Attacks on Islam in eighteenth-century England were really attacks on Christian heresies

Evidence

We have seen how Prideaux’ book was written against the Deists; he tried to show that Christianity is free from those marks of imposture that he believed he had successfully imputed to Islam. Another author used an attack on Islam in order to attack Unitarianism in a slightly different way; his Historical and Critical Reflections upon Mahometanism and Socinianism (1712) not only identifies the two doctrines (the differences are ‘imperceptible’ ) but postulates that the Socinians wanted an actual anti-Trinitarian confederacy with the Turks. … This is the background to the more famous writers of the eighteenth century, who liked to attack or to praise Islam only as a means to attack Christianity. Again the weapons of the mediaevals were used. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1603

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault’s existing claims about how ‘Islam’ functions as a screen onto which the West projects its own internal theological and political anxieties — parallels Razack’s and Anidjar’s arguments that the Muslim is constructed as constitutive outside.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the Socinian-Turk confederacy claim suggests ‘Muslim’ and ‘heretic’ were interchangeable negative categories — does this anticipate modern conflations of Islam with political heresies like communism?