Medieval anti-Muslim prejudice was protoracism, not full modern racism

Evidence

Both groups, however, were turned into races both ideologically and in terms of practice. However, the idiom was still religious. This is therefore a form of protoracism rather than the full-blown racism of the secular and scientific kind seen in the nineteenth century. Moreover, as historian George Frederickson argues, what was believed to be inherited by blood was a “propensity to heresy or unbelief rather than intellectual or emotional inferiority.” Moriscos (the term given to converted Muslims) were not uniformly deemed as inferior, a hallmark of modern racism, even though there was a backlash and revulsion generated toward Moorish culture in the late medieval and early modern eras, as historian Olivia Constable has demonstrated. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 121

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines protoracism as distinct from modern scientific racism — the operative category distinction.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what precisely marks the shift from protoracism to full racism — if even 19th-century scientific racism was often about moral/intellectual traits, how clean is the distinction?
• XREF: connects to: Seventeenth-century England did not yet racialize Muslims in official documents — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 140; Anti-Muslim racism has no unbroken historical continuity from medieval to modern forms; Pre-modern racialization of Muslims was protoracism in religious idiom, not modern racism (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Pre-modern racialization of Muslims was protoracism in religious idiom, not modern racism #corroborates (0.97)
• Pre-modern anti-Muslim prejudice laid racial groundwork without full racial ideology #corroborates (0.92)
• Anti-Muslim racism has no unbroken historical continuity from medieval to modern forms #corroborates (0.90)
• Medieval racialization wrote ethnic anxieties onto Muslim bodies as overlapping afflictions #expands (0.75) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 102
• Anti-Muslim phenomena are endemic but latent, not constant, in European culture #qualifies (0.75) — Chris Allen, Islamophobia, 200