Islam & America (Rewind 200 Years)

I'm working on an essay--a short one, 7-8 pages--to present at a conference next weekend in New Orleans. I've been there once before, 1996 or 1997, but I'm guessing that I didn't see any parts of the city ultimately destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. I've stood at "ground zero" in New York City, some years after a different kind of catastrophe struck, and I could see the difference in the city, feel it, from earlier times when I'd visited and actually traveled to the top of one of the WTC towers. I'm wondering if--and how--I'll see New Orleans differently. Hopefully, I'll find some time to move around and see what I haven't seen before--and write about it.

As I said, the purpose of the trip is to attend a literary conference sponsored by the Charles Brockden Brown Society. Brown's work was the subject of my dissertation and my first book, and so I'm fairly involved with this sponsoring organization--heck, I'm a charter member! For those who don't know--and why would you?--Brown (1771-1810) was an important writer in the early years of the American republic. He grew up in Philadelphia and, as a boy, must have felt the buzz in the city as the Declaration of Independence was read aloud in its streets. As a young man, he would have been aware of Philadelphia as the capital of a new nation, a democratic experiment on a scale never before attempted. Certainly he must have felt the city shake beneath the steps of Benjamin Franklin, who was at home there, beneath the steps of visitors such as George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and others who were part of the fledgling government. It's really something to think about!

I digress.

My paper is what I intended to focus on--my as-yet-unwritten paper, I should say. While I was working on one of Brown's main literary ventures--The Literary Magazine, and American Register (1803-1807)--I was struck by the number of articles about such places as Persia, Egypt and Arabia, what we today would call the "Muslim world"; although, like the Christian world--and maybe even more so--the Muslim world is everywhere. So, my paper will attempt to analyze Brown's "take" on Islam two hundred years ago.

Those who study the circum-Atlantic world of the early American republic know that the conflict between the United States and Islam didn't begin with the Iranian hostage crisis that led to the downfall of the Carter administration in the late 1970s. But who in Happy-Days-white-bread-Cold-War America really gave a thought to Muslims before that? John Adams did. Thomas Jefferson did. But somewhere after the Barbary Wars of the late 18th century, the Muslim world seems to have dropped below American radar. Perhaps it was whitewashed--and thus hidden--by European (and American) colonial enterprises; perhaps it was perceived as too barbarous for consideration.

As background for the essay, I've been reading Robert J. Allison's The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776-1815. Allison claims early on that America's "encounter with the Muslim world actually began before there was a United States and almost before Europeans became aware that America existed":

When the Christian kingdoms of Castille and Aragon conquered the Muslim kingdom of Granada in 1492, their most Christian majesties Isabella and Ferdinand had extra capital to pay for Columbus's voyage to the Orient. But however important this voyage would be to our history, Ferdinand and Isabella hoped that by securing a new route to the Indies, they would find a new source of revenue to pay for their continuing holy war against the Muslims they had driven into Morocco and Algiers.

Islam was very much on the American mind of the 1780s, 1790s and the first decade of the 1800s, and events that took place seem eerily familiar. Three strangers obviously from the Middle East arrived in Virginia in 1785, making Governor Patrick Henry uneasy at the thought they were Algerine (Muslim) spies. The three-person "cell" was soon deported, even though the strangers turned out to be Jewish. Sailors from US ships were taken prisoner by Barbary pirates from the North African states of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli, taken prisoner (hostage) and held for years, and Federalists charged President Jefferson with weakness for being unable, for a long time, to negotiate their release.

These troubles were largely over by the time Brown was producing the Literary Magazine, but the Muslim world was still on his mind. The paper I'm writing will describe and analyze the picture Islam one American man of letters presented to his readers.

"Stephen Decatur's Conflict with the Algerine at Tripoli", during the boarding of a Tripolitan gunboat on 3 August 1804.

http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/images/kn10000/kn10949c.htm

Top image: http://teachpol.tcnj.edu/amer_pol_hist/thumbnail102.html

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