ABSTRACT
The phrase ‘Islam and the Atlantic’ invokes more than the category of religion, for Islam as a political and cultural presence has had a real but also imagined presence in what we implicitly de ne as a Europeanized, Christian Atlantic world since its inception. Muslims lived in this Atlantic but, ironically, their practice of the faith was often obscured in favor of discourses about notional Muslims who, whether depicted as eternal enemies or as future citizens, provided a foil to emerging de nitions of European religious persecution and tolerance, particularly in the Anglo-Atlantic.
