Mark Twain’s 1869 bestseller framed Muslims as inherently brutish and unprogressive

Evidence

Mark Twain’s book The Innocents Abroad, published in 1869, describes his tour of the Holy Land. Twain portrays Muslims and Ottomans as “a people by nature and training filthy, brutish, ignorant, unprogressive, [and] superstitious.” The book was wildly popular, with nearly 100,000 copies sold. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 517

Categorization

• CANDY: A neat party fact: Mark Twain — beloved American icon — sold a wildly popular book calling Muslims ‘filthy, brutish, ignorant, unprogressive, superstitious.’
• XREF: connects to: Mark Twain, an anti-imperialist, still voiced racial contempt for Arabs; Nineteenth-century American Muslim knowledge came from Bible, Arabian Nights, and Twain — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 211