Attached to Paper Session
Meeting Preference
The term “Islamophobia” came into common usage in the 1990s, and the rising Islamophobic acts in North America and Europe today reflect the particular socio-political challenges of the present moment. Yet anti-Muslim sentiment has deep roots in the West, especially in Christian history. This paper explores one slice of this history, focusing on Anglo-Protestant discourses about Islam. Drawing upon archival research in British and American archives, and interpreting textual sources alongside visual and material culture, I find that gender discourses have played a central role in Anglo-Protestant conceptions of Islam and continue to influence anti-Muslim views today. Indeed, gender-based tropes lie at the foundation of Islamophobia in a way that is unparalleled in anti-Semitism, despite many similarities between these two forms of religious bigotry. To combat such bigotry, we need a better historical understanding of the ways religious prejudices have formed, adapted, and become imbedded in European and American culture.
This paper’s introduction attends to the place of gender in the foundational Protestant texts on Islam from the Reformation. Martin Luther’s writings against the Turks, for example, enshrined into Protestant theology the medieval Christian view of the Prophet Muhammad – and all Muslim men by proxy – as licentious, exploitative of women, and prone to hyper-masculinist violence. In contrast, the Reformers had positive things to say about Muslim women, whom they applauded for their modest dress and pious demeanor (Womack 2022).
The paper moves on to explain how ideas about Muslim women shifted in the Enlightenment. The first section explores British Protestant thought about Islam, as conveyed in religiously inflected texts, like clergyman John Foxe’s extremely critical The historye and tyrannye of the Turkes (1563), and in more popular venues like Elizabethan theater. Both employed the trope of the violent Muslim man (Toenjes 2016; Vitkus 2003). I also explore the change in British and American thought about Muslim women after the early eighteenth century, when the discourses of the veil and the harem – both Orientalist constructions – came to dominate Protestant discussions about women in Islam (Kahf 1999).
The second section documents how nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British and American Protestant missionaries, particularly women, employed tropes about oppressed Muslim women when campaigning for funds and personnel to evangelize the Islamic world (VanSommer 1907 and 1911). I trace the multi-media messaging about Islam that traveled from the mission fields in textual, visual, and material formats to American and British audiences—messages that mission supporters traded back and forth across the Atlantic on postcards of Muslim subjects or missionaries dressed in Islamic garb and in women’s mission society publications. These included children’s books that exposed young Protestants to the discourse of the veil and harem at an early age (Zwemer 1926).
The third section notes the proliferation of competing positive and negative images of Islam in the post-WWII, post-colonial period in which British and American orientations toward Muslims were shaped by the emerging interfaith movement, ongoing racism and xenophobia, and geopolitical and economic entanglements in the Middle East (Howard 2021; Aziz 2022; McAlister 2001). The advances made in Christian-Muslim theological understanding in both societies existed alongside persistent images that even ecumenical Protestants still retained of Islam as a masculinist religion that oppresses women.
The paper concludes with a look at rising Islamophobia, which has prompted a growing body of scholarship, especially in the US (Gottschalk 2019; Love 2017; Aziz 2022; Kazi 2019; Beydoun, 2018; Hussein 2016). I ask what we could learn from this historical study on gender discourses about breaking the power of anti-Muslim sentiment. Tracing the transnational movement of Protestant images of Islam from continental Europe to Britain and, later, back and forth between the UK and US, I demonstrate that the gender constructs that have contributed to contemporary Islamophobia are not set in stone but rather are the result of ongoing re-invention. This adaptability has allowed images of Islam to be used for white and Christian supremacist purposes but also may provide a key to unraveling the power of Anglo-Protestant biases about Muslim women and men.
*At the committee’s direction, the paper could include a comparative analysis of the historical similarities and differences between Islamophobia and anti-Semitism in Anglo-Protestant contexts.
Primary Sources
Archives of the Church Missionary Society, Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide, Oxford Centre for Muslim-Christian Studies, National Library of Scotland, Presbyterian Historical Society, Congregational Library, Quaker Special Collections, Day Missions Library at Yale, Hartford International University, United Methodist History Center.
Van Sommer, Annie, and Samuel Zwemer, eds. *Our Moslem Sisters: A Cry of Need from Lands of Darkness Interpreted by Those Who Heard It.* Revell, 1907.
Van Sommer, Annie, and Samuel M. Zwemer, eds. *Daylight in Harlem: A New Era for Moslem Women.* Revell, 1911.
Zwemer, Amy Wilkes. *Two Young Arabs and the Travels of Noorah and Jameel.* CCUSFM, 1926.
Secondary Sources
Aziz, Sahar. *The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom.* University of California Press, 2022.
Beydoun, Khaled. *American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear.* University of California Press, 2018.
Francisco, Adam. *Martin Luther and Islam: A Study in Sixteenth-Century Polemics and Apologetics.* Brill, 2007.
Gottschalk, Peter, with Gabriel Greenberg. *Islamophobia and Anti-Muslim Sentiment: Picturing the Enemy.* Rowman & Littlefield, 2019.
Howard, Thomas. *The Faiths of Others: A History of Interreligious Dialogue.* Yale University Press, 2021.
Hussein, Shakira. *From Victims to Suspects: Muslim Women since 9/11.* University of New South Wales, 2016.
Kahf, Mohja. *Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque.* University of Texas Press, 1999.
Kazi, Nazia. *Islamophobia, Race, and Global Politics.* Rowman & Littlefield, 2019.
Love, Erik. I*slamophobia and Racism in America.* NYU Press, 2017.
McAlister, Melani. *Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, & U.S. Interest in the Middle East since 1945.* University of California Press, 2001.
Toenjes, Christopher. *Islam, the Turks and the Making of the English Reformation: The History of the Ottoman Empire in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments.* Peter Lang, 2016.
Vitkus, Daniel. *Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630.* Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Womack, Deanna. “Protestant Portrayals of Islam: From the Reformation to Modern Missions,” *Interpretation* 76:2 (2022): 140–155.
Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)
Islamophobia is on the rise, along with anti-Semitism, in Europe and North America today. To combat such bigotry, we need a better historical conception of the ways prejudices become imbedded in religious and cultural thought patterns. This paper focuses on gender in Anglo-Protestant discourses about Islam as a key to understanding the deep roots of anti-Muslim sentiment. I show how images of violent Muslim men migrated from continental Europe to Britain during the Reformation, I explore how the Orientalist discourse of the veil influenced British and early American thought about Muslim women’s oppression during the Enlightenment, and I document how nineteenth and early twentieth-century Anglo-Protestant missionaries employed tropes about abused Muslim women. Recognizing the endurance of these negative gender discourses even with the growth of interfaith and Christian-Muslim initiatives after the mid-twentieth century, I ask how the lessons of history might assist us in confronting American and British Islamophobia today.