ABSTRACT
The purpose of this contribution is to study how the past can help understanding the place of Muslims in present British social imagination. By focusing on Queen Elizabeth I’s relations to the Islamic world and Queen Victoria’s bond with her servant and instructor Abdul Karim, the objective is to demonstrate how, when dealing with Muslims, the same attitudes (mainly suspicion and rejection) still prevail and how they even transcend royal authority. At the same time, this approach invites questioning of the idea of context (especially post 9/11 and post 7/7) as well as an exploration of the environment, which, beyond a given historical period, determines the collective ethos and ensures attributional continuities. This allows us to study how the Islamophobic mind works and how Islamophobia is by nature an epistemological limitation proper to the Eurocentric capitalist and imperialist mind.
