Abstract: Despite historical and geographical variations, similar sentiments toward Muslims and Islam have become evident in Anglophone cultures over four centuries. During their empire, Britons developed domestically and abroad tropes of Muslim invasion and Islamic tyranny, Muslim valor and Islamic piety. Officials, missionaries, colonists, and their descendants have referenced “the Muslim” as a foil and extreme by which to gauge social maladies and ponder toleration’s limits. Have these sentiments outlived the empire that globally proliferated them in places such as India, Australia, and the United States, as well as in Britain?

Bio: Peter Gottschalk is Professor of Religion at Wesleyan University.  His research on American attitudes toward Islam and Muslims led him to author American Heretics: Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and the History of Religious Intolerance (2013) and co-author Islamophobia: Making Muslims the Enemy (2007).  As a scholar of Hindu and Muslim cultures in India, he has authored Religion, Science, and Empire: Classifying British India (2012) and Beyond Hindu and Muslim: Multiple Identity in Narratives from Village India (2000), and also co-created the website “A Virtual Village” (http://virtualvillage.wesleyan.edu).