Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821–1921Karine V.Walther. University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

Abstract

Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821-1921 Karine V. Walther. University of North Carolina Press, 2015.In Sacred Interests, Karine V. Walther, assistant professor of history at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service in Qatar, provides a well-documented investigation of relations between the United States and the Islamic world during the nineteenth century, and she convincingly argues that this period set the stage for contemporary American attitudes toward Islam. Walther asserts that popular perceptions of Islam were to a great extent shaped by American Protestant missionaries and denominations who combined religious and racial characteristics to depict Muslims as violent barbarians intent upon the destruction or conversion of all unbelieving infidels such as Jews and Christians. However, the conversion of Muslims to Christianity might provide a civilizing influence that would negate the Muslim tendency toward violence. The missionaries who were well connected to key figures within the American government viewed Muslims around the world as monolithic, although most contact with Islam in the nineteenth century concerned the Ottoman Empire. There were considerable lobbying efforts for American intervention in the Middle East to protect Jews and Christians, but, for most of the nineteenth century, American diplomats maintained a policy of nonintervention. However, this policy was altered by the Spanish-American War and the annexation of the Philippines. Walther devotes considerable attention to the Islamic Moros whose resistance to annexation provoked a brutal repression by the United States, although this brutality was rationalized as part of a necessary civilizing mission. Sacred Interests concludes with the post-World War One agreements that ignored Arab nationalism in favor of European mandates that continue to cast a shadow over the turbulent Middle East. Her book suggests that need to break away from nineteenth-century stereotypes and assumptions if they expect to understand the complexity of the Islamic world. The clash of civilizations concept continues to exercise considerable sway over American attitudes toward Islam.Walther begins her account with an examination of American support for the Greek rebellion against the Ottoman Empire. The Greeks were Christians and Greece the birthplace of American democracy, and, thus, the Greek rebels deserved the assistance of the United States against the barbaric Ottoman Islamists. In seeking the intervention of the American government, religious lobbyists emphasized the atrocities of the Ottomans while the massacres committed by the Greek forces were ignored. American officials, such as James Monroe and John Quincy Adams, expressed sympathy with the Greek cause, but an official policy of nonintervention was maintained. A similar pattern was evident in the American response to the struggle of Bulgarian Christians and nationalists to achieve independence from the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s. Walther writes, Americans depicted Bulgarians as politically and religiously advanced Christians at the religious mercy of fanatical, violent, and despotic Muslim rulers (68). The focal point for American agitation in the region was the Christian missionaries and professors at Robert College, which was established in Istanbul as a bastion of American civilization within the barbaric Ottoman capital. Again, Bulgarian atrocities were ignored in favor of depicting Muslim savagery.Support for Bulgarian independence also came from the Russians who were intent upon spreading their influence into the Balkans. The Russians, despite pogroms against Jews, were considered part of Christian civilization and thus exempt from much of the missionary criticism leveled toward Muslim leaders. In fact, Walther argues that Ottoman officials were quite aware of the racial inconsistencies within American and European Christendom, pointing out European anti-Semitism as well as the suppression of Native and the lynching of blacks in the American South. …