Scholarship on European persecution consistently omits Muslims as targets

Evidence

In her glowing review of Moore’s book, Miri Rubin reiterates that “heretics, lepers, Jews, homosexuals, and prostitutes were increasingly labeled as enemies of and dangerous to the Christian body politic … A language of religion was emerging” (in Speculum 65 : 1025). Rubin regrets that “the question of gender is little considered” (1026), but has not a word about Muslims, either men or women, who populated Europe between 950 and 1250 and after. In a related, if different context, one may also consider Hans Mayer’s wonderful Outsiders, a book that focuses on “women who are exceptional because they ignore the rules; men who are outsiders on account of sexual inclination; the Jewish outsider within bourgeois society” (Mayer, Outsiders, xviii). Although he makes passing references to “Moors,” it is clear that Mayer, too, fails to consider Islam or Arabs as constitutive of”Europe,” or even as “outsiders.” — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 904

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: an essay on the historiographical ‘missing Muslim’ in European persecution studies — how a whole category of targets vanishes from the canonical persecuting-society / outsider literature despite demographic presence.
• QUESTION: Why does the persecuting-society canon (Moore, Rubin, Mayer) structurally exclude Muslims while including Jews, lepers, and heretics — what methodological assumption produces this blind spot?