as semicivilized aids for Christianizing other Africans; Islam’s racialization dates to American slavery, not modern immigration debates — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 148; Property racecraft perfected against Black Americans now templates anti-Muslim exclusion. — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 468
• DEEPTHINKING: The genealogy here — Muslim other → Native American other → African enslaved other as a single sliding template of ‘benevolent domination’ — is a genuinely paradigm-shifting point about the continuity of racialization across targets.