Islamophobia took different shapes in Britain and America because each faced different Muslim relations

Evidence

A historical exploration of British and American literature between 1690 and 1947 demonstrates the roots and qualities of Islamophobia that Britons and Americans have shared. Meanwhile, significant differences between the perspectives found in the two countries demonstrate how these were fashioned by differing concerns about their own societies. … In the latter context, predominantly white Christian Britons found themselves a minority in a land once ruled by successive Muslim rulers who left impressive vestiges of their once-mighty empires. As a ruling elite, Britons had to adapt their Islamophobic inheritance to the exigencies of governing tens of millions of Muslims. In the United States, engagements with Muslims appeared to be a matter of international affairs alone, “Mohammedans” representing an “other” far more distant than the Jews, Catholics, and other religious minorities who lived among the Protestant majority. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 99

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that Islamophobia is shaped by each society’s own concerns (not by Muslims themselves) reinforces the reader’s frame: the frightened subject’s domestic anxieties generate the prejudice. Connects inward-facing fear logic to Said’s orientalism through the thin ‘distant other’ contrast.