In the US imagination, Muslims are not white, and they certainly aren't Christian. Their origins are murky and distant, as opposed to the ancestral Anglo-Saxon lands with which many white Americans still identify. Muslims have always been posited as an external threat that, in addition to America's many internal enemies, including American Indians, African-Americans, Mexicans, queers, and feminists, threaten the American dream.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 575