Greater familiarity with the Middle East in the nineteenth century came from visitors to the Holy Land and from missionaries. Mark Twain, who went on to become a staunch anti-imperialist, wrote in 1869 about his trip to the Holy Land in a book titled The Innocents Abroad, which sold nearly a hundred thousand copies. While Twain witheringly (and hilariously) critiqued his fellow travelers for their hubris and lack of cultural sensitivity—a characteristic of American tourists that would continue into the next century and become grist for the Hollywood mill—he also had harsh words to say about Muslims. He called them “a people by nature and training filthy, brutish, ignorant, unprogressive [and] superstitious,” and saw the Ottomans as “a government whose Three Graces are Tyranny, Rapacity, [and] Blood.”

XREF: Connects to broader history of orientalism and how Western impressions of the Middle East were formed long before modern geopolitics.

Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politi…, loc. 136