Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive and the Barbary Orient

Abstract

There stood the infidel of Modern breed, Blest vegetation of infernal seed, Alike no Deist, and no Christian, he; But from all principle, all virtue, free. To him all things the same, as good or evil; Jehovah, Jove, the Lama, or the Devil; Mohammed‘s braying, or Isaiah’s lays; The Indian’s Powaws, or the Christian’s Praise. Timothy Dwight, The Triumph of Infidelity (1788) The American literary acquaintanceship with the Muslim Near Orient, or the Near East as some prefer to say, in the eighteenth and in the nineteenth century respectively, was principally an enterprise based on indirect encounter and exotic experience. A handful of inquisitive travelers and curious religious missionaries had some opportunity to observe directly, but most authors had to rely on the printed page-books and other sources written by students who had no real chance of penetrating into the Orient first hand. European writers, the British romanticists in particular, played a tremendous role in the formation of the American perception of Muslim thought and character. While part of the problem was fragmentary sources and faulty knowledge, the root cause was the deeply established Occidental preconception of Islam and Muslims, which is a subject that lies beyond the scope of this paper ...