Islamic Mediterranean civilization both retarded and then accelerated Europe’s development, seeding anti-Islamic racism.

Evidence

European racialism was to undergo a kind of doubling onto itself, for in between the era of intra-European racism that characterized the first appearance of European consciousness and the predatory era of African enslavement, is the almost entirely exogenous phenomenon of Islamic domination of the Mediterranean—the eventual fount of European revitalization and recivilization. Independent of the historical meshings of European development but profoundly restricting that development—first in literally retarding European social development by isolating it from civil life, science, speculative thought, and so on, and then, after four centuries, by accelerating its recovery from the twelfth century onward—Muslim civilization mapped the contours of the European cultural renaissance. These events were to leave tell-tale marks on Western consciousness: the fear and hatred of “blackamoors”; the demonization of Islam; the transfiguration of Muhammad the Prophet into the anti-Christ. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 384

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that Muslim civilization was ‘the eventual fount of European revitalization’ warrants chasing the specifics of which scientific and speculative transmissions are meant.