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

AuthorBrandabur, Clare
PositionFor Zion's Sake: The Judeao-Christian Tradition in American Culture - Book review

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...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT