Muslims were celebrated in the eighteenth century but suspected once tied to black conversion

Evidence

Things were not always so; since the eighteenth century, a handful of educated Muslim slaves from Africa, like Job Ben Solomon, attained celebrity status and elite sponsorship in England and America, although they were often expected to serve Western commercial interests and avoid raising questions about equal rights. But in the atmosphere of 1920s’ America, with the rise of nativism and the exclusion of nonwhite immigration, conversion to Islam by African Americans took on a sharp political profile, raising FBI suspicions about the foreign connections of American Muslims. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 45

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s framing question of when the ‘frightened subject’ takes shape — nativism’s 1920s rise as the pivot matches the historical arc elsewhere in this vol; also resonates with Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in the library on how colonized subjects manage outside regard.
• ADDENDUM: Pertinent to the trees infrastructure piece’s larger theme only tangentially, but the pivot-timing (celebrated individual good Muslim vs. suspect collective) parallels the immodesty piece’s shift from individual dress to classed moral panic.