The Islamic Lineage of American Literary Culture: Muslim Sources from the Revolution to Reconstruction by Jeffery Einboden

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 149 never viewed thought and knowledge as settled or static, and instead leapt at the opportunity presented by apparent logical contradictions to produce new knowledge, as James Engell notes in his chapter, which shares the book’s title (238). The authors’ frequent dialoguing with one another helps clarify the narrow scope of some of the essays in the book and encourages a comprehensive rather than a selective reading. As interest in the growing interdisciplinary fields of attention studies and boredom studies continues to grow, Coleridge and Contemplation positions itself as a rousing and timely resource, enhancing ongoing debates among Romanticists and Coleridgeans regarding Coleridge’s vitally vermicular, but often bewildering theory of mind and its diverse applications. Sean Nolan The Graduate Center of the City University of New York The Islamic Lineage of American Literary Culture: Muslim Sources from the Revolution to Reconstruction Jeffery Einboden Oxford University Press, 2016. xv + 216 pp. $78 cloth. Through a series of excellent monographs, Jeffrey Einboden has emerged as an expert philologist of global literary studies who reveals new comparative apertures for interpreting early American writing. Based on his remarkable multilingual acumen, Einboden has honed an original methodology which locates specific acts of textual transmission as productive matrices for exposing the dynamics of intercultural exchange. His 2013 book, NineteenthCentury U.S. Literature in Middle Eastern Languages ingeniously wrestled with the lexical complexities involved in translating canonical American literature into Hebrew, Persian, and Arabic. The scholarship in this book reverses the optics by witnessing expressions in Arabic and engagement with Muslim sources buried in the private writings of five important early American intellectuals: Ezra Stiles, William Bentley, Washington Irving, Lydia Maria Child, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Islamic Lineage of American Literary Culture uncovers “a domestic American tradition of Islamic engagement” (126) extending from the Revolutionary period through the American Renaissance as Protestantism is transformed across a sequence of New England generations from Calvinism to Unitarianism to Transcendentalism. Religion & Literature 150 The book’s strengths derive from the depths of Einboden’s archival discoveries from a dozen repositories and the precision of his close readings of his excavated evidence. Einboden’s sleuthing reveals dynamic ways that Islamic sources, Qur’anic translations, and Arabic inscriptions were domesticated and incorporated into these writers’ intimate modes of self-fashioning. Digging beneath published writings, Einboden examines material markings in manuscripts that are more concealed, including diaries, notebooks, primers, epistolary exchanges, marginalia, and scribblings on envelopes. He argues convincingly that the discoveries he has made have been neglected because later editors, lacking linguistic competency, omitted many Arabic inscriptions in their collections. Einboden’s love of language is palpable in his revelatory analysis of how words and works transmit between languages and move through time and space, and become manifest in intimate instances of semantic production never disclosed until these critical interventions bring them to light. Einboden’s first two chapters address two important but underexamined early American religious thinkers: the Calvinist Ezra Stiles and the Unitarian William Bentley. Einboden examines the personal writings of these ministers to reveal how their study of Arabic and their reading of Islamic sources served as exegetical resources from which they constituted more cosmopolitan religious selves. The book begins when Ezra Stiles pens an illustrative inscription to his son that includes verses from the Qur’an in Arabic, performing a “hybrid paternity” (32) between varied Semitic languages. Another remarkable moment of Stiles’ “ecumenical exchanges” (24) is when, at the end of a letter to Rabbi Isaac Cardigal, he signs his own name in Arabic script. Stiles also prophesies that the emergent American nation will preserve the “great purity and elegance” of the English language exemplified by how the sacredness of Arabic has been preserved despite the proliferation of provincial dialects. The second chapter features William Bentley, known in his time as “America’s ‘most learned’ man” (51), whose situation as a prominent minister in Salem placed him within a circuit of transoceanic exchange that enabled him to acquire twenty-eight Islamic texts, which have “never received critical notice, despite representing the richest collection of Muslim manuscripts assembled in Jeffersonian America” (57). Like Stiles, Bentley believed the capacity to read Arabic was “exceedingly useful...