Late-nineteenth-century Darwinian race science underpinned homo islamicus typologies
Evidence
The notion of Homo islamicus (as well as Homo arabicus and Homo indicus) comes out of the Enlightenment typologies discussed above. These typologies, however, were advanced at a moment when there was a move away from the Enlightenment universalism discussed above and an emphasis on irreconcilable differences among people and civilizations. By the end of the nineteenth century, not only was there a sense that the “West” represented the height of human accomplishment, but adaptations of Darwin’s theory of the origin of species applied to infer the origin of races and notions of innate biological racial superiority were widespread. Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, first coined the term eugenics in 1883, advancing the notion that human beings could improve their kind by selective mating between those with desirable traits. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 192
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
Related
- Homo islamicus emerged from Enlightenment racial typologies hardened by eugenics-era essentialism (similarity 0.82)
- Colonial-era science transformed Muslims into a fixed racialized type (similarity 0.81)
- Homo islamicus as a separate human type emerged only in the nineteenth century (similarity 0.80)
- Modern scientific racism emerged out of Enlightenment taxonomy of human subspecies (similarity 0.80)
- Ancient notions of race as biology do not match reality (similarity 0.79)
- Modern scientific racism displaced religion from the race concept. (similarity 0.78)
- Eighteenth-century naturalists laid groundwork for scientific racism as ideology justifying slavery (similarity 0.78)