Religion served as the primary vehicle for racial difference in early modern Europe

Evidence

Contact with the Spanish led to a configuration of Indians as Muslims. Throughout the sixteenth century, and into the seventeenth century and eighteenth century, ideas about racial di√erence were encapsulated through religious di√erence and, in the case of Native Americans and Muslims, also through sexual di√erence. Muslims and Native Americans were classified as racially other—that is, barbaric, depraved, immoral, and sexually deviant. The stereotype of the Muslim, as presented in literary and theological documents, imagined the ”Turk” as ”cruel, tyrannical, deviant, and deceiving” and the ”Moor” as ”sexually overdriven and emotionally uncontrollable, vengeful, and religiously superstitious” (Matar 1999, 13). This creation of the figure of the Muslim as the Christian other became part of the ideological justification of holy war and imperial expansion. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 187

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s knowledge of racism as modern/Enlightenment-era phenomenon; this passage pushes race-as-religion genealogy much earlier, into the sixteenth century. — connects to: Calvinist divine election hardened racial boundaries against earlier Catholic monogenism — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1322; Shakespeare’s Moor and Jew characters encoded pre-modern racialized difference. — Nasar Meer, Racialization and Religion: Race,…, 27; Race was co-constituted with religion in European history. — Nasar Meer, Racialization and Religion: Race,…, 31 (+4 more)