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).

Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg, Common Heritage, Uncommon F…, loc. 96