Eighteenth-century Anglo-American Islamophobia held the Ottomans as bad government exemplar.

Evidence

Locke’s comments voiced three aspects of contemporary Anglo-American Islamophobia. First, that the Ottomans represented an exemplar of bad government and, second, that Muslims offered a nascent threat (of varying degrees according to the author) to every non-Muslim political order under whose jurisdiction they lived. Third, Locke, like Jefferson and the citizens of Chesterfield County, expressed the possibility that (at least some) Muslims could coexist under a non-Muslim government. Although such a threat remained in the abstract for Americans until the large-scale Muslim emigrations of the twentieth century, it haunted British administrators and others in British India following the uprising of 1857–1858. This wide-scale, virulent rebellion not only ushered in an end to the East India Company (EIC) as the British government assumed direct control over its Indian territories, it also instilled an overall British distrust toward Muslims. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 122

Categorization

• DEFINE: Offers a three-part anatomy of early Islamophobia: bad government exemplar, nascent threat to every political order, yet possible coexistence—useful framework for the reader’s analysis.