Pre-modern racialization of Muslims was protoracism in religious idiom, not modern racism

Evidence

The genealogy of the race concept that I trace thus began in the newly formed empire of Catholic Spain in the fifteenth century and sixteenth century and imagined its civilizational others in relation to the Muslim Moor and the indigenous people of the New World. As Nabil Matar (1999) and Anouar Majid (2004, 2009) have persuasively argued, this early recognition of religious di√erence dominated Spanish, and European, identity and may have provided philosophical and intellectual antecedents to the Enlightenment and its humanistic approach. In early Enlightenment philosophical thought, Islam was at the border, and at the margin, of the European imagination of the human subject (Majid 2004). This prototypical racism, which imagined itself as the antithesis of Islam and Muslims, shifted conversations about modernity and its provincialisms; it also created an important framework for thinking through contemporary racism, as well as the basis and existence of anti–Muslim racism. As imperial renewal was taking place in the Reconquista (Reconquest), clear ideas of race were being formed. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 157 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Shakespeare’s Moor and Jew characters encoded pre-modern racialized difference. — Nasar Meer, Racialization and Religion: Race,…, 27; Medieval anti-Muslim prejudice was protoracism, not full modern racism — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 121; Pre-modern anti-Muslim prejudice laid racial groundwork without full racial ideology (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Anti-Muslim racism predates and informs the modern race concept. #complicates (0.80) — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 157