For early modern Europeans Islam functioned as a civilizing intermediary toward Christianizing Africans

Evidence

Recent scholarship has unearthed the previously unknown or under researched history of Muslims in the United States. These works have gone back to the archives and demonstrated that among the Africans brought to these shores were a significant number of Muslims. As Kambiz GhaneaBassiri’s research shows, Muslims were not wholly unfamiliar to Europeans, who had first encountered them in the Crusades and then been in contact with Ottomans and North Africans in their attempts to dominate the Atlantic trade routes. Even if their knowledge was superficial and biased, Europeans were aware that Muslims followed a religion that was not entirely alien to Christianity. While Islam was already considered a false religion, some Europeans saw it as a civilizing force among Africans. Muslims themselves were then regarded as a semicivilized group that could aid in “civilizing” other pagan Africans. The goal, however, was to Christianize all Africans regardless of their original creed. Islam was merely a waystation on the journey. — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 130

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Choudhury’s earlier chapters on colonial European differentiation of Islam as a racial practice, and to the broader subordinate-group inversion literature the reader is tracking. — connects to: African Muslim slaves preserved Islam until Protestant abolitionism pulled them into Christianity; Europeans saw enslaved African Muslims as semicivilized aids for Christianizing other Africans; Nineteenth-century travelers credited Islam with civilizing enslaved Africans beyond Christianity’s reach — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 131 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Europe’s first racialized view of Africans came through Islam’s armies #corroborates (0.72) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 462