Huntington’s Islam essentialism reused earlier tropes aimed at Catholics and Jews

Evidence

Three years later, in 1993, Harvard professor, Samuel Huntington, penned his provocatively titled article in Foreign Affairs, “The Clash of Civilizations?,” arguing that the next global conflict would be between the West and Islamic states. Building on the chorus of American Zionists claiming Muslims were a growing security threat, Huntington rebuked post–Cold War optimistic visions of a peaceful world order based on multilateral internationalism and universal values. Instead, he essentialized Islam as possessing an unchangeable core that made its followers incapable of accepting modernity and democracy, in contrast to Protestantism’s democratic ideals. Not coincidentally, these were the same racial tropes deployed against Catholics and Jews to justify restricting their immigration earlier in the twentieth century. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 695

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the ADDENDUM article ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ — recurring panic tropes being recycled across target groups.
• ADDENDUM: The claim that anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish immigration-restriction tropes were recycled against Muslims is a strong structural parallel to the recurring-moral-panic theme of ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back.’
• SEED: Every exclusionary discourse recycles the same libel — ‘these people cannot handle modernity’ — across Catholics, Jews, now Muslims. A genealogical essay on the trope.