Anti-Muslim racism predates and informs the modern race concept.

Evidence

The genealogy of the race concept that I trace thus began in the newly formed empire of Catholic Spain in the fifteenth century and sixteenth century and imagined its civilizational others in relation to the Muslim Moor and the indigenous people of the New World. As Nabil Matar (1999) and Anouar Majid (2004, 2009) have persuasively argued, this early recognition of religious di√erence dominated Spanish, and European, identity and may have provided philosophical and intellectual antecedents to the Enlightenment and its humanistic approach. In early Enlightenment philosophical thought, Islam was at the border, and at the margin, of the European imagination of the human subject (Majid 2004). This prototypical racism, which imagined itself as the antithesis of Islam and Muslims, shifted conversations about modernity and its provincialisms; it also created an important framework for thinking through contemporary racism, as well as the basis and existence of anti–Muslim racism. As imperial renewal was taking place in the Reconquista (Reconquest), clear ideas of race were being formed. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 157

Categorization

• QUESTION: A significant historical thesis challenging the standard view that race originates in colonial encounters with Africans. Worth verifying against the Easter, Fredrickson, and Hannaford accounts of race origins.
• SEED: Article angle: the Reconquista as the overlooked birthplace of Western racial thinking — how the Muslim Moor became the first racial other avant la lettre, with implications for how we periodize racism today.
• XREF: connects to: Pre-modern anti-Muslim prejudice laid racial groundwork without full racial ideology; Racism predates anti-Blackness and produces each distinct race.; Racism produces races, and racism predates anti-Blackness — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 60