Sympathetic portrayals of Islam during the Enlightenment may have problematized the medieval narrative, but they did not dislodge it. Islam lived on in the European imagination as a religion rooted in deceit, violence, and misogyny. Even if the theological arguments driving polemical constructions of Islam lost some of their potency by the end of the Enlightenment, they did linger into the modern era. The fear of the Muslim “Other” as an obstacle and threat to European power and hegemony did not fade but rather intensified in the face of Ottoman decline and Europe’s increasing interest in colonial expansion in the nineteenth century.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and broader postcolonial critiques of Western representations of Islam, which frame this persistence as serving colonial power interests.

Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Intro…, loc. 166