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?

Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg, Common Heritage, Uncommon F…, loc. 81