European capitalist expansion required constructing Muslim rivals as a religious other.

Evidence

In his magisterial The World Is a Ghetto (2001), Winant argues that the early sources of racism derived from competing imperial projects based in religious ideology. For European capitalism to expand, a religious other had to be created in Islamic rivals: the Turks and the Moors. Alluding to the conquest of the Americas and the Atlantic slave trade, Winant (2001, 41) argues that such treatment of the Muslims and Jews served as the paradigmatic example of racial othering and internal and external ethnic cleansing. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 144