Crossroads The Multicultural Roots Of America Pdf
Lister lh 150 gearbox manual for sale. In the aftermath of the tragic events of 11 September 2001, subsequent disclosures of nefarious U.S. Government contracts with various Muslim governments, and still rising Islamophobia, Timothy Marr’s The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism provides readers with some End Page 154 insights into the roots of the representations of and attitudes toward Islam and Muslims.
This text extends and deepens knowledge on various topics—American orientalism, early American history, and Islam in America. Students of American history automatically think of western European influences on the social and political structures of early America, but Marr invites us to revisit early America and explore another significant influence on those structures—cultural imaginings of Islam and Muslim cultures. These imaginings were used along with others in oppositional ways in early nation building.This text is situated at significant and unique crossroads, that of Islam in America, American studies, and early American literature studies. Texts on Islam in early America, such as Sylviane Diouf ’s Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (1998) or Allan Austin’s Muslim Slaves in Antebellum America: Transatlantic Stories and Spiritual Struggles (1997), focus on Muslim slaves from West Africa with only casual mentions of any interaction between the colonists and Muslims on the Barbary Coast. Historical texts written on Islam in America or Muslims in the United States omit any reference to American imaginings of Islam or Muslims at any time prior to the twentieth century. American studies itself ignored this significant aspect of the formation of this nation’s identity until the last decade of the twentieth century.
Orientalism as a topic was limited to discussions of the imaginings of Islam and Muslims in the Middle East. After decades of reimagining the Muslim world through the lens of orientalism as articulated by Edward Said (1976), scholars in the 1990s turned their eyes toward America’s participation in the orientalist enterprise. Fuad Shab’an’s Islam and Arabs in Early American Thought (1991), Robert Allison’s The Crescent Obscured (1995), and Malini Johar Schueller’s U.S.
Orientalisms (1998) opened the door to the discussion through which scholars like Marr could walk. Marr successfully takes up the challenge.He clearly knows the criticality of establishing a conversation between Muslim and non-Muslim Americans and uses this as a theme throughout this text. He asserts that “the powerful historical templates that preceded and prefigured the mass immigration of Muslims still shape in some ways the contours of how Islam is perceived and received within the United States” (p. While scholars in the 1990s explored “diplomatic and cultural interactions” or the hypocrisy of using Islam as a foil, this text further excavates numerous hitherto unreviewed archives such as military records, pictures of early monuments, pamphlets, missionary reports and biographies, and biblical eschatological writings to give readers a holistic picture of “the times.” His situation even of his term “Islamicism” also demonstrates his erudition in this field.
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End Page 155“Islamicism” as a concept aims to acknowledge the difference “between orientalist codes and Islamic faith,” what he calls “Islamic orientalism.” Muslims have long protested the refusal on the part of media in particular to make this distinction as they often blur the lines between the two. He further provides readers with some other much needed differentiation of terms such as the notion of “Islamism,” which he asserts has been used to describe the agendas of Muslims who desire to form Islamic states. Yet, his most significant contributions to this topic lay in the relationship of Islam and Muslims to American identity formation.Chapter 1 begins its examination of the relationship with the era after the American Revolution and an “America” that feels powerful after gaining sovereignty from Britain. This was a time to begin formulating that feel of nation and thus the concomittant sense of distinction. As with many previous instances of nation building, the nation was built on an oppositional philosophy: we are what you are not; you stand for tyranny while we stand for freedom and justice. Marr reminds students of history that there was also a concurrent war raging in the seas of the Mediterranean for shipping rights in which Western European states were attempting to eliminate each other as competition. The fact that many who had fought on behalf of one European state or another, such as Captain John Smith, were a part of the building of the colonies was not lost when exploring how the European attitude toward Muslims was inherited by those in power in the colonies.
Muslim ascendency on the Mediterranean threatened anyone who was not an ally, and the sagas of interaction led to the publishing of a significant number of books on the Muslim world in the 1790s. These texts included missionary reports, military strategy documents, and pamphlets along with reports of Muslim torture of American captives. Muslims were the barbarians with tyrannical governance and oppression of women for both European states and America; the reports were proof.Chapter 2 steers readers to an even more detailed accounting of the use of Islam as a foil to demonstrate the superiority of Christian virtues. Here Marr explores missionary efforts to the Muslim world, millennialism, and Mormonism.
Here the archives again prove to be invaluable. He finds his primary evidence in church literatures. In clerical texts, Islam and Muslims are demonized repeatedly in everything from their prophet to the way children are disciplined in schools. He asserts, “Because Christians resisted viewing Islam as legitimate religious dispensation, they were forced to invent explanations of why End Page 156 divine wisdom had permitted so much worldly power to such a false religion” (p. Muslims were monsters and the enemies of God and the Mormons were their kin. Again, Christian society was everything that Muslim society was not. Yet there was also the continuing need to use the caricatures of Muslims and their religion to cement the building of national identity.
This is the subject of chapter 3.It was one thing to decry slavery abroad and tolerate it at home. Abolitionists used this and arguments comparing the situation in the states to the “immoral practices” of those of the Malays to arouse the passions against slavery.
Crossroads The Multicultural Roots Of America Pdf 2017
For those who could read, the images of Islam were those of tyranny and antichristian morality. Muslims were cruel and vicious. Christians should not mimic them. Marr revisits antislavery documents and finds a persistent use of the rhetoric of the orientalist imagination to challenge the morals of slave owners. “How could Christian Americans presume to be superior, much less convince Muslims to convert to their worldview, if some of their cultural customs were immoral and socially destructive?” (p.
This ploy was also used in temperance pamphlets that castigated Christians for their excessive drinking while Muslims, those enemies of God, foreswore drink. Marr uses numerous pamphlets to illustrate the thrust of the movement. Chapter 4 builds on the previous chapters in which the Ottoman empire was both enigmatic and knowable in its barbarism with a detailed description of an invasion of the epitome of that despotism and immorality with the existence of the Mormons, described as “an American ‘Islam.’” The patriarchal structure of Mormonism, along with the practice of polygyny, places this religious community squarely inside the cultural imaginings already in place of the Muslim world.Last but not least is chapter 5, a new treatment of Herman Melville’s person and work. While this reviewer cannot comment directly on where this treatment of Melville is situated in other biographies and critiques, there is definitely a good introduction to the cosmopolitan nature of some of America’s early writers and their adoption of the attire of the fantasies. I suspect that looking at Melville from this perspective is at least enlightening as it certainly was for me. I find this text thoroughly engrossing and informative.
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His style of writing history is engaging, and the contextualization enables readers to “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. End Page 157.