The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776-1815 by Robert J. Allison. 1995, 266 pages with illustrations. Available from Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford.

The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776-1815 is one of the rare books which appear at the juncture of several events to illuminate a subject that urgently needs explaining. Published at a time when the essentialist theories of culturalism have been resurrected to map out future wars and account for the West's inevitable antagonisms with Islam, the book helps the reader understand why Orientalism continues to operate in a variety of disguises, almost totally unaffected by Edward Said's critique, published more than two decades ago. By focusing on the crucial formative period of the United States between Independence and the consolidation of the republic, Robert J. Allison, rather unassumingly, shows that Islam-as-Other is inextricably woven into the country's identity, and that America needs this otherness to continue to believe in its uniqueness, or what others may call “exceptionalism.” Just as the present-day US media uses Iran to underscore the medieval nature of the Islamic republic's regime and highlight its own secular, enlightened and freedom-bound ideologies, early America relied on the same perceptions to describe the Barbary and Ottoman states. The issues and the rhetoric may change, but fundamental attitudes remain.

Having inadvertently witnessed the outbreak of the Iranian Revolution in 1978 (seemingly antithetical to progress and liberty), Allison came back to the US to study his country’s own Revolution. Little did he know that “images of the Muslim world” would appear everywhere he turned “in the early history of the American republic.” Americans had inherited Europe’s attitude toward Islam and Muslims, and were anxious to avoid the pitfalls of Islamic societies. A wide-ranging literature conveyed “the persistent picture of the Muslim world, an inverted image of the world the Americans were trying to create anew.” Americans were warned not to follow in Islam’s despotic footprints and thus encouraged to uphold principles established by the Revolution. The only issue that complicated America's high morality (and in which it apparently fared worse than Muslims) is the issue of slavery—which stained the virtues of this otherwise ideal republic.

In the years following the Revolution, Americans were anxious to have access to the Mediterranean trade, but the Barbary states, urged on by both Britain and France, posed a danger to American maritime commerce. The danger was so real that the appearance of three Moroccan-looking men at the shores of Virginia prompted that state to enact legislation which would become the prototype of the Enemy Aliens Act of 1798, allowing the US president to deport aliens whose countries were at war with the US. (The law was later struck down as unconstitutional.) After signing a historic treaty with Morocco and securing the Atlantic, Americans continued to wrestle over whether to pay tribute to the other Barbary states (Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli) or build a navy and suffer the risk of establishing a standing army. The new republic was forced to negotiate and pay in the beginning; but as the government commissioned the building of a fleet, the balance of power gradually shifted in favor of the better-armed and fiercely patriotic Americans. In 1805, the well-armed Americans defeated Tripoli and brought seventeen Tripolitan prisoners to New York, who were then advertized as “real bona fide imported Turks” and displayed at theatres. American patriotism reached new heights: “Testimonials to the heroes of Tripoli ranked them beside the Revolutionary fathers and placed the post-Revolutionary generation in a new heroic light. The Revolutionaries had beaten the British; this generation had bested the scourge of Christendom.” Songs and poems commemorated the event and Lord Nelson lauded America’s military feat. Even Pope Pius VII declared the defeat of Tripoli to be a landmark: “The American Commander, with a small force, and in a short space of time, has done more for the cause of Christianity than the most powerful nations of Christendom have done for ages.”

This dramatic ending to a troubling diplomatic crisis also reaffirmed to the Americans that their system, founded on liberty, was destined to triumph. Many had read in popular 18th-century literature that Islam fosters political and social tyranny and opposes progress. Many accounts stressed how Islamic despotism transformed the once-great Muslim nations and empires of the Middle East and North Africa into wasted granaries and depleted civilizations. Islamic government was seen as hopelessly corrupt—that the absolutist Ottoman sultan was a virtual hostage to his janissaries was proof of that. In short, “the Muslim world was a remarkably useful rhetorical device that could be used by libertarians like Mathew Lyon and Thomas Paine and by conservatives like John Adams and Alexander Hamilton.”

Yet, as the American government fought to redeem its captives in the Barbary states, Jefferson, who upheld a tough line on the issue of tribute to the Barbary states, was fully aware of the contradiction of his and his country’s position regarding the despotic institution of slavery. Like some of the American revolutionaries who were held captive in Algiers, he knew that American morality faltered on this issue, and simply couldn’t convincingly justify itself. In 1800, the United States was holding around one million Africans in slavery, while from the entire period of 1785 to 1815, there were only around 700 American captives in the Barbary states. That these captives called themselves slaves and compared themselves to African slaves in the US is mere hyperbole, especially since the status of slaves in Muslim lands was much better than that endured by Africans in the United States. Slaves in Muslim lands had more rights and could earn freedom and reach high social positions merely upon converting to Islam. This shows that slavery was understood differently by Muslims and Americans, which may explain why relatively fewer Americans chose to convert to Islam and become renegades.

In any case, the exaggerated designation of slave was sometimes used to combat slavery in the United States, not drum up sympathy for the American captive. The metaphor of white slavery was useful for abolitionists, even to those who had never been to Africa. When Benjamin Franklin, the president of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, petitioned against slavery and was attacked by a Congressman from South Carolina, he wrote an essay attributing the same pro-slavery argument to the dey of Algiers.

Allison reserves the last chapter of his book to James Riley's captivity narrative, the most popular and influential of the entire genre. In the end of the narrative, Riley, rescued from the Bedouins by a Moroccan trader, vows to fight slavery upon his return to the US. The kindness of Sidi Hamet, the Moor who rescued Riley and a few of his mates, so moved American readers that one American named his son Sidi Hamet. But the narrative's most dramatic impact was on young Abraham Lincoln, who cited it as one of the most influential books he had read.

There is more, so much more, in this highly readable book than can be accounted for in this brief review. A list of illustrations enhances the perception of Muslims at the time, and even reveals the ways in which Moors and Indians were interchangeable in Americans' minds. The book covers and deftly analyzes all the important books, plays, poems, and songs that dealt with the issue of Islam and Muslims. Using historical documentation and literary analysis, the author manages to create an argument that has a strong appeal to historians and cultural theorists interested in issues of Islam, Orientalism and American nationalism. The book definitely should have a wider readership, especially in the Islamic world. It launched this reviewer into a new intellectual pursuit, one which is still delightfully adventurous and full of surprises.