The contribution traces forms of anti-Muslim othering in contemporary Islamophobia that take place ‚in the name of emancipation‘. Specifically, it highlights the role of religiosity and secularism in the construction of ‚Muslim Others‘. Drawing on original qualitative data from Austria, the notion of ‚historicist racism‘ is introduced to highlight discursive practices that construct Muslims as anachronistic subjects. Anti-Muslim historicist racism, it is argued, results in the peculiar phenomenon of ‚anti-secular secularism‘: A secularism that, by marking Muslim Others as particularly religious, undermines its own foundations.