Book Reviews

The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism
Timothy Marr

Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 309 pages.

Perceptions of the “other” are a powerful force in day-to-day human inter-
action, as well as in domestic and international politics. Since the publica-
tion of Edward Said’s Orientalism almost three decades ago, many scholars
have appropriated and debated his thesis about the reality-changing power
of European (and American) discourses on Muslims and Arabs. In the book
under review, Timothy Marr, professor of English in the American Studies
Curriculum department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill,
simultaneously broadens and criticizes Said’s ideas. 

The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism (a somewhat misleading
title for a fascinating book) offers a rich analysis of how Americans appro-
priated images of Islam, Muslim societies, and the Middle East during the
seventeenth to nineteenth centuries for various political, social, and cultural
– but ultimately American – purposes related to domestic and international
issues. The author argues that such perceptions, in light of their complex and
multiple uses in American history, are significant because they continue to
shape contemporary American approaches to the Muslim world.

Marr advances this thesis by looking at an impressive array of historical
sources and documents, as well as secondary literature on various aspects of
American history and culture, in which he finds a multitude of references to
Islam and Muslims (or Turks, Saracens etc., respectively). His analysis of
these references offers a stunning kaleidoscope of American images of the
Muslim “other,” but reveals far more about the inner dynamics of American
nation-building and cultural self-definition than about Islam or Muslims. 

In his introduction, “Imagining Ishmael: Introducing American Islam-
icism,” which in terms of theoretical engagement is the book’s most power-
ful part, Marr situates his book in relation to Said by challenging the latter’s
“contention that nineteenth-century Americans never made an ‘imaginative
investment’ in the orient because they were preoccupied in large part with



the settlement of the West” (p. 17). His analysis focuses on discourses pro-
duced by a white Protestant elite concentrated in the northeastern United
States and thus intentionally ignores the inner ethnic and cultural diversity
of American society. 

The first chapter, “Islamicism and Counterdespotism in Early National
Cultural Expression,” argues that the notion of oriental despotism, as exem-
plified in the images of the Ottoman Empire and its rulers, provided a pow-
erful negative backdrop for defining early republican ideas of liberalism and
democracy. It also demonstrates the multiple levels of American engage-
ment in global politics and the diverse uses of the (mostly negative) Ottoman
example to explain American foreign policy successes and failures.

Chapter 2, “Drying Up the Euphrates: Muslims, Millennialism, and
Early American Missionary Enterprise,” focuses on the Protestant imagina-
tion’s designation of the Turks as part of the Antichrist and the diverse
approaches to Protestant missionary encounters, which invariably resulted in
direct encounters with Muslims. Marr shows that such encounters had the
potential to dramatically alter simplistic negative perceptions, which some-
times resulted in redirecting missionary activity toward Eastern Christians,
leaving infidel Muslims for a later generation to convert. 

In chapter 3, “Antebellum Islamicism and the Transnational Crusade of
Antislavery and Temperance Reform,” Marr takes the reader on a fascinat-
ing journey through the uses of Orientalist images of Turks and Muslims as
arguments for abolishing slavery and the negative consequences of alcohol
abuse. Ironically, abolitionist writers used two diverging propositions: lag-
ging behind “even” the savage Turks, who had abolished slavery in the
1850s, and simultaneously criticizing American slavery as more inhumane
than “Muslim slavery.” In both discourses, Muslims appear as a backdrop
for domestic arguments and politics. 

Chapter 4, “Turkey Is in Our Midst: Mormonism as an American
‘Islam,’” explores American anti-Mormon polemics in its Orientalist
imagery and shows how easily existing stereotypes of Islam and Muslims
(especially polygamy) could be reused to demonize a rival Christian com-
munity, in part by declaring the American West a domestic Orient. Chapters
5 and 6, “American Ishmael: Herman Melville’s Literary Islamicism” and
“Turning Turk: The Gendered Pageantry of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Islam-
icism,” explore various aspects of the complex Islamicist ideas in Melville’s
literary production as well as artistic imagery and the appropriation of roman-
ticized “Oriental” clothing for both men and women in a variety of American
cultural contexts. 

94 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 24:4



I would have liked to see a more elaborate conclusion, rather than the
short afterword that ends the book. Marr rightfully points to contemporary
comparative scholarship’s potential awareness of the ideological constraints
of intercultural comparison while advancing the understanding of cultures
and religions. This book is written in an elegant and sometimes demanding
style. The significant number of very interesting illustrations enhances its
argument and provides helpful visual support for his ideas and claims. 

Marr uses islamicism to describe a discourse similar to Said’s use of
Orientalism and sees it as shorthand for Islamic Orientalism. For those in the
field of Islamic studies who had just gotten used to calling themselves Islam-
icists, Marr’s use of this term will prove disconcerting, even though he insists
on a lower-case spelling. In addition, and as indicated above, the book’s title
might not attract enough attention from the right audience. 

While this work of American studies significantly enhances our under-
standing of American discursive formulations about Muslims, it ultimately
cannot provide an alternative, more nuanced picture of Muslims or Islam
during the centuries in question. This extends to knowledge about the inter-
nal politics of Islamic studies, as evident in the lone use of Bernard Lewis’
work on race and slavery in Islam as support for the abolitionists’ purported
romanticizing of Muslim slavery.

This small critique notwithstanding, the book is highly recommended
for those interested in advanced discussions of Orientalist ideas and their
transformative power. With its impressive wealth of sources and complex
and nuanced argument, it advances and complements existing scholarship
on the topic, especially in relation to earlier American history. It should,
therefore, prove very useful for those interested in the legacies of historical
discourses for contemporary politics and society. 

Juliane Hammer
Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies, Department of Religious Studies

University of North Carolina at Charlotte, North Carolina

Book Reviews 95