The word Islamophobia was coined in 1918 by Étienne Dinet, a French painter who converted to Islam. Islamophobia itself is much older, and it has deep roots in Christianity. The Christian narrative of Islam as an inherently heretical and violent religion dates to the eighth century, when John of Damascus, an Arab Christian monk, discussed the Islamic rejection of Jesus’ crucifixion in his treatise The Fount of Knowledge. In what is perhaps the first Christian apologetic refutation of Islam, John attacks Muhammad and the Qur’an as immoral. He refers to Islam as the “Ishmaelite heresy” and dismisses its teachings as “ridiculous.” John’s writings were translated into Latin and significantly shaped the Western church’s perspective on Islam.
As the military conquests of Muhammad’s successors gradually expanded, parts of the Christian Roman territory were incorporated into the new Islamic empire. In 718, Muslim military forces conquered the Iberian Peninsula. Soon afterward, the first highly biased biography of Muhammad, Storia de Mahometh, was written by an anonymous Christian. Based partially on the traditional biography of Muhammad, it mixes fact with highly disparaging fiction; it also happens to include the first fragments of the Qur’an translated into Latin (Q 33:37). It was followed by many other fictionalized biographies of Muhammad that served as anti-Islamic propaganda and Christian apologetic literature.
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In 1099, the First Crusade culminated in the establishment of the Kingdom of Jerusalem; nearly all Jewish and Muslim residents were massacred. Most of the subsequent crusades were unsuccessful, and some were outright disasters. Christian-Muslim relations in this period were largely defined by the narrative of the Holy War. For Christians, these campaigns were repeated attempts to recover the Holy Land; for Muslims, they were defensive wars against would-be colonizers. However, these military conflicts also had unexpected outcomes. The crusaders encountered superior Muslim medicine, astronomy, mathematics, architecture, and philosophy. Witnessing the accomplishments of Islamic civilization, many may have realized that Christian propaganda about Islam was untruthful.
The continuing need to portray Islam as a heresy and Muslims as villains led to more Islamophobic initiatives in the Christian world. In an effort to disprove Islamic teachings, Peter the Venerable, a French Benedictine abbot who believed that Muhammad was the successor of Arius and the forerunner of the Antichrist, ordered the Qur’an to be translated into Latin. Robert of Ketton, an English priest and diplomat, undertook this task. In 1143, he produced the first translation of the Qur’an into a Western language and titled it Lex Mahumet pseudoprophete. The standard translation in Europe until the 18th century, it was a foundational source of anti-Muslim prejudice in European and Christian thought.
In subsequent centuries, Muhammad was described by various Christian monks as a Christian heretic, a false prophet, and even the Antichrist. This hostility and fear took root in the hearts of many medieval Christians, fueled in part by the outlandish tales of crusading pilgrims and preachers. Devout Christians were assured that Muhammad had met a tragic end—in 666, the year of the beast, rather than in 632 when he in fact died. This host of confabulations found its way into medieval romances (the Song of Roland is a prominent example) and poetry (Muhammad appears in Dante’s eighth circle of hell). Anti-Muslim prejudice was embedded in works of literature that are considered foundational to European and Western identity.
Islamophobia also infused polemical scholarly work. Confutatio Alcorani (Confutation of the Qur’an) was written around 1300 and published in 1500; it was later used extensively as a handbook on Islam. Its author, Italian Dominican friar Riccoldo da Monte di Croce, uses the Bible to argue that the Qur’an is not the word of God and attempts to validate Christian doctrine by citing it directly from the Qur’an (without noting that the latter contradicts the former).
Throughout the 16th century, the Ottoman Empire threatened the Balkans and Central Europe. With the advent of the printing press, a new genre of literature known as “Turk-booklets,” written in the vernacular and addressed to commoners, became very popular. Like many medieval writings, they portrayed Islam as the product of the ramblings of a false prophet. Some claimed he was a son of Satan.
Three of the Turk-booklets were by Martin Luther, who viewed Ottoman power as a danger to Christendom. Around 1541 Luther penned the hymn “Restrain the Murderous Pope and Turk” (still sung in revised form as “Lord, Keep Us Steadfast in Thy Word”). He repeated many of the falsehoods about Islam found in earlier writing, while also inventing some of his own. The “Turk,” according to Luther, was a scourge sent by God to punish Christians for their sins, the corruption of the papacy in particular.
In 1543, Luther wrote a preface to an edition of Ketton’s Qur’an translation as an expression of support for it. (The city where it was to be printed, Basel, objected to the printing of a non-Christian scripture.) Luther did not do this to promote interreligious dialogue; his objective was to expose the Qur’an as “a work full of lies, fables, and abominations.” He believed that reading the Qur’an would equip Christians to disprove Islam, which, like other religions, he considered one of Satan’s ploys.
In the United States, Islamophobia has deep roots in anti-Blackness. When the transatlantic slave trade began, Islam was already well established across West Africa, so the first Muslims to come to North America were enslaved Africans—about 900,000 of them. While they were sometimes forbidden from practicing their religion, in other instances their particular practices of prayer, dress, diet, and so on made them a visible non-majority group. Their existence was thus acknowledged by priests, missionaries, journalists, scholars, diplomats, writers, and slaveholders. Omar ibn Said, born in what is now Senegal among the Fulani people, was enslaved in 1807. His autobiography, the only known narrative of an enslaved person written in Arabic, tells of how his profound Muslim faith helped him survive his capture and enslavement. Although he became well known as a scholar of religion in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where he lived, he nevertheless died enslaved.
African Americans have largely been erased from American Muslim history, which tends to center Arab and South Asian Muslim experiences—despite the reality that in the United States, Muslims are ethnically and racially diverse and most Arabs are Christian. The narrative of Muslims as foreigners has been useful in rationalizing surveillance and criminalization of American Muslims, along with military excursions in Muslim-majority countries. But a growing body of literature now indicates that Islam has existed in the United States since the earliest European settlements. Islam is no more foreign to this country than the European presence.
In the 19th century, the education of clergy in the United States branched out from universities and divinity schools to denominational seminaries, with Andover Newton Seminary becoming the first Protestant seminary in the country. Muhammad in the Seminary, David Grafton’s 2024 study on the teaching of Islam in American seminaries, traces the sources that have been used to educate clergy about Islam. Grafton writes:
Throughout the nineteenth century, thousands of ministerial students learned about Muhammad and the Qur’an in a variety of surprising ways throughout their seminary education. Usually, their exposure to Islam was negative and pejorative. Islam was a foil for American values. It was portrayed as alien and backward. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, views of Islam became more complicated and nuanced.
Medieval and Reformation sources were frequently used in this era. Grafton’s in-depth research provides several profiles of prominent seminary professors who taught about Islam.
One of them was John DeWitt, professor of biblical literature and ecclesiastical history at New Brunswick Seminary from 1823 to 1831. His source was Flacius Illyricus’s Magdeburg Centuries, from 1559. It in turn relies on Theophanes the Confessor’s Chronicle, which, according to Grafton, was one of the most widely used Christian sources in reference to Islam. Theophanes saw the “Saracens” as God’s punishment for rulers’ transgressions, such as adopting heretical beliefs or iconoclasm. He also pioneered the disparaging claim that Muhammad’s somatic reactions to the revelation of the Qur’an—trances and sweating—were simply symptoms of epilepsy.
DeWitt’s successor at New Brunswick, Samuel M. Woodbridge, continued in this vein. In his introduction to Islam course—titled Mohammedan Persecution—he taught that Muslims burned the Library of Alexandria, despite a lack of consensus on that question in the sources. His assessment of the Muslim empire was exclusively negative: “They destroyed wherever they came—including literature and libraries, the Alexandria library among them. Those who live under them were allowed a ‘miserable existence.’”
Such prejudice continued into the 20th century. Frederick Joseph Kinsman, who taught ecclesiastical history at General Seminary from 1903 to 1908, wrote about Islam as a violent, fanatical faith that subjugates women: “The morals of the Koran are very different from those of the Bible. . . . The position of women is a degraded one and a narrow and ferocious fanaticism is encouraged in spreading the system of Mohammed, one of the great missionary faiths of the world.” Kinsman passed along inaccuracies such as an incorrect wording of the Shahādah, the Islamic declaration of faith. In discussing the Qur’an, he did not introduce any readings or examples from it. Neither did he mention the H•adīth, the collection of Muhammad’s sayings and actions that is second in importance only to the Qur’an.
Grafton sums up the teaching of Islam in American seminaries in the 19th century as both largely superficial and deeply biased. The religion was seen as punishment for the transgressions of the church, its arrival as an “interruption to the flow of Western Christian history.” It was considered in relation to the expansion of the Muslim empire, not from a theological angle; genuine engagement with Islamic theology would undoubtedly have called into question the Islamophobic preconceptions and fantasies that had been reinforced for centuries. With its sources largely dismissed as heretical ramblings, Islam was taught in a manner that further entrenched medieval stereotypes among American Protestant clergy, who then passed them on to their congregations. This demonstrates the power of theological educators in spreading information—and misinformation—about other religions.
Seminaries are beginning to realize that it is time to reverse this regrettable history and to help undo the damage of Islamophobia. Several, including Hartford International University for Religion and Peace, Luther Seminary, and Chicago Theological Seminary, now offer Islamic studies programs aimed at Muslim students. There are many benefits to this. At present, there are no fully independent, accredited Muslim seminaries in the United States where students wishing to pursue a clergy vocation professionally can obtain a graduate degree. While it is possible to go abroad for such a degree, to become a US military chaplain, a candidate must be a graduate of a US-accredited seminary. Hartford International University offers the only Islamic chaplaincy degree in the United States.
Islam-related courses are also starting to become available to seminary students studying on other tracks (including Christian-centered ones), usually as electives. In an interview with us, Grafton, who teaches at Hartford International University, said that non-Christian courses in seminaries are typically “not integrated into the overall theological formation of the student. They’re kind of extra.” If you’re in the last year of and MDiv program, he explained, “then you can do interfaith. You do all your standard Bible and theology, and only then can you engage in ecumenical or interfaith work.”
There are, however, exceptions. Union Theological Seminary in New York City added an Islamic studies program in 2016. “There are 2.1 billion Christians and 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, so there’s no way a Christian can be responsible as a theologian and not know anything about Islam,” Union’s president, Serene Jones, told In Trust magazine that year. Addressing the common fear that teaching about other faiths might dilute Christian commitments at an institution, Jones noted that Christian students at Union found that classes in Islam in fact strengthened their own faith. “Across the board, you hear from the students that interreligious engagement deepens the understanding of their own tradition rather than being a threat,” she said. “I would think that it can only make us a better seminary and prepare better ministers for the church.”
A clergy friend of ours told us that her interest in Islam was originally sparked by a childhood friendship with a Muslim girl. A few years before she went to seminary, she signed up for an Islam 101 course at her local community center. When she later encountered misconceptions about Islam at an adult Bible study class, she was equipped to challenge them.
In a seminary course on the history of Jewish thought, she learned that some types of antisemitism had been invisible to her as a Christian. She suspected Islamophobia might be similar, so she took a Muslim studies class in order to not “inadvertently be expressing or practicing Islamophobia.” The class helped her rethink some negative stereotypes about Muslim women. She appreciated the opportunity to participate in evidence-based learning about Islam in seminary because “it is really hard to get good information about Islam,” she said, referring to disinformation and stereotypes pervasive even in the mainstream media. “I don’t see myself as someone who has all the answers,” she noted, “and we live in a society where you encounter questions about other faiths. I think if I am to serve people well, I need to at least have some idea of where we might look for answers to those questions.”
Seminaries are often unsure what to do with Muslim students interested in studying Christianity, writes Grafton in a 2015 article titled “Christian Ministry Within a Religiously Plural America.” Students want to study the Bible from a Muslim perspective, and some Christian denominations and seminaries aren’t clear whether that’s even something they should be doing. Grafton explains that seminarians and institutions stand to benefit theologically, sociologically, and pastorally from integrating the study of Islam into seminary education.
In taking seriously Muslim theological engagement with Christianity, Christians can learn to better articulate their own theological convictions. For instance, Muslim scholars have long critiqued the idea of the Trinity, seeing it as the worship of three gods instead of one, and Christians often struggle to explain how this is not the case. Engaging with those critiques can make Christians more theologically literate and capable, as they cannot retreat to the safe bastions of jargon but must instead articulate a theology that is intelligible outside Christianity.
Grafton’s arguments concerning the sociological and pastoral benefits start from the reality that our society is multicultural and multireligious. He notes that not only is America religiously diverse, but our congregations are as well, largely due to an increase in interfaith marriages. Grafton’s work brings one crucial question to the fore: How can pastors be effective—both outside and inside their congregations—if they do not understand other religions?
Still, many mainline Protestant seminaries and theological schools do not offer courses about Islam and Muslims as part of their MDiv programs. And because the growth of Islamic studies at Christian seminaries is recent, a lot of clergy have never studied Islam formally or with a professor trained in the field. One pastor we interviewed, who is deeply integrated into the world of American Baptist Churches USA, recounted his experience at a seminary affiliated with ABCUSA 20 years earlier:
I took a course on Islam. At that time, it was taught by a very prominent evangelist. He was self-taught in everything that regarded Islam and Muslims, and the seminary at that time had no issues with that hiring. The way it was framed, and how it was conducted, was very essentialist, to say the least. A lot of handouts . . . [and] the book had been written by the professor himself. No bibliography at all. And he would say things along the lines of, “If you talk to a Muslim, a Muslim will answer this to this question.” So it was like building up straw people. The course sustained itself like that for years.
If this example does not convey the full extent of the disregard for Islam that exists in some corners of the Christian world, the following response to a question in our survey of ABC clergy, “What would you like to see happen in your congregation in terms of interfaith education?” certainly turns up the dial:
Nothing! My job as a minister for Christ is not to educate others on “religions” that are not the truth. My job is to make sure that they know Jesus as Lord and Savior, that is, having the covering of His blood shed on the cross for our sins. It is my calling as minister of that Gospel to make and to be full-formed followers of Christ. It is not to point out the counterfeit but to help those that know and those that do not know Jesus to know Him by the truth of His word. Teaching any other doctrine from the pulpit is heresy!
In a multicultural society, in which Muslim populations are growing even in small towns and interreligious marriages and friendships are more common than ever, such attitudes pose challenges to Christian ministry professionals.
Muslims bear the burden of Islamophobia, but it is chiefly Christians who are complicit in and beneficiaries of it. Therefore, we have the responsibility to confront this hate, including in our seminaries. It is our religious duty to love our neighbors and see God in them, and this duty requires learning about Islam and confronting Islamophobia.
This article is excerpted from Confronting Islamophobia in the Church: Liturgical Tools for Justice, by Anna Piela and Michael Woolf, copyright © 2026 by Judson Press. Used by permission of Judson Press.
