Lutheran Reformers mapped Islam onto Antichrist prophecy to delegitimize it

Evidence

The Church of Rome might be thought the head, and Islam the body, of Antichrist, although, since ‘out of God’s Church there is no Antichrist’, the Turk could not correspond closely to the description. On the other hand, certain prophecies, notably the Apocalypse, ‘he shall make war against the Saints’, applied strictly to the Turk, and not properly to the Pope at all; the latter warred, not by force, but by superstition. Melanchthon explicitly stated that the name of Antichrist was suitably applied to Muhammad, as devastator and tyrant of the Christian religion. In the mediaeval tradition, he pointed out that the unity of God needed no special revelation: ‘this wisdom of theirs is nothing but a certain philosophy of the common human reason’. For Melanchthon the essential was the denial of the mediation and ‘placation’ worked by Christ, that He is ‘born of the substance of the Eternal Father … (and) was the Victim of the human race’. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1562

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Anidjar’s genealogy of the Jew-Arab/Christian enemy as European self-constitution; the Antichrist-as-dual-enemy framing parallels how Aziz’s Racial Muslim and Razack treat Islam as the West’s constitutive outside. — connects to: Millennialists projected the Antichrist’s apparatus onto the League of Nations in the 1920s — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic…, 251