Federal official attention to Muslims only ever served political interests, not Muslim welfare

Evidence

When slavery ended in 1865, however, the image of the Muslim as the friendly foreigner disappeared. With the exception of an occasional federal judicial decision regarding the ability of Muslims to integrate into American culture and the banning of polygamists from entering the country in 1891, the federal government seems to have had little to say about its domestic Muslim populations, most of whom were Gilded Age immigrants from the Ottoman Empire. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 350

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s guiding interest in how state attention to Islam weaponizes it — links to chapter comparisons about who benefits from framing Muslims as foreigners.