Islam has shaped the race concept since its historical inception
Evidence
The genealogy of the race concept that I trace thus began in the newly formed empire of Catholic Spain in the fifteenth century and sixteenth century and imagined its civilizational others in relation to the Muslim Moor and the indigenous people of the New World. As Nabil Matar (1999) and Anouar Majid (2004, 2009) have persuasively argued, this early recognition of religious di√erence dominated Spanish, and European, identity and may have provided philosophical and intellectual antecedents to the Enlightenment and its humanistic approach. In early Enlightenment philosophical thought, Islam was at the border, and at the margin, of the European imagination of the human subject (Majid 2004). This prototypical racism, which imagined itself as the antithesis of Islam and Muslims, shifted conversations about modernity and its provincialisms; it also created an important framework for thinking through contemporary racism, as well as the basis and existence of anti–Muslim racism. As imperial renewal was taking place in the Reconquista (Reconquest), clear ideas of race were being formed. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 157 (
#complicates, via linked claim)
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Islamophobia has coalesced Muslims into a distinct racial group and Islam into a race. — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 61; Islam has become a race despite scholars’ hesitation to name it so; Race was co-constituted with religion in European history. — Nasar Meer, Racialization and Religion: Race,…, 31 (+15 more)
Broader Connections
- European colonial racial practice of differentiating Islam preceded and enabled modern Islamophobia
#complicates(0.78) - Anti-Muslim racism predates and informs the modern race concept.
#complicates(0.75) — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 157