An historical exploration of British and American literature between 1690 and 1947 demonstrates the roots and qualities of Islamophobia that Britons and Americans have shared. Meanwhile significant differences between the perspectives found in the two countries demonstrate how these were fashioned by differing concerns about their own societies. In order to emphasize this difference, we choose to compare American views of Muslims with those found among Britons who had lived in India. In the latter context, predominantly white Christian Britons found themselves a minority in a land once ruled by successive Muslim rulers who left impressive vestiges of their once mighty empires. As a ruling elite, Britons had to adapt their Islamophobic inheritance to the exigencies of governing tens of millions of Muslims. In the United States, engagements with Muslims appeared to be a matter of international affairs alone, "Mohammedans" representing an "other" far more distant than the Jews, Catholics, and other religious minorities who lived among the Protestant majority.

DEFINE: Frames Islamophobia as a historically contingent inheritance, not a monolithic or universal attitude.

Second, the perception of Muslims and Islam as a threat pervaded so broadly that even the most ardent secularists and Christians (these groups were not mutually exclusive) could utilize them as foils serving quite divergent agendas. Prideaux saw Islam as the anti-Christian product of a power hungry imposter. Voltaire viewed Muhammad's excesses as a warning to governments that espoused religion. As we shall see, secularists like Thomas Jefferson often included Muslims as an extreme example marking the lengths to which toleration should be practiced. Simultaneously, Christians often viewed Islam as – if not the greatest threat to Christianity – the largest obstacle to its universal expansion.

We are very glad to announce that the annual pilgrimage to Mecca has gone off this year with remarkable success. “Glad to announce!” we hear good Mrs. Grundy ejaculate; “why should a Christian newspaper rejoice over the happy conduct and termination of the rites and ceremonies of Mahound?” But the estimable lady in question ought to understand that this great custom of the Moslem world is no longer a matter of indifference to ourselves. The East and the West are nowadays so closely knit together by commerce and intercourse that, upon sanitary grounds alone, we have every reason to watch with the utmost interest the accounts form the holy cities of Arabia. Twice has Europe received the plague of cholera from the crowds that throng from all parts of the eastern world to Mecca and Medina.

XREF: Connects to historical epidemiology and the sanitary concerns that linked Western public health to the Hajj in the 19th century.

Given the lack of contact with Muslims except in moments of crisis and through missionaries, Americans often relied on British views to inform their apprehensions about Islam. Thus, Thomas S. Kidd has observed, "Although one should hesitate to describe early Americans as conversant with Islam, they certainly conversed about Islam regularly."

XREF: Connects to broader histories of American orientalism and how colonial-era intellectual frameworks were inherited from Britain. Builds on: "British and American Islamophobia diverged due to differing societal contexts"

For British and American audiences, the menace of Islam existed at a variety of different levels. Politically, socially, religiously, and theologically, Muslims and their religion were seen to threaten in varying degrees and in different ways Britain and America, secularism and Christianity.

Builds on: "Muslims and Islam served as flexible foils for divergent agendas"

For instance, a petition by citizens of Chesterfield County, Virginia to their state assembly argued in 1785, “It is mens [sic] labour in our Manufactories, their services by sea and land that aggrandize our Country and not their creeds…Let Jews, Mehometans, and Christians of every denomination find their advantage in living under your laws.” More famously, Thomas Jefferson rejected an effort to insert “Jesus Christ” into a Virginia bill for religious freedom. He noted, “The insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination.” … In it he promoted the inclusion in public life of all Protestants – whatever their sect – before going a step further: “Nay, if we may openly speak the truth, and as becomes one man to another, neither pagan, nor Mahometan, nor Jew, ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the commonwealth, because of his religion. The Gospel commands no such thing.”

XREF: Connects to the author's broader argument about the intended scope of American religious liberty in founding-era documents.

Locke and others used fictive Muslims to indicate the extremity of their inclusivity, knowing how acutely their audiences would view an actual Muslim presence as a threat. Each time statesmen took Muslims as an extreme example, they helped reinscribe the liminality of Muslims in the popular imagination. … For instance, Locke declared in his Letter that toleration could not extend to those whose religion compels them to be faithful to a foreign prince. His one example was the Muslim who lives under a Christian magistrate “whilst at the same time he acknowledges

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and how Western thinkers deployed the Muslim as rhetorical foil in liberal political theory. SEED: Potential essay on how tolerance discourse historically encodes its own exclusions through hypothetical 'limit cases'.

Second, inspiring Mughal architecture impressed many British observers even as it attested to Muslim decline. The Mughals may have been despotic – as seemed inevitable in the Anglo-American view of "oriental" and "Muslim" states – but the benefits of their governance could be appreciated too, now that they posed no threat. James Mill, whose History of British India (1817) represents one of the most influential and tartest British appraisals of South Asians, praised Muslims for their relative sophistication relative to Hindus.

XREF: Connects to scholarship on orientalism and the legitimation of empire through narratives of Muslim decline.

The third aspect of pre-1857 conditions that mitigated British Islamophobia was the model of tolerance some Britons saw as instrumental to Mughal success. For instance, long after Mughal political power had evaporated, Anglican bishop Reginald Heber reported in his Indian travelogue (1828) that “the fierce Mohammadans” only had begun to question British control because Britons had disrespected the Mughal court. The same year, Walter Hamilton in his gazetteer of India stumped for a respectful Mughal policy, “The most rational course appeared to be, to leave the king’s authority exactly in the state in which it was found, and to afford the royal family the means of subsistence…not unsuitable to a fallen but illustrious race.” A quarter century later, Edward Thornton noted in his gazetteer, “The feelings of deference for the throne of Delhi extended to provinces very remote from the seat of its former grandeur, and to Hindoos not less than to Mahomedans. It was in fact universal.” Undoubtedly, this transcommunal respect must have struck some Britons in India as evidence of toleration’s advantages, just as Locke and others promoted at home.

Builds on: "British observers admired Mughal accomplishments while viewing Muslims as declining."

As Wilson's comment demonstrates, a half century later this view and the passion behind it had not dissipated much among Britons and many members of the colonies.

Meanwhile, at least one commentator in the United States drew a larger lesson from the rebellion. D.H. Wheeler, president of the Chautauqua Institution, despaired in 1885 that Britons had ignored “the religious source” of the uprising and continued their twin practices of arming some Muslims and slaughtering others. “[England] is uniting Islam, and teaching Islam how to make war…A Moslem victory is proclaimed in every Arab tent, and in every Indian village.” While decrying the European atrocities, Wheeler preferred that Islam “should be locked fast in the iron arms of the British empire” for the sake of Christendom.

XREF: Connects to patterns of imperial overreach creating unified resistance movements, a recurring theme in colonial history studies.

Wheeler reflected yet another Islamophobic concern among many Britons and Americans: a global surge of Islamism meant to bring the world under singular Muslim domination. Much of this centered on Istanbul (or Constantinople, the name many commentators preferred), “the capital of Mohammedanism” as an American missionary there put it in 1835. In his overview of religions that went through at least five reprintings in the first half of the nineteenth century, John Haywood explained that Muslims’ “spiritual head” lived in Turkey, a man equivalent to the “Roman Pontiff, or the Grecian Patriarch.” He was referring to the khalifa (caliph), an office of leadership of the entire Muslim community dating back to the successors of Muhammad. The Ottoman sultans had claimed it for themselves since 1517.

XREF: Parallels modern discourse about global Islamism and Islamic caliphate fears; the historical continuity is striking. Pays off: "British colonial rule inadvertently united armed Muslims against England."

In contrast with these American anxieties, Britons in India only became alarmed at the prospect of an Ottoman-oriented pan-Islamism as the nineteenth century concluded. Officials began to fear that Turkish agents were stirring discontent in India. Important intellectuals like Sir Muhammad Iqbal and Abul Kalam Azad promoted an Islamic identity that transcended national borders, a widespread sentiment among the ulama. Pro-British Muslims such as Sir Saiyid Ahmad Khan and Mirza Ghulam Ahmad felt compelled to write tracts defending loyalty to the British government as popular support grew for the Turkish sultan. However, no uprising ever pursued any Ottoman-oriented ends.

QUESTION: Why did pro-Ottoman sentiment never translate into an uprising? What specific factors constrained action despite widespread ideological support?

Independence leader Mohandas Gandhi saw advantage too in pan-Islamist sentiment and allied his Congress Party with the Khilafat movement that sought to prevent the victorious Allies from removing the caliph and dismembering the Ottoman empire. In 1924 the entire issue vanished when

XREF: Connects to anti-colonial solidarity and how nationalist movements borrowed transnational religious causes.

At the start of the First World War, when the Ottomans allied with Briton's enemies, British anxiety deepened. Immediately, the Government of India telegraphed all districts describing pan-Islamism to officials, directing them to warn certain Muslim preachers of the consequences of criticizing the government, and requiring all householders to report foreigners. Despite such concerns, after the war some authorities aimed to use pan-Islamic thought to British advantage. In 1919, the Government of India sent to at least one provincial government a copy of a fatwa that called "upon all Muhammadans to oppose Bolshevism" and the central government sought to publicize it by feeding it to Muslim newspapers.

XREF: Connects to British empire's divide-and-rule tactics and colonial manipulation of religious identity for geopolitical ends.

As Hardy put it, "In thinking about Muslims after 1857, the socalled Wahhabis were for the British the great unthinkable that was always thought." British belief in Indian-based Wahhabis originated in the 1820s, as Saiyid Ahmad Barelwi and his followers moved to the northwest territories to launch a jihad against the Sikhs who ruled there. Their Tariqah-i Muhammadi may have shared a notion of jihad with Arabia's Wahhabis, but its efforts at reform drew much more from Sufi traditions.

For many Pakistan proponents – certainly for its ultimate leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah – separatism represented less an anti-imperial and anti-Hindu agenda than a political threat to obtain minority concessions from the British-led government and Hindu-dominated Congress Party. Indeed, once the endgame had played out and the sought concessions failed to materialize, Jinnah steered the movement into close alliance with the British during the Second World War in order to best obtain his objectives even as Gandhi and the rest of the Congress leadership sat imprisoned for their wartime efforts to undermine British rule.

XREF: Contrasts Jinnah's separatist strategy with Gandhi's anti-imperial stance, illuminating divergent tactics within India's independence movement.

Some warned that coercive conversions did not belong just to the past but may again menace Christians. For instance, in 1835 Eli Smith, an American missionary in Turkey, imagined for his audience in a Boston magazine that the dead ancient Christians of Western Asia warned American Christians today, "Hereafter, upon the fair face of your beloved America, as now upon that glory of all lands which was once our country, a night of apostacy may settle down, and hordes of yet unnamed barbarian invaders fasten deep the blight of some new Mohammedanism" [sic].

XREF: Connects to anxieties about religious coercion and the imagined threat of 'Mohammedanism' as a foil for American Protestant identity — relevant to orientalism and religious-freedom discourse.

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 made it a perennial menace: the proclivity of Muslims to spread their religion and to do so violently. In their reflections on the proselytizing power of Muslims – an issue among Europeans since at least the eighth century when predominantly Christian north Africa and Spain converted almost entirely to Islam – Americans and Britons almost universally explained mass conversion as the result of coercion.

XREF: Connects to historiography of Orientalism and how Western empires rationalized Islam as a violent, coercive faith — echoes Edward Said's framework. QUESTION: How does this coercive-conversion narrative differ from actual historical conversion dynamics in North Africa and Spain?

Early in the next century, President Theodore Roosevelt compared Muslims with a more domestic model of fanaticism when answering critics of his policies toward a rebellious minority in the Philippines: “To abandon the Moro country as our opponents propose in their platform, would be precisely as if twenty-five years ago we had withdrawn the Army and the civil agents from within and around the Indian reservations in the West, at a time when the Sioux and the Apache were still the terror of our settlers.”

XREF: Connects colonial-era comparison frameworks across American imperial projects in the Philippines and domestic Indian policy.

One answer that most Americans and Britons seemingly accepted was that the inherent fanaticism of (male) Muslims produced their violent success. According to the well respected and widely read Briton Claudius Buchanan (1807), Muslims were a “dagger-drawing people” who maintained a “vindictive spirit.” Smith, in 1835, opined that religious fanaticism was “the strongest principle of obedience in the Turkish citizen, and of bravery in the Turkish soldier.”

XREF: Connects to broader orientalist discourse critiqued by Said and to post-9/11 framing of Muslim fanaticism.

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 good reason for South Asians to convert, it reflected less the value of Islam than the deficits of Hinduism, specifically caste prejudice and the proscription of widow remarriage.

In 1892, a publication of the Church of England's Church Missionary Society (CMS) credited the prophet's success to a combined strategy of carrot and stick, arguing that Muhammad took a decrepit form of Judaism and Christianity and "added to it elements of worldliness and sensuality which rendered it acceptable to the natural mind, and by establishing the principle of enforcing his tenets by the sword, he ensured their zealous propagation."

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of 19th-century Western orientalism and missionary polemics against Islam.

Reverend John Takle – a New Zealander working as a missionary in Bengal – used the most recent "scientific" evidence that tracked intermarriage between Muslim and native races to supposedly prove a long-standing conclusion. In 1911 he stated, "The anthropometric survey made by government proves conclusively that the vast majority of the Mohammedans in India are converts from among the depressed Hindu communities."

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of scientific racism from the era — colonial anthropometry used to legitimize social hierarchies in other colonial contexts (e.g., phrenology, cranial measurement). QUESTION: What was the actual quality and methodology of this 1911 anthropometric survey? Worth chasing how flimsy the underlying data was.

The “scientific” dimension of European imperialism not only seemed to affirm existing views about Muslims and Islam it also helped deepen fears by proving how many Muslims existed. Anglo-American literature about Muslims repeatedly stressed their considerable population. Recall that in Smith’s essay on Turkey, he warned Americans of “hordes of yet unnamed barbarian invaders” that might sweep the US if enough missionaries did not meet the Islamic threat. In 1842 Hayward indicated a world population of 140 million Muslims. An 1850 letter in the Missionary Herald by a “Mr. Hume” began with a reckoning of the relative numbers of Muslims and Hindus in Bombay, drawing on data derived from the recently instituted census there.

XREF: Connects to broader scholarship on how colonial censuses constructed and exaggerated demographic threats to justify intervention.

Although some European states had begun to develop demographic tools to better understand their populations by this time, the British were creating a more thorough and expansive census for its Indian territories than they exercised at home. The first all-India census (1872) and the several city and provincial counts that preceded it each required those polled to give their religion. The resulting numbers alarmed Britons because the population of Muslims exceeded their expectations.

XREF: Connects to broader histories of colonial knowledge-gathering and how demographic tools served imperial administration.

“In East Bengal two-thirds of the inhabitants and in North Bengal nearly three-fifths are followers of the Prophet.” As the Mohammedans in those regions increase faster than Hindus, it is quite possible that within a few decades Hinduism may be banished from those parts of Bengal…The influence of Islam is the most powerful engine destroying Hinduism in North and East Bengal at the present day. The next year Takle cited U.N. Mukherjee of the Indian Medical Services whose pamphlet “A Dying Race?” made much the same argument. Official demography added to the stream of knowledge about Muslims that imperialism made available to Britons and Americans.

XREF: Connects to colonial demographic anxieties and communal tension in British India, relevant to partition-era history and Hindu nationalist narratives.

Reflecting on the overall expansion of Islam, the American missionary Samuel M. Zwemer, a recognized authority who published repeatedly on Islam, declared of “the Moslem Peril,” “It is now or never; it is Islam or Christ!” 58 Zwelmer’s sentiment signals the last quality of Islamophobia that featured prominently in Anglo-American discourse: Islam as Christianity’s inherent and inexorable nemesis.

Christians feared Muslims both as a radically other religious competitor and a despoiled fraction of Christians. Deprecating Muslims often served efforts to police the doctrinal boundary circumscribing “true Christianity,” as seen in Roger Williams’ answer to Quaker founder George Fox in G. Fox Digg’d out of His Burrows (1676).

So, when Fox claimed that the growth of the Quaker community demonstrated its credibility, Williams retorted that Islam and Roman Catholicism had grown equally as quickly. Elsewhere, Williams wrote of his anticipation that the destruction of Islam and Catholicism would coincide, along with the mass conversion of the Jews, with the apocalypse.

XREF: Connects to the seventeenth-century discourse on religious credibility and millenarian expectations, relevant to understanding Protestant-Catholic-Jewish apocalyptic thought.

In 1912, Bruce Kinney wrote Mormonism: The Islam of America, the book's title stemming from the perceived similarities between the two religions in terms of topics such as polygamy and ideas on heaven. The resemblance was not intended to be a salutary one, as the book written by a former superintendent of Baptist missions in Utah dealt with "the Mormon problem."

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.

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. Hence, the “Antichrist seems at this time to have set both his Feet upon Christendom together, the one in the East, and the other in the West.” … How better to reconcile the triumphant truth of Christianity with its historical setbacks beginning in the seventh century than to portray the conquered churches as corrupted? Prideaux viewed Muslims as a tool used by god to punish the sinful eastern churches. God raised “the Saracens to be the Instruments of his Wrath, to punish them for it.” … Simultaneously such an explanation chastised contemporary dissenting Christians with the threat of god's possible punishment and explained the loss of Christendom's heartland while denigrating Islam.

Despite the shared conviction among many Britons and Americans that Islam stood in inherent antagonism to Christianity and the sentiment among some that it should be destroyed, Britons in India – especially those serving the government – remained conflicted about how to proceed. Although some of its servants viewed Muslims as antithetical to Company aims, the EIC preferred to minimalize Christian missionary activity, concerned that resulting antagonisms might disrupt commerce. … The Bengal government justified itself to the Court of Directors through allusion to the principles of toleration practiced in England toward minorities, notably Jews and Catholics.

XREF: Connects to broader history of colonial religious tolerance as commercially motivated.

Meanwhile James Owen of the British and Foreign Bible Society contended that government should promote the Bible because “the sooner it supersedes the Shaster and the Koran, the sooner will the happiness of India be consummated.” Others objected. Thomas Twining, a senior merchant for the Company in Bengal, argued that either the conversion of India’s people should be left to god or British efforts would be met with unrelenting hostility. 78 In the end, Buchanan’s publications proved particularly consequential (as did the efforts of William Wilberforce), and when Parliament renewed the Company’s charter, they included greater latitude for missionary work.

Samuel M. Zwemer, one of the most famous – and perhaps the most well published – missionaries to Muslims summed up this view: “In India and Malaysia God’s favor has given us an open door to 100,000,000 Mohammedans. Under Queen Wilhelmina, the Christian Queen of Holland and under George V, the Christian Emperor of India, 100,000,000 Mohammedans are enjoying the blessings of Protestant Christian rule.”

XREF: Connects to broader literature on missionary-colonial entanglements and the 'white man's burden' ideology of the era.

It must be reemphasized that not all Americans or Britons shared extreme Islamophobic sentiments. Some positively valued the religion and the cultures associated with it. Some converted, as apparently had the New Yorker Mohammed Alexander Russell Webb. However, the preponderance of publications from the late eighteenth to the middle of the twentieth century demonstrate recurring themes of fear and threat beyond the sentiments of disapproval and loathing also present.

Americans and those Britons serving in India often differed in their perception of Muslims. Few Americans benefited from actual contact with Muslims that many Britons experienced occasionally, if not daily. However, after 1857 Britons in India eyed Muslims more warily as a source for potential rebellion. In both the American and British cases, European imperialism made more known about Islam than ever before although such information was often inflected by administrative anxieties and Christian concerns.

Builds on: "Historical Islamophobia dominated Western publications from 1700 to 1950."

Such convictions presumed a singular Islam that required all adherents to act in prescribed ways. This helped make a pan-Indian conspiracy plausible in many British imaginations. The stereotype of the inherently intolerant, aggressive jihadi which helped convince Britons of a potentially India-wide Wahhabi conspiracy rested on a reified understanding of Islam that pictured the religion as a self-motivating agent.

DEFINE: Clarifies the concept of reification as treating a religion as a singular, self-motivating agent rather than a diverse set of adherents and practices. Builds on: "Imperial administration distorted Western knowledge of Islam."

Some volumes more than echo past perspectives: Answering Islam: The Crescent in Light of the Cross (1993, 2006), for instance, begins by citing Zwemer. This book's goal of providing Christians with counterarguments to Islamic beliefs – “preparing you with strong apologetic answers” –reflects how the perpetuation of Islamophobia often represents more of an effort to positively define those making the allegations than accurately describe Muslims or Islam.

XREF: Connects to the broader scholarship on how outgroup prejudice functions to reinforce ingroup identity. SEED: Could yield an essay on how religious apologetics reveal more about their writers' identity needs than about target faiths.

The American Catholic priest Starbuck recognized this when he observed in the nineteenth century, “We know Mohammedanism better and worse than Hinduism or Confucianism or Buddhism. It has been implicated inextricably with Christianity as a tremendously aggressive and intensely hostile force during all the twelve centuries of its existence. This, until our own day, has made objective study of it almost impossible.”

XREF: Connects to modern discourse about how colonial and theological biases continue shaping scholarship on non-Western religions.