The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism

An analysis of the historical roots of today's conflicts between the US and the Muslim world.

Timothy Marr (Author)

9780521618076, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 26 June 2006

324 pages
22.8 x 15.4 x 2 cm, 0.44 kg

"I find this text thoroughly engrossing and informative. His style of writing history is engaging and the contextualization enables readers to be 'be in the moment' with the actors. This text can be read from many perspectives and is certainly academic but also a book for the informed."
Journal of World History, Aminah Beverly McCloud, DePaul University

In this cultural history of Americans' engagement with Islam in the colonial and antebellum period, Timothy Marr analyzes the historical roots of how the Muslim world figured in American prophecy, politics, reform, fiction, art and dress. Marr argues that perceptions of the Muslim world, long viewed not only as both an anti-Christian and despotic threat but also as an exotic other, held a larger place in domestic American concerns than previously thought. Historical, literary, and imagined encounters with Muslim history and practices provided a backdrop where different Americans oriented the direction of their national project, the morality of the social institutions, and the contours of their romantic imaginations. This history sits as an important background to help understand present conflicts between the Muslim world and the United States.

Introduction: imagining Ishmael: introducing American Islamicism
1. Islamicism and counterdespotism in early national cultural expression
2. 'Drying up the Euphrates': Muslims, millennialism, and early American missionary enterprise
3. Antebellum Islamicism and the transnational crusade of antislavery and temperance reform
4. 'Turkey is in our midst': Mormonism as an American 'Islam'
5. American Ishmael: Herman Melville's literary Islamicism
Conclusion: American Howadjis: the gendered pageantry of mid-nineteenth-century Islamicism.

Subject Areas: Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], History of the Americas [HBJK]