Islamophobia was coined to justify colonial conquest of Muslim lands

Evidence

One of the earliest uses of Islamophobia can be traced back to French author, Alain Quellien (1910), in his book La Politique musulmane dans l’Afrique occidentale francaise. Considered to be the first explicit definition of the term, Quellien suggested that the widespread hostility towards Islam and Muslims among Europeans stems from the notion that Islam is the enemy and negation of Christianity and Eurocentrism (López, 2011). To justify the colonial conquest of their lands and resources, Muslims were stereotypically framed as culturally inferior, dangerous, and inherently different from non-Muslims (Lajevardi & Oskooii, 2018; Richardson, 2012; Selod & Embrick, 2013). — Ummul-Kiram Kathawalla, Fei Bi Chan, Quratulain Gulamhussein, Amy Riegelman, and Moin Syed, Conceptualization and Measurement of…, 25

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Black Marxism’s argument that racial ideology was manufactured to rationalize colonial plunder.
• SEED: An essay on how a single colonial-era French tract fathered a century of European anti-Muslim framing.