Muslims were respected in the West until nativist exclusion politics racialized them.

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

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• SEED: The contrast between the celebrity slave Job Ben Solomon’s elite patronage and the later FBI targeting of Black Muslims is an essay angle: how a group’s standing flipped once it became a domestic political threat rather than a distant curiosity.

Related

• Muslims were celebrated in the eighteenth century but suspected once tied to black conversion (similarity 0.92)
• Literate enslaved Muslims disproportionately shaped early American political discourse (similarity 0.80)
• Early American Muslim elites were better educated than most white Americans (similarity 0.79)
• American racism against Muslims extends back to enslaved Africans (similarity 0.79)
• State repression of the Nation of Islam conflated civil rights with communist subversion (similarity 0.79)
• Northern anti-slavery whites still held blacks to be alien to America. (similarity 0.79)
• American Islamophobia stems from slavery and anti-Black racism, not just Orientalism. (similarity 0.78)
• Early American Muslims were among the most literate and cosmopolitan Americans of their era (similarity 0.78)
• American popular perception linked Islam to Black identity and decolonial violence until recent decades (similarity 0.78)