Americans and the Islamic World in the Long Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Sacred Interests surveys encounters between the United States and the Muslim world from the 1820s to the beginning of the twentieth century. It draws effectively on both secondary and primary sources to reconstruct the ways in which American foreign policymakers responded to key crises: the bids for freedom on the part of Greeks, Bulgarians, and Armenians in the Ottoman Empire; the persecution of Jews in Syria and Morocco; and the efforts to impose colonial authority on Muslims in the Philippines after annexation. Of particular interest to its author, Karine V. Walther, is the role played by missionaries, journalists, academics, businessmen, clergymen, and philanthropists. Situated as a contribution to the “new diplomatic history,” her narrative focuses on the ways in which those non-state actors collaborated with diplomats, colonial officials, soldiers, and political elites abroad and influenced perceptions of the Islamic world among a wider American public. For many, what came to serve as their default explanation for the Greek war of independence, the Cretan revolt, the Bulgarian insurrection, and the Armenian resistance was that fanatical, intolerant Muslims preyed upon religiously and racially more “advanced” Christians. This narrative, according to Walther, consistently “blinded Americans to the discrimination, ethnic nationalism, and imperial repression happening across the world—and in their own backyard” (29). It also fostered, long before the advent of Samuel Huntington, the conviction that the West was locked in a historical and global clash of civilizations with Islam.