Deanna Ferree Womack, "Re-Inventing Islam: Gender and the Protestant Roots of American Islamophobia" (Oxford UP, 2025)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Dec 21, 2025 · 57m

From the end of the American Civil War to the start of World War II, the Protestant missionary movement unintentionally tilled the soil in which American Islamophobia would eventually take root. What ideas did missionaries in Islamic contexts pass on to later generations? How were these ideas connected to centuries-old Protestant discourses about Muslims and gender beginning in the Reformation? And what bearing does this history have on the birth of Islamophobia and on Christian-Muslim dialogue efforts in the US today? In answering these questions, Re-inventing Islam traces the gender…