Islam and Arabs in Early American Thought

Abstract

The introduction to this book credits the author with clarifying the operative attitudes of Americans towards Islam by looking at the cause and result of the Muslim image in American literature. However, regret is expressed that Sha'ban had to be heroically selective about a subject radiating in many rich directions. Apparently, the book offers fresh insights and new possibilities for exploration and discovery, thereby contributing significantly to the enhancement of a literary tradition that came to the forefront with Said's Orientalism. Sha'ban studies orientalism in tenns of America's exposure to and understanding of Islam by focusing on Muslims of nineteenth-century North Africa and the Middle East. Even though the book's thrust is political, Sha 'ban challenges the reader to review familiar American writers and trends from an unfamiliar perspective as he traces the historically biased approach of Americans in their dealings with the Muslim world. In chapter one, “A Place for My People,“ the author explains how America’s Puritan beginnings shaped its self-image and its attitude towads “the Arab world, its people and land.” The Pilgrims saw themselves as the chosen people in a promised land. Under the umbrella of a providential plan and the divine covenant, they were heirs to the kingdom of God in the new world and therefore shared a common responsibility to execute the divine mission. Unlike European monamhs who relied on religion for personal privilege (i.e., the Divine Right theory), Puritans shifted away from emphasizing the personal and private aspects of Christianity to its communal or corporate nature. They constantly endorsed their national responsibility to share the benefits of their chosen status as citizens of God’s kingdom with the rest of the world ...