Early Protestant polemicists linked Islam with Catholicism and Judaism as apocalyptic rivals.
Evidence
So, when Fox claimed that the growth of the Quaker community demonstrated its credibility, Williams retorted that Islam and Roman Catholicism had grown equally as quickly. Elsewhere, Williams wrote of his anticipation that the destruction of Islam and Catholicism would coincide, along with the mass conversion of the Jews, with the apocalypse. — Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg, Common Heritage, Uncommon Fear, 99
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the book’s broader thesis that Islamophobia was part of a wider Protestant boundary-policing against multiple religious others. — connects to: Luther weaponized images of Islam to attack Catholicism as well as Turks — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 154; Muslims were cast as apocalyptic beasts within Christian eschatology.; In colonial America, many Protestants associated Islam and Catholicism with the Antichrist. Indeed, Prideaux related the rise of Muhammad and the bishop of Rome’s claim to reign over all churches. Hence, the ‘Antichrist seems at this time to have set both his Feet upon Christendom together, the one in the East, and the other in the West.’ (+12 more)
Broader Connections
- Colonial Protestants yoked Islam and Catholicism together as twin Antichrist powers
#exemplifies(0.80) - Early Protestant writers framed Islam’s rise as divine punishment for corrupted churches.
#expands(0.70) — Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg, Common Heritage, Uncommon Fear, 108 - The essay critically assesses the contemporary scholarship on Christian Islamophobia, arguing that it often overlooks the internal Christian divisions and portrays Christianity as a monolithic…
#responds-to(0.70) - Islam threatened Christianity because it mounted a rival revelatory claim
#expands(0.60) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 64 - Medieval Christian infighting outweighed the shared threat of Islam
#qualifies(0.60) — Ali Qureshi, The Fall of Constantinople, 45 - Islamophobia scholarship often treats medieval Christianity as a united whole against Muslims
#complicates(0.60) — Ali Qureshi, The Fall of Constantinople, 25 - Medieval elites first linked Islam and Muhammad to violence and sexual deviance
#expands(0.50) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 66 - A Protestant-derived aesthetic of understated realism now underwrites ‘rational’ anti-Islamic prejudice.
#expands(0.50)