Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg — Common Heritage, Uncommon Fear: Islamophobia in the United States and British India, 1687–1947

57 published claims from this book.

• A minority of Americans and Britons valued Islam despite dominant fear-based publications.
• Although Britons in India differed from Americans because of the active (if exaggerated) threat to their political order, both shared a conviction regarding two alleged qualities of Islam that…
• American commentators read the 1857 uprising as a religious awakening of Islam against Britain
• American evangelicals compared Mormonism to Islam as a shared heresy.
• American founders framed Muslim power as a mortal threat to Christendom
• Americans derived much of their Islamophobia from British colonial sources.
• Anglo-American discourse framed Islam as Christianity’s inherent and inexorable nemesis.
• Anglo-American Islamophobia is not new, its roots demonstrated by an historical exploration of British and American literature between 1690 and 1947.
• Anglo-American observers explained Muslim expansion as caused by inherent religious fanaticism.
• Anglo-American observers explained Muslim expansion as violent coercion.
• Anglo-American press frames Muslim criminals by religion rather than nationality
• Anthropometric surveys were weaponized to prove converts came from lower Hindu castes.
• Anti-Islamic fear imagined Muslims colonizing America into apostasy from afar.
• Anti-Muslim images were deployed against unrelated domestic targets
• Anti-Muslim polemics function to define their authors’ identity rather than describe Islam.
• Anti-Muslim rhetoric served to police the doctrinal boundary of true Christianity.
• Asian and American Islamophobia diverged according to each society’s domestic situation
• Britain’s Indian census counted religion more thoroughly than its own census.
• British anti-Muslim prejudice outlasted the 1857 rebellion by decades.
• British census data on Muslim numbers amplified Anglo-American fears.
• British conflated diverse Indian Muslim movements into an imagined Wahhabi conspiracy
• British government policies directly promoted Christian missionizing in India.
• British officials tried to weaponize pan-Islamism against Bolshevism after World War One.
• Britons in India, unlike Americans, faced an active (if exaggerated) Muslim threat to their political order, yet both shared convictions regarding Islam’s coercive proselytizing and violent spread.
• Christian missionaries in India tended to have the most success among the very groups they alleged Muslims to have converted the lowest ranking castes and most impoverished classes.
• Colonial demography fueled fears that Islam would eclipse Hinduism in Bengal.
• Colonial observers attributed conversions to Hindu deficiencies rather than Islam’s appeal.
• Diminished Muslim threat let British observers admire Mughal culture despite Orientalist negative stereotypes.
• Direct contact with Muslims shaped imperial perceptions of Islam.
• Early American toleration debates explicitly extended civil rights to Muslims.
• Early Protestant polemicists linked Islam with Catholicism and Judaism as apocalyptic rivals.
• Early Protestant writers framed Islam’s rise as divine punishment for corrupted churches.
• Essentializing Islam as singular enabled belief in pan-Indian conspiracies.
• Fears of Ottoman-inspired pan-Islamism never produced actual uprisings in India.
• Gandhi allied the Congress Party with the Khilafat movement over the Ottoman caliphate.
• In colonial America, many Protestants associated Islam and Catholicism with the Antichrist. Indeed, Prideaux related the rise of Muhammad and the bishop of Rome’s claim to reign over all churches.…
• Inclusive rhetoric naming Muslims simultaneously marked them as liminal outsiders.
• Islam’s entanglement with Christianity’s history has blocked objective Western study of it.
• Islamophobia operated at multiple political and theological levels for both audiences.
• Islamophobic writing functions to define the Christian author, not describe Muslims
• Missionaries converted mostly the castes Muslims supposedly seized
• Missionaries interpreted imperial conquest as divine endorsement of Christianity.
• Most Americans and Britons seemingly accepted that the inherent fanaticism of (male) Muslims produced their violent success.
• Mughal religious tolerance tempered some British Islamophobia before 1857
• Nineteenth-century Americans and Britons attributed Islam’s spread to coercion rather than persuasion.
• Nineteenth-century Anglo-American observers feared a globally unified Islam centered on the Ottoman caliph
• Roosevelt equated Muslim unrest in the Philippines with Native American rebellions.
• Secularists and Christians alike weaponized Islam as a foil despite opposite agendas.
• South Asian Muslims held distinct views from their British rulers
• The alleged Wahhabi conspiracy was a British phantom conflating disparate Muslim movements.
• The British census of India fed Anglo-American fears of Muslim demographic dominance
• The East India Company suppressed missionary activity to protect commerce with Muslims.
• The Pakistan movement originated as a political bargaining tactic, not an anti-imperial agenda.
• The Wahhabi threat was a category Britain could not stop thinking even beyond evidence.
• Victorian missionary discourse framed Islam as a synthesis of mundane appeal and coercion.
• Western newspapers watched the Hajj primarily out of sanitary self-interest against cholera.
• While these Americans and Britons avoided any suggestion that someone, drawn by a positive characteristic of the religion, might willingly accept Islam, others argued that, if there had been a…