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.

Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg, Common Heritage, Uncommon F…, loc. 18