Fear and anxiety about Muslims coexisted with equal diplomatic standing before imperialism

Evidence

The attitude of Britons toward the Turks was one of “fear, anxiety, and awe.” Further, the idea of colonization was not applied to the Ottomans. Thus, Queen Elizabeth “cooperated commercially and diplomatically with both the Turks of the Ottoman Empire and the Moors of the Kingdom of Morocco, and never entertained or articulated—and nor did her subjects—projects for colonizing them.” In the seventeenth century, the British either embraced Ottoman civilization or vilified it. All along, however, there was a sense that the Turks were not outsiders. Certainly, they were not “outside the diplomatic scope of alliance and peace treaty, individual friendship and amicable correspondence—and even marriage.” — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 125

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

Related

• Europeans recognized Ottomans as diplomatic equals, not colonial targets (similarity 0.91)
• Elizabethan England never conceived colonizing the Ottomans or Moors (similarity 0.88)
• British views of Ottomans mixed fear and awe without colonial designs (similarity 0.83)
• British Islamophobia intensified only when Muslims ceased to be a safely declining power (similarity 0.80)
• British India feared pan-Islamism later than America did (similarity 0.78)
• Imperial knowledge about Islam was colored by administrative anxieties and Christian concerns (similarity 0.78)