Early Anglo patronage of Muslims was economic, not religious or abolitionist

Evidence

Job’s relationship with his Anglo sponsors was an important precursor to Americans’ later patronage of certain Muslim Americans. It helps to identify the differing interests that shaped Anglo and later Anglo-American interactions with the Muslim other in the colonial versus antebellum eras. Job’s return to Africa was not made conditional on his promise to convert the “heathen” to Christianity nor was it explained as an expression of antislavery sentiment. Neither Job nor his sponsors seemed to oppose slavery. His return to Africa, like that of later Muslim Americans, was seen instead as having potential economic benefit through the establishment of trade networks. Job’s repatriation served the interests of those merchants who wished to develop English-speaking native agents in West Africa, and in so doing, anticipated a larger trend in the antebellum United States. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 361

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• SEED: The pattern — ‘tolerating’ a religious other not out of abolitionism or conversion zeal but for trade-network profit — is an essay angle on how American engagement with Muslim communities was commercial from the start, never principled.
• XREF: This directly parallels the antebellum Abdul Rahman Ibrahima case that follows and, more broadly, the book’s core thesis that tolerance is always instrumental, serving the fearer’s interests.

Related

• Early Anglo patronage of Muslim Africans served commercial, not religious or abolitionist, ends. (similarity 0.95)