Orientalism informed not only how race was understood during the formative stages of American history, but also how it was constructed. Orientalism helped guide, and fluidly tweak, the parameters of whiteness. And in the same way that blackness stood as the racial antithesis of whiteness, the necessary other without which whiteness would not exist, the Orientalist construction of Islam marked the faith as the civilizational foil of the West, a contrast that was necessary for the emerging United States to envision itself as an extension of Western civilization. In order to solidify itself as part of the West, and an extension of Europe in the Western Hemisphere, the United States had to follow in the footsteps of Europe and establish itself as the mirror opposite of the Muslim world.

XREF: Connects to how blackness functioned as the racial antithesis of whiteness — Orientalism served a parallel role for Islam and Western identity. Builds on: "U.S. law barred Muslim naturalization from 1790 to 1944."

Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Unde…, loc. 154