Early modern Christians ranked Muslims inferior by faith, not by race
Evidence
As far as missionaries were concerned what was at stake in winning the argument was the rescue of the souls of the benighted from the flames of Hell. The Muslims, of course, regarded Christian missions in a much less benign light. From the seventeenth-century Christian perspective, Muslims were inferior, not because of their race or culture, but because they professed a faith that was not true and thereby they faced damnation. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 153
Categorization
- QUESTION: When did racialist ranking of Muslims displace this theological-ranking-as-damned view? Tracking that shift would illuminate the passage from religious to racial othering.
- XREF: connects to: Muslims were viewed as inferior when Muslim states were weak, not when strong
Related
- Muslims were viewed as inferior when Muslim states were weak, not when strong (similarity 0.83)
- Medieval Christians respected Islamic civilization even while they knew Muslims as others. (similarity 0.80)
- Christian humiliation before Muslim power was attributed to sin, not to God’s will (similarity 0.80)
- Some mediaeval Christians considered Muslims morally superior to Christians. (similarity 0.80)
- Early Muslims read Christian and Jewish submission as divine sanction of Islam’s superiority. (similarity 0.80)
- Medieval theologians ranked non-Christians by their closeness to the truth. (similarity 0.79)
- Religious identity can become racialized by imputing biological and cultural inferiority (similarity 0.78)
- Medieval theologians neutralized Muslim success by holding it a just chastisement of Christian sin (similarity 0.78)