European study of Islam originates in fear, not curiosity, and that hostility persists today.

Evidence

European interest in Islam derived not from curiosity but from fear of a monotheistic, culturally and militarily formidable competitor to Christianity. The earliest European scholars of Islam, as numerous historians have shown, were medieval polemicists writing to ward off the threat of Muslim hordes and apostasy. In one way or another that combination of fear and hostility has persisted to the present day, both in scholarly and non-scholarly attention to an Islam which is viewed as belonging to a part of the world—the Orient—counterposed imaginatively, geographically, and historically against Europe and the West. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 862

Categorization

• XREF: Flags a key mechanism for the Islamophobia toolkit — Orientalism’s root affect is fear of a religious competitor, which grounds later readings of contemporary anti-Muslim discourse as continuous with medieval polemic.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 862