Virulent anti-Islamic polemic survived into the imperialist era largely unchanged

Evidence

The attitude of extreme prejudice survived without dilution long after it had become impossible that Orientalists should accept it. In a book published in 1785 we still find the dove that whispers in the Prophet’s ear, the idea that he married his old master’s widow, the complaint that the Qur’adn is disorderly and _ illexpressed and that Muhammad was bred an idolator, the claim that he was epileptic, as well as accusations more generally accepted, as that he relied on force of arms. He is described in terms then fashionable as ‘ignorant, rude and enthusiastic’. A Life published in 1799 would be distinguished in any period by the virulence of its hatred of Muhammad; its author conceived that Caligula, Nero and Domitian, and Judas Iscariot, would be ‘ashamed to associate with him in the regions of the damned’; he considered that ‘many millions of rational beings are degraded to the rank of brutes by the consummate artifice and wickedness of a single individual’. This sort of obsession seems incredible at so late a date; when this book appeared, Napoleon had already returned from Egypt, and the modern or ‘imperialist’ phase of European relations with the Arab world must be said to have begun. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1600

Categorization

• XREF: Corroborates and extends the vault’s existing claim thread on how ‘Islam’ is constituted as the West’s constitutive outside — shows the persistence and institutional transmission of the hostile construction across centuries.