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'.

Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg, Common Heritage, Uncommon F…, loc. 47