The abstract figure of the Muslim embodies Europe’s foundational fear of death

Evidence

The Muslim stands for the European and Europe’s legacy as the figure of death’s approach, death walking, the plague, the coming of death as such. The Muslim in Europe – not individual Muslims, not even Muslim communities, but the idea of the Muslim himself – has come to represent the threat of death. The fear of death on which Hobbes so heavily rested the motivation to (Euro-)modernity’s social contract is embodied in the imagined figure of “the Muslim.” — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 868

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Goldberg’s broader argument about racialized abstraction — the feared object is the idea, not the person — which parallels writings on Islamophobia-as-trope and Orientalism (Said).
• SEED: Angle for an essay: how the Hobbesian death-fear — supposedly the rational foundation of the social contract — was quietly racialized onto a single human emblem before the contract was even drafted.