Philosophers reinscribed Muslim threat even while conceding toleration’s limits

Evidence

Each time statesmen took Muslims as an extreme example, they helped reinscribe the liminality of Muslims in the popular imagination. For instance, Locke declared in his Letter that toleration could not extend to those whose religion compels them to be faithful to a foreign prince. His one example was the Muslim who lives under a Christian magistrate “whilst at the same time he acknowledges himself bound to yield blind obedience to the mufti of Constantinople; who himself is entirely obedient to the Ottoman emperor, and frames the famed oracles of that religion according to his pleasure.” 21 Islam, according to Locke, may incline a Muslim to unthinkingly obey a religion that ultimately sways at a tyrant’s whim. If such a Muslim lives in a non-Muslim country, she introduces this tyrannical, foreign jurisdiction there. Locke’s comments voiced three aspects of contemporary Anglo-American Islamophobia. First, that the Ottomans represented an exemplar of bad government and, second, that Muslims offered a nascent threat (of varying degrees according to the author) to every non-Muslim political order under whose jurisdiction they lived. Third, Locke, like Jefferson and the citizens of Chesterfield County, expressed the possibility that (at least some) Muslims could coexist under a non-Muslim government. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 122

Categorization

• DEFINE: Names how Lockean toleration theory embeds the figure of the tyrannical Muslim as its political boundary case.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing project on the architecture of exclusion and the frightened subject; also to Beydoun’s legal analysis of Islamophobia across the chapter set.