Abstract
Islamophobia in the twenty-first-century United States is of recent vintage, and yet hearkens back to debates predating the emergence of the United States herself. Contemporary discourses that express and encourage anti-Muslim sentiments echo and reproduce aspects of a far older discursive tradition about Islam. This chapter examines ways in which contemporary discourses draw from, and depend upon, historical precedents. It explores how America’s Founding Fathers invoked Islam as they sought to define the institutional character of their fledging nation. Islam served as a multivalent trope that could be invoked in favour of both the permitting and prohibiting of religious tests, and for establishing or disestablishing religion. It also appeared in the emergence of Oriental spy literature produced as part of a desire to galvanise citizens in support of a common vision of both America’s national identity and its projected global mission. Understanding how Islam functioned in the nation’s early debates provides insight not only into the rhetorical precedents of current anti-Muslim stereotypes, but also the mechanisms through which anti-Islamic narratives are perpetuated. This chapter adopts a historical approach in order to develop a deeper understanding of how, and in what forms, the fear of Muslims has manifested itself within the United States.
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Notes
- 1.
While Palin was widely speculated to run in the primaries, she announced that she would not be competing for the nomination on 5 October 2011.
- 2.
I mean by ‘major’ the nine Republican candidates who appeared regularly in televised debates while their campaigns were active: Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman Jr, Tim Pawlenty and Rick Santorum.
- 3.
- 4.
See, for example, the excellent report by Ali et al. (2011), Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America; and Nathan Lean’s (2012) recent monograph, The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims. The Southern Poverty Law Center has also been instrumental in documenting the histories and networks of individuals who are central in generating anti-Muslim and anti-Islamic hysteria.
- 5.
The role of Islam in debates over the US Constitution forms the subject of a chapter in Denise Spellberg’s (2013), Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders, and I am greatly indebted to the author for drawing my attention to some of the key sources for the study of Islam in the early national United States.
- 6.
The most influential English text within this tradition, and among the most influential for early American views of Islam more broadly, was Humphrey Prideaux’s ([1687] 1716) The True Nature of Imposture Fully Display’d in the Life of Mahomet.
- 7.
For a detailed discussion of Islam in early American evangelical representations, see Kidd (2009), chapter 1.
- 8.
While this tradition is most commonly associated with Protestant literature (and especially the English Baptists), there are a number of Catholic groups that drew on this argument as well. One example of this is the French Oratorians, a Catholic order that was subjected to persecution in the late seventeenth century in part due to the subversive implications of their theology for the doctrine of divine right absolutism. See, for example, the pamphlet attributed to the Oratorian Michel Le Vassor (1689), Les soupirs de la France esclave qui aspire après sa liberté. See also Wright (2013), chapters 2–3.
- 9.
See, for example, Voltaire’s (1829) ‘Essai sur les mœurs et de l’esprit des nations’, and Nicolas Antoine Boulanger’s (1761) Recherches sur l’origine du despotisme oriental. Montesquieu’s understanding of the right relationship between politics and religion has been widely contested, and he was more concerned with the need to establish and clearly delineate the separation of powers more generally than with the specific need to separate church and state. Critically, his characterisation of Islam as archetypical of the political system of despotism was predicated on the assumed absence of any separation of powers in Muslim states. See also Wright (2013) chapters 3 and 4.
- 10.
I borrow the concepts of ‘canon’ and ‘exegetical labour’ from the writings of Jonathan Z. Smith (1982) specifically, his chapter, ‘Sacred Persistence: Towards a Redescription of Canon’. While Smith’s redescription of ‘canon’ aims to expand the applicability and analytic usefulness of this term within cultures, the dynamics of arbitrary restriction and exegetical expansion that he identifies with ‘canon’ can be observed just as clearly, I think, in the processes of cultural ‘Othering’.
- 11.
For the French Huguenot literature, see Bayle and Chardin; treated in more detail in Wright (2013).
- 12.
This theme features in the writings of members of persecuted Protestant minorities in England, America and France, including Roger Williams, Jean Chardin, and Pierre Bayle. It can also be traced, in another form, to medieval and early modern apologetic works, which emphasised Christ’s renunciation of the world and willing submission to suffering as proof both of his divine status and of the truth of his message. This same literature often contrasted Christ’s life with that of Muhammad, whose alleged worldliness was proof of his status as a religious imposture. The most famous culmination of this theme, and the most influential work in the American context, is Prideaux’s ([1687] 1716) The True Nature of Imposture.
- 13.
Rhode Island was founded by the Baptist Roger Williams, who was banished from the Massachussetts Bay Colony. Consequently, it was renowned during the colonial and early national period as a haven for religious dissidents.
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Wright, S. (2016). Reproducing Fear: Islamophobia in the United States. In: Pratt, D., Woodlock, R. (eds) Fear of Muslims?. Boundaries of Religious Freedom: Regulating Religion in Diverse Societies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29698-2_4
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