The Park51 fight revived the white-captivity narrative of the Barbary era

Evidence

The Islamophobia network’s effort to brand the center as the “Ground Zero Mosque,” even though it was several blocks from the site of the former World Trade Center, succeeded. Their construction of the victims of 9/11 erased the multiracial and multinational character of the dead. The narrative was one of white victimhood at the hands of the racialized Muslim, which has a longer history in the United States. As shown in Chapter 2, there was a groundswell of demand at the turn of the nineteenth century not only for Native American captivity stories but also the white US captive stories related to the Barbary Coast. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 658

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Connects to the complaints/immodesty cluster less directly, but the deeper resonance is the captive/white-victimhood narrative lineage — echoes of the tree/grafting metaphor cluster’s interest in narrative infrastructure. Primarily it feeds the Islamophobia cluster though: racializing continuity from Barbary captivity stories.
• XREF: Directly corroborates the continuity claim in the vault that 9/11 Islamophobia is continuous with Barbary-era racialization rather than a post-9/11 invention. — connects to: Barbary captivity narratives denounced white slavery while ignoring American slavery; Abolitionists invoked images of White slavery in Barbary to oppose Black slavery in America.; Abolitionists invoked Christian slavery in Barbary to oppose Black slavery — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes…, 1408
• SHARE: The poll figure (54-68% opposition to an interfaith Islamic center blocks away from Ground Zero) is a concrete data point useful to anyone tracking public opinion on Park51.

Broader Connections

• Barbary captivity narratives denounced white slavery while ignoring American slavery #expands (0.82)
• Abolitionists invoked images of White slavery in Barbary to oppose Black slavery in America. #complicates (0.80)
• Abolitionists invoked Christian slavery in Barbary to oppose Black slavery #complicates (0.78) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 1408