Gender and the Transnational Roots of Protestant Islamophobia

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.