by Rafia Zakaria
(CNN)”Turn Turk Tim and Renounce Thy Faith/In words as well as actions/Is it worse to follow Mahomet than the Devil?” So wrote Benjamin Franklin in “Poor Richard’s Almanack” in 1741. Franklin’s maxim here, comparing the Prophet Muhammad to Satan, is but one example of early American Islamophobia.
According to scholars Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg, one in five enslaved persons brought to the United States from Africa were believed to be Muslim, but Puritan leaders like Cotton Mather dismissed the existence of Muslims altogether. Historian Thomas Kidd quotes Mather’s smug claim, “We are afar off, in a Land, which never had (that I ever heard of) one Mahometan breathing in it.”
The Islamophobia that exists in the US today, politically weaponized as a legitimate political view by former President Donald Trump and his supporters, weighs heavily on Muslim-American shoulders. My daughter, who was months old when the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon and the hijacking and crash of United 93 in Pennsylvania happened, dreads September 11 just like so many other American Muslim children. Every September since the attacks, it seems, bullying and teasing ensue in American schools.