The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism

Introduction: imagining Ishmael: introducing American Islamicism; 1. Islamicism and counterdespotism in early national cultural expression; 2. 'Drying up the Euphrates': Muslims, millennialism, and early American missionary enterprise; 3. Antebellum Islamicism and the transnational crusade of antislavery and temperance reform; 4. 'Turkey is in our midst': Mormonism as an American 'Islam'; 5. American Ishmael: Herman Melville's literary Islamicism; Conclusion: American Howadjis: the gendered pageantry of mid-nineteenth-century Islamicism.

Timothy Marr is assistant professor in the Curriculum in American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he teaches seminars on such topics as cultural memory, captivity, tobacco, birth and death, and mating and marriage. He became interested in the subject of this book while teaching Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick" at Lahore American School in Pakistan in the late 1980s. He is the co-editor of Ungraspable Phantom: Essays on Moby-Dick.

"The history of Americans perceptions of, and engagements with, the Islamic world is obviously of enormous interest today. One of the strengths of this book is that it pays attention to that of the diversity of those encounters, while not ignoring the fundamental relations of power between U.S. and Muslim populations. Marr's well researched, erudite, and thoroughly engaging book provides not only a study of American Islamicism, but also a broad-based and intellectually rich analysis of the United States and its global cultural imaginings in the 18th and 19th centuries. " -Melani McAlister, George Washington University "Marr's study opens up a new historical context to American mis-images of Islam spread over the last three centuries and their unacknowledged reverberations even today." -Iftikhar Malik, Bath Spa University College, Bath, UK The Journal of American History "This author's thoroughly researched and documented book is indispensable reading for anyone seriously interested in the genealogy of America's conflicted view of Islam." -Anouar Majid, University of New England, The Historian "I find this text thoroughly engrossing and informative. His style of writing history is engaging and the contextualization enables readers to be '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." Journal of World History, Aminah Beverly McCloud, DePaul University