Fuad Sha'ban. Islam and Arabs in Early American Thought.

Fuad Sha'ban. Islam and Arabs in Early American Thought. Durham, N.C: Acorn Press, 1991. 244 pages. Hardcover, $49.

Fuad Sha'ban. For Zion's Sake: The Judeao-Christian Tradition in American Culture. London: Pluto Press, 2005. 250 pages. Paper, $27.

THOUGH SEPARATED BY FOURTEEN YEARS, these two volumes form two halves of an organic whole: the second book, For Zion's Sake, is an elaboration of the chapter on "The Vision of Zion" in Islam and Arabs in Early American Thought. In the earlier book Sha'ban articulates the ways in which biblical--especially Old Testament--mythology intrinsic to the American foundation narrative served to structure into the American self-portrait an oppositonal relationship with "Arabs, Muslems, and their part of the world." In defining this adversarial relationship with Islam in the first volume, Sha'ban has prepared the way for the American Puritan identification with the Israelites, based on the perception of the New World as congruent with biblical Zion, which is the subject of the second volume.

Sha'ban demonstrates that the early American settlers saw themselves as the "Chosen People," constructing their privileged status as well as their mandate to dispossess the native Americans by analogy with the Israelites of the Old Testament:

   This concept of Americans as God's people remained a constant
   factor in the thinking of American religious as well as lay leaders.
   ... Even George Washington, a man not known to mix religion
   with politics, in his 'Address to the Hebrews of Savannah'
   compared the situation of the Israelites with those of the European
   emigrants to America (Sha'ban 1991: 5).

Long before Washington asked the blessings of Jehovah on the people of Savannah, Sha'ban notes, both John Winthrop, leader of an early group of settlers, and Cotton Mather, the first ecclesiastical historian of the new nation, also invoked Old Testament archetypes in calling their people to their predestined role as covenanted people of God whose task was to build "God's American Israel." Sha'ban shows how this original sense of a divine mission later developed into what came to be called "manifest destiny."

In these erudite books, Professor Sha'ban examines an amazing array of scholarly and popular texts, tracing the roots of American Orientalism farther back than the late eighteenth century (the starting point used by Edward Said in Orientalism), (1) taking us all the way back to the Zionist aspirations of Christopher Columbus himself. And he shows that according to Henry Jessup, "the American Orientalist par excellence," the historical vision of God's plan for the development of history includes "the coincidence of the rise of the Mohammedan religion and the Christianization of the Saxon race both of which occurred in the seventh century" (Sha'ban 1991: 44). Jessup took note as well, Sha'ban says, of the crisis for both Islam and Christianity represented by the fateful events of 1492: in The Mohammedan Missionary Problem (1879) (2) Jessup "describes the relations of Christianity with Islam in extremely interesting terms of reciprocal exchange of services orchestrated by the Great Master of the universe" (Sha'ban 1991: 44).

Sha'ban traces the development of an exalted consciousness in America of its own uniqueness which gave rise to a sense of mission since it contained the requirement that the enjoyment of political liberty had to be shared. "The theme of light beaming from America to the four corners of the world was a favoite topic with Americans through the centuries," Sha'ban points out, "Yet it was not only the exercise of liberty which was considered by Americans to be the true obedience to God; the exercise had to be complemented with the spreading of liberty throughout the world" (ibid.: 24).

      The profundity, as well as the breadth of the American
   emotional and intellectual attachment to an Oriental perspective
   during the first three centuries of the European presence in
   North America, is greater than commonly supposed. This
   attachment, which is still the basis for America's involvement in
   the Orient, was in the making from the founding of the colony at
   Plymouth: it became the mature constituency by the end of the
   Civil War. And although the establishment of the American
   Oriental Society in 1842 marked the beginning of a more active
   stage in the development of American Orientalism, there had
   been a number of Oreintalist activities throughout the history of
   the American people (Sha'ban 1991: 195).

Though Americans inherited from Europe an entrenched anti-Islamic prejudice, a review of indigenous scholarly commentary on Muslem religion and on the Prophet reveals a wide variety of opinion, ranging from tolerant and even favorable treatment among a minority of intellectual circles such as Free Relgion and Transcendentalist groups. Among the majority of more popular writers, however, the Prophet Muhammad was depicted as a charlatan and imposter, attitudes which only began to change in the nineteenth century under the influence of Thomas Carlyle who included Mohammad in On Heroes and Hero Worship (3) as the model of the "hero as prophet" (Sha'ban 1991: 59). "The essence of Muhammad's message, according to Carlyle, is sincerity ... a deep genuine sincerity ... a lack of affectation and consciousness of his greatness." He is, Carlyle maintained, truly "an original man; he comes to us at first hand" (Sha'ban 1991: 59). Sha'ban traces the evolving image of the Prophet through an amazing variety of poets and commentators to reveal the impact of Carlyle's rehabilitation of the Prophet in popular culture. George Sale's translation of The Qu'ran (4) was prefaced by a somehwat ambivalent introduction in which Sale at least credited Mohammad with sincerity, especially about "his Grand point, the unity of God, which was what he chiefly attended to" (Sha'ban 1991: 58).

Sha'ban devotes a fascinating chapter, "The Shores of Tripoli" to the encounter of early Americans with the Muslems of the Barbary States, one to American missionaries in the Muslem world, and another to American travellers in the Middle East. As early as 1679 the man appointed by the British King to be Governor of Carolina, Seth Southell, was captured by Barbary Pirates on his way to take up his duties in the colonies (Sha'ban 1991: 65). This intervention would involve the new nation in a series of negotiations, ransoms, attacks, including a declaration of war against Algiers in 1815, and even a proposal to permanently annex the Muslem states of North Africa initiated by the American Consul at Algiers William Shaler in 1823 (Sha'ban 1991: 81). From these encounters there emerged a literature of captivity narratives, poems, and adventure stories. "This," Sha'ban observes, "was the first stage of active American involvement in the affairs of the Orient." In contrast to the "Orientalism in a westward direction" represented by the Puritan pilgrimage to the New World, this "was Orientalism in its new Eastward direction" (Sha'ban 1991: 81).

The chapter entitled "The Dream of Baghdad" in which Sha'ban deals with the centrality of graphic images of the Orient derived from such texts as The Arabian Nights that have furnished the romantic dreams of Americans. "In 1873, Harriet Beecher Stowe edited a collection of nine works of fiction most popular with the American public. Significantly, two of these works were Oriental: Vathek and some tales from The Arabian Nights" (5) (ibid.: 178). In combination with the familiar biblical narratives, these uiversally known stories gave the American traveler a sense that he was visiting "his" Orient when he entered the Holy Land.

The Chapter entitled "The Vision of Zion: The American Myth of the City on a Hill" is repeated in the new volume which is, as has been said above, a further elaboration of this theme. Even for Americans, or perhaps especially for Americans, Sha'ban de-familiarizes the reader with startling readings of familiar figures. For example, the image of Christopher Columbus is de-familiarized for those of us who know him as the discoverer of the new world who piloted three small ships across trackless oceans guided by maps secured by guile, and who, arriving in the Caribbean, thought he was in India. In place of this familiar figure, Sha'ban reveals from the explorer's own letters a Columbus who saw himself as the continuation of the Crusades, a man determined "to spread the light of the Gospel throughout the world and to enlist the newly converted peoples in the life-and-death war with the empire of Muhammad." His ultimate goal was the "recovery of the Holy Land, especially Jerusalem, in preparation for the Kingdom of God." (Sha'ban 2005: 22) (Emphasis added).

In fact, it was the deep religious convictions of Columbus and his belief in prophecy which (according to Robert Clouse's The New Millennial Manual 1999) (6) enabled Columbus to convince Ferdinand and Isabella to finance his "Enterprise of the Indies." In a letter to the Spanish court dated February 15, 1492, Columbus said that "the Bible was his lifetime roadmap for the fulfillment of divine prophecies and the rebuilding of Zion ... To conquer the world, spread the Christian faith, and regain the Holy Land and the Temple Mount." In the "Enterprise of the Indies" he wrote of "this other voyage to the Holy Sepulchre [Jerusalem]" (Ibid.). As Sha'ban points out, this concept of the mission of Columbus occurs in the late fifteenth century, follows by less than a century the failure of the last of the Crusades, and precedes the Protestant Reformation. Yet it contains in its conception the program of today's Neocons and can be seen both as validating President Ronald Reagan's description of Columbus as "the inventor of the American dream" and as eerily prescient of George W. Bush's jousting with "Islamic fascism."

The Puritans were driven by this same sense of mission, including the conviction of having been "chosen", of being God's special and peculiar people which has the unfortunate consequence of blinding Americans to their own limitations. Sha'ban relates, not without a certain gentle irony, the egregious self-importance and conceit of American leaders who speak of a "perfect" or "ideal" American state, with the understanding that this state is a model to which the rest of the world should aspire. Though Sha'ban tactfully leaves this unexpressed, every informed reader can articulate the tragic history which has to be repressed and denied in order for this illusion of "perfection" to be maintained at the conscious level. Some of that submerged history is spelled out by Leslie Fiedler in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) (7) when he suggests the horrors that have been banished to the unconscious, ready to emerge as the nightmares of the American Gothic:

   A dream of innocence had sent Europeans across the ocean to
   build a new society immune to the compounded evil of the past
   from which no one in Europe could ever feel himself free. But the
   slaughter of the Indians, who would not yield their lands to the
   carriers of utopia, and the abominations of the slave trade, in
   which the black man, rum, and money were inextricably entwined
   in a knot of guilt, provided new evidence that evil did not remain
   with the world that had been left behind (Fiedler 1960: 143).

To Fiedler's list we can add the pollution of the ecosystem with nuclear waste, the cutting down of the forests, the appalling poverty of inner cities, the destruction of the family farm by corporate agriculture, the training and deployment of death squads to devastate democratic movements in Central and South America, the catastrophes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Korea, and Viet Nam, and now the disaster of Iraq and Lebanon, both outgrowths of the shameful US sponsorship of Israeli dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

In discussing the importance of "Zion" as it was experienced by African-Americans, Sha'ban explores the remarkable degree to which Africans, sold into slavery and deliberately severed from their own cultures, incorporated the religion of their masters. Applying the biblical "Promised Land" metaphor to their own situation, African slaves developed a rich body of oral literature, especially songs and spirituals, in which images like Jacob's Ladder, crossing the Jordan, and Joshua fighting the Battle of Jericho figured prominently. Additional light is thrown on this subject by Dr. George Junne, Jr. of the University of Northern Colorado whose recent paper "Neither Christian nor Heathen: New World African Muslim Slaves" reveals that a significant number of African slaves were Muslems, many of whom, Junne says, "managed to keep their religion intact while others converted to Christianity." (8)

Sha'ban shows that the preoccupation with the myth of America as a "City on a Hill" led to the national commitment to rebuild the New Jerusalem, i.e. the City on a Hill (Sha'ban 2005: 63). Thus, almost from its inception, America was programmed to see itself as both heir and guarantor of Israel. When American Christians visited the Holy Land, they used the Bible like a tourist guide, searching for literal sites in which to experience their ecstatic sense of taking possession of their own land, Sha'ban (2005) records, noting that

   ... the most unpleasant experience--one which evoked almost
   universal repugnance--was the discovery that the area was
   actually populated, indeed dominated, by people whose culture
   and beliefs differed from those of the traveler. There was a sense
   of injured pride, of molested personal property, when the Western
   Chrstian traveler arrived in Hebron, Jerusalem, or Constantinople
   after a long journey, with great expectations, only to find that the
   guardians of 'his' holy places were either Muslems or, at best,
   Eastern Christians and Catholics. These alien natives, 'occupiers'
   in the eyes of the travelers, were deluded intruders in a land which
   the American traveler considered his own possession. For some of
   them the Muslem presence in the Holy Land, indeed in the whole
   surrounding area, evoked bitter historical memories of the spread
   of Islam and raised the persistent hope of evicting these Muslems
   from the land which 'belonged' to the Christian West (137-38).

Of course it is not surprising that these quite unjustified feelings of ownership and entitlement should have given rise to plans to re-possess this area. People like Sarah Haight, for example, fantasized about the city of Constantinople that the time would come when the Ottoman usurper would be "trampled under foot by indignant Christians" (qtd. by Sha'ban 2005: 138). In Jerusalem, Charles E. Bergh, another traveler, chagrined that Muslems should be in charge of the Holy Sepulchre Church, suggested that "the Muslem wretches" should be a driven away from the land" (Sha'ban 1991: 135). Bergh was unaware, of course, that the Islamic officials had agreed to oversee the Christian buildings on the Haram al Sharif when Christian sects were unable to reach agreement about sharing their care.

Running through both of these books are two intriguing themes: one is the predominance of the Jewish Old Testament over the Christian New Testament in American discourse about the Middle East; the other is the recurrence of the problem of the literal interpretation of figurative texts. A "civic religion" has developed in America, Sha'ban shows, which has taken on an increasingly Hebraic dimension, adopting a literal reading of biblical millennial terminology and implicitly over-riding the separation of church and state, thereby subverting the rational scientific Enlightenment paradigm.

      At the core of American civil religion is the biblical
   symbolism of the "chosen people," "the Kingdom of God" and
   the "Promised Land." The new state represented New Jerusalem,
   and the people of America were Israel and its kings. Soon after
   Independence, Pastor Abiel Abbot gave a sermon in which he said
   that the term "our American Israel" had become a common
   description of the American Republic, and that "common consent
   allows it apt and proper" (Sha'ban 2005: 168).

As a result of this judaization of the American civil religion and its increasing prominence in public discourse, antipathy toward Islam and complete support for Israel have come to monopolize the political scene. In an almost comic reductio ad absurdum, Democrats and Republicans vie with each other in their declarations of total loyalty to Israel. "Vicious attacks on Islam and the Prophet Muhammad have become an addendum to the basic Judeo-Christian tradition in the United States", Sha'ban concludes, and as the best illustration of this trend he cites the book, Jerry Falwell and the Jews (1984) by Merrill Simon. (9) Falwell bends over backward to reassure the Jews that "Christianity is not a rival religion to Judaism" (Sha'ban 2005: 159). In what sounds like a very un-Christian statement, "Falwell states that Christianity does not present even an improvement on the message of Moses." Falwell adds, "We believe in a Jewish Messiah as prophesied in a Jewish book written by Jewish authors. We do not improve on Judaism, because it is the foundation for all Messianic fulfillment" (Jerry Falwell and the Jews, qtd. by Sha'ban 2005: 159).

In a "Foreword" to the Falwell book, Rabbi Emanual Rackman observes that "The lovers of Israel today are to be found principally in the camp of Protestant Fundamentalists," and, exposing the political agenda behind the Falwell book, he adds the hope that these Fundamentalists have "a theoretical love of the State of Israel which possibly could be transformed into a practical political support to offset the growing influence of the Arabs" (Rackman qtd. by Sha'ban 2005: 158).

Falwell's position is reminiscent of that of Benjamin Disraeli who, though a convert to Anglicanism, stressed the debt owed to Judaism by Christians. Falwell's view also suggests the influence of the Scofield Reference Bible whose pro-Zionist propaganda inserted in pseudo-scholarly annotations has been circulated by Evangelical "end-time" sects from its inception in 1908 and to the present through frequent re-printings as documented by Pastor Charles E. Carlson (10) Carlson points out that, while the real New Testament counsels all Christians to pray for peace, these evangelical Christians pray for war--the final battle Armaggedon after which, they believe, Jesus will return. The emphasis on eschatology, on the alleged obligation of Christians to support the Jewish state spiritually and financially, and the nearness of the "Rapture"--these are all gratuitous impositions on biblical interpretation designed, as Carlson says, "to create a subculture around a new worship icon, the modern State of Israel, a state that did not yet exist in 1900, but which was already on the drawing boards of the committed, well-funded authors of World Zionism." (11)

The final chapters of For Zion's Sake explore "The Role of Religion in American Life" and "America and Millennial Fever." Both deal with urgent issues of the influence on the American presidency and the public at large of the fanatical religious fight who exhibit in an extreme form amounting to hubris the megalomania of the Puritan founding mythology on crucial issues of foreign policy. Pointing out the danger to democratic values posed by literal interpretations of biblical prophecy, Sha'ban cites fanatics like Michael Rohan who set fire to the Dome of the Rock to "prepare for the Kingdom of the Prince of Peace in the Temple," and the American Jewish settler physician Baruch Goldstein who slaughtered 29 Muslems at prayer in the mosque at Hebron, an atrocity which has made him a (posthumous) hero in the Jewish settlements (Sha'ban 2005: 207).

Sha'ban quotes Robert Bellah's comments on this millennial zeal in "Civil Religion in America" (12): "Behind the civil religion at every point lie Biblical archetypes: Exodus, Chosen People, Promised Land, New Jerusalem," adding that "Those on our side ... become 'the free world.' It is then part of the role of America as the New Jerusalem and 'the last hope of earth' to defend the free world" (Sha'ban 2005: 207).

Both books contain valuable bibliographies, and For Zion's Sake includes an "Appendix" of "Sample American End-time Predictions" many of which include "end-time" deadlines which have long since passed. Both books are highly recommended for an understanding of the historical roots of the most important issues underlying the contemporary American moral, intellectual, and political crises.

ENDNOTES

(1.) Charles E. Carlson, in "How Zionists Changed Biblical Interpretations Using Scofield and Oxford University in 1908" httpl. Edward Said. Orientalism. New York: Random House, 1978.

(2.) Henry Harris Jessup. The Mohammedan Missionary Problem. Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publications, 1879.

(3.) Thomas Carlyle. On Heroes and Hero Worship and The Heroic in History. Edited with an Introdution by Carl Niemeyer. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966.

(4.) The Koran: The Koran Commonly Called the Alcoran of Mohammed. Translated by George Sale. London: William Tegg, 1850.

(5.) H.B. Stowe (ed.)A Library of Famous Fiction: Embracing the Nine Standard Masterpieces of Imaginative Literature. New York: 1873.

(6.) Robert Clouse, Robert Hosack, & Richard Pierard. The New Millennial Manual. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1999.

(7). Leslie Fiedler. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Stein & Day, 1960.

(8.) George H. Junne, Jr. "Neither Christian Nor Heathen: New World African Muslim Slaves." (Proceedings of Bogazici University American Studies Conference: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Ethnicity. 6-7 March 2003.)

(9.) Merrill Simon. Jerry Falwell and the Jews. New York: Jonathan David, 1984.

(10.) Charles E. Carlson through his www.whtt.com Website ("We Hold These Truths").

(11.) www.whtt.com (20 January 2006).

(12.) Bellah, Robert N. "Civil Religion in America," Daedalus, 96 (1967) 1-22.

Clare Brandabur is an assistant professor of English Literature at Dogus University, Istanbul, Turkey.