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.

Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg, Common Heritage, Uncommon F…, loc. 85