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Book Review
Canada and the United States
Timothy Marr. The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2006. Pp. xii, 309. Cloth $75.00, paper $24.99.
Umar F. Abd-Allah. A Muslim in Victorian America: The Life of Alexander Russell Webb. New York: Oxford University Press. 2006. Pp. ix, 388. $35.00.
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| Timothy Marr pours an enormous amount of archival research and sympathetic energy into a double-sided task: to provide a history of early American racism toward Muslims and the cultures of Islam, and also to provide a history of those Americans engaged in a kinder, gentler counterstruggle against this prejudice. Although his sources are often textual and visual, Marr's methodology is solidly that of the historian; much of his book is built on a kind of switching back and forth between large-scale cultural history and close readings of individual moments or texts in American Islamicism, and generally the book is a model of its type—an interdisciplinary cultural history with chapters ranging from military conflicts to theology to literary criticism to popular culture and beyond. |
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Marr systematizes early American Islamicism into three types: domestic, comparative, and romantic, and choreographs his chapters to illustrate this system. Tracing Islamicist thought from the early days of white colonists in North America, for example, through the American Revolution and its European influences—John Smith, Thomas Jefferson, and Montesquieu all had their moments of Islamicist engagement—Marr charts the ways racist images of "Oriental despots" were critical in consolidating American self-images of republican liberty. "The recurrent cultural images of Islam circulating during the colonial period and inherited and enhanced by Americans in the early national period," Marr writes, "frequently stood in opposition to many qualities that citizens of the United States affirmed in their own bid for moral legitimacy as an emerging civilization. While Islam signified antichristian imposture, America promised Christian purity; while Islam meant barbaric despotism, America cherished enlightened democracy" (p. 10). |
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Marr's clearest sympathies are for white Americans who "demythologize" Islam; he presents a strain of ostensibly anti-racist texts and argues for their redemptive Islamicist qualities. Correctives against the dominant modes of American Orientalism, Marr's heroes are those who fight for more inclusive attitudes toward Muslims and the cultures of Islam. Imperialism itself, however, never really seems to be under critique by either Marr or his heroes, and this results in a rather flat history of the imbrication of colonial expansion and white liberalism. At times, in fact, Marr offers apologetics for what he portrays as benevolent cultural imperialism as a sort of acceptable trade, analyzing what he calls "an imperialism of virtue" (p. 52) and championing figurers like the missionary Horatio Southgate. While writing of large-scale historical shifts, however, using individuals as illustrations, Marr is fully engaging, readable, and fascinating. Much of chapter two, for example, is a sweeping history of images of Islam in Christian millennial eschatology. For better or for worse, in presenting this kind of cultural history, Marr's book is at its most readable and least problematic. |
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