It is striking to see how the fictional possibility of American Muslims was used as an extreme hypothetical example, as when the 1789 Constitutional debates on the “religious test” for the presidency entertained the notion that even a “Mahometan” could be considered for that office. It was evidently only after the 1857 Indian revolt (largely blamed on the Muslims and the last Mughal emperor) that British officials began to subscribe to a paranoid suspicion of a Muslim threat to their

QUESTION: The 1789 debate over the religious test considered even a 'Mahometan' for the presidency — worth investigating how the founding generation imagined religious pluralism.

Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ Th…, loc. 39