by Alan Mikhail
Nevertheless, quite oddly, one of the debates that emerged during the drafting of the Constitution was the question of whether or not a Muslim could be president of the United States. Regarded as the “eternal enemy without,” Muslims in this context (more so than Jews or Catholics) represented one of the primary legal limit-cases for the founders in their conversations about the ideals of citizenship and religious freedom in the young United States. In 1788, the answer to the question of whether an “imagined” Muslim could be president of the United States was a theoretical, though reluctant, yes. As Muslims were virtually absent from the United States in that period, the fact that the shapers of the Constitution even thought to consider the question of a Muslim president points to the shadow threat Islam was conceived to be—an inheritance of America’s European origins.
Columbus had seen the lands across the ocean as a means of funding an apocalyptic war to “recapture” Jerusalem. The Puritans saw America as the New Jerusalem. Nineteenth-century Americans understood the western United States as an Edenic wilderness they had to redeem. The Holy Land thus always lurked as part of the European and then American understanding of the New World. In the nineteenth century, as more and more Americans traveled to the real Jerusalem for tourism, religious missions, and trade, their notions of an American Eden in North America formed much of their encounter with Ottoman Palestine.
After the Civil War ended, Abraham Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd, discussed a trip to recuperate from the terrors and tragedies of the war. They considered first a journey “out to the West as far as California, then perhaps to Europe.” The other option was “a special pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which Lincoln had often said was a city he longed to see.” His assassination cut short these plans, though just before his death he and Mary had reportedly settled on Jerusalem. In Lincoln’s mind, California and Jerusalem existed on a continuum. Each represented both a spiritual destiny and a geographic destination for Americans. Such a notion derived from the same mythology of Crusade that drove Columbus west—a redemptive journey to gain the promises of a Promised Land.
The nineteenth-century writers who, unlike Lincoln, did eventually cross the Atlantic to the Middle East not only shared this vision of Jerusalem but also articulated the way in which Americans in that period and later came to understand the East—by yoking Muslims to Native Americans. In a mirror image of Columbus’s effort to understand the indigenous peoples of the Americas by means of the Islam of the Old World, nineteenth-century Americans fell back on what they knew of Native Americans—as derogatory and scant as that knowledge was—to comprehend what they saw in the Holy Land. Thus, on the road from Damascus to Jerusalem, Mark Twain writes in The Innocents Abroad (1869) that the “dusky men and women” he saw “reminded me much of Indians. . . . They sat in silence, and with tireless patience watched our every motion with that vile, uncomplaining impoliteness which is so truly Indian, and which makes a white man so nervous and uncomfortable and savage that he wants to exterminate the whole tribe.” Later, he says, “These people about us had other peculiarities, which I have noticed in the noble red man, too: they were infested with vermin, and the dirt had caked on them till it amounted to bark.” If for Columbus Muslims represented the ultimate other through which to understand all difference anywhere in the world, for Twain Native Americans played this role.
In his epic lyric travel poem Clarel (1876), Herman Melville describes pyramids in Egypt’s Nile Delta as:
Three Indian mounds
Against the horizon’s level bounds
Of an encounter with a group of Arab bandits on a road near the Jordan River, he writes:
Well do ye come by spear and dagger!
Yet in your bearing ye outvie
Our Western Red Men, chiefs that stalk
In mud paint—whirl the tomahawk.
Above all, neither Melville nor Twain could ever assimilate Islam to their world. The nineteenth-century American writer Washington Irving differed in this regard, as he studied the religion and the history of Islamic Spain and wrote books on these topics employing Arabic and Spanish sources. His rendering of Islam to the American public thus offered both a more scholarly take and a more sympathetic one. But for Melville and Twain, Islam was always other and only enemy, useful for literary and rhetorical purposes, but not worthy of serious or nuanced engagement. For example, the existence of Arab Christians in Bethlehem, Christ’s birthplace no less, was a detail that befuddled and seemingly annoyed Melville:
Catholic Arabs? Say not that!
Some words don’t chime together, see
Twain could only understand Islam by domesticating it to what he knew of America. In Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894), one of the sequels to his masterpiece, Tom explains to Huck that a Muslim “was a person that wasn’t a Presbyterian,” to which Huck responds that “there is plenty of them in Missouri, though I didn’t know it before.” This is, of course, satire. Embedded in the joke, however, is the historical truth that even in the nineteenth century—as it was for Columbus and his men—Islam remained beyond the frontiers of Americans’ conceptual universe, a limit-case for Twain to make the point that only Presbyterians matter in Missouri. Everyone else is so beyond the bounds, they might as well be Muslims.
In the twentieth century, artistic engagements with the Muslim world continued to perpetuate American notions of uncivilized and evil Muslims, rapacious and licentious Arabs. In the new medium of cinema, films such as The Thief of Bagdad (1924), A Son of the Sahara (1924), and The Desert Bride (1928) projected these stereotypes on screen for American audiences. From the early twentieth century to today, the violent, brooding Arab villain has been a favorite of Hollywood. In twentieth-century American literature, too, caricatures of Islam continued to flourish. Consider just one example. The Beatnik writers Jane and Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg all lived in Morocco for a time in the 1950s and 1960s. Both in their writings and in their personal lives, these paragons of hippie counterculture adopted often racist attitudes toward Moroccans, much closer to those of the dying colonial order around them than to anything resembling the spiritually free future with which they are generally associated. Morocco for these towering American literary figures was a libertine frontier of sex and kif, empire and nostalgia, populated by people who were at best a backdrop, at worst sexual objects to exploit.
The Thief of Bagdad (1924)
AS THE UNITED STATES engaged more directly with real Muslims both in America itself, through immigration at the turn of the twentieth century, and in the Middle East and elsewhere, through travel, Christian proselytizing, expatriate residence, diplomacy, and increasingly war, the earlier, often fantastical fears of Muslims and Islam persisted. Over the course of the last half century, one figure above all others has dominated these fears—the terrorist. The deaths of Americans in places such as Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, Yemen, and Afghanistan confirmed to many the menace of Islam, and, of course, the attacks of 9/11 brought this peril into the United States itself. These all-too-real instances of Muslims killing Americans have coursed new vitality into the centuries-long notion of a Muslim threat to the United States. Now, in the early twenty-first century, an imaginary of what Muslims are thought to be—ruthless, violent, hate-driven—has overtaken any reality of what Muslims actually are in the United States—citizens, parents, voters, Americans. This contemporary fear and demonization come easily because they tap directly into a long history of the perceived threat of Islam in the Americas—which, as I have suggested, began at the first moment Europeans set foot on these continents.
This is not to discount the fact that Muslims have attacked America. They have. The indisputable reality, however, is that Muslims are not modern America’s primary domestic terrorists. That distinction belongs to white nationalists. Since 9/11, white nationalists—nearly all of whom are professed Christians—have accounted for more terrorist attacks than any other group in the United States. Yet, Muslims have received the greatest attention a
s potential domestic perpetrators of violence against Americans and, in turn, have been regular targets of both discriminatory legislation and hate crime in the United States.
Irrational fantasies about a Muslim threat in the contemporary United States emerge in many ways. For example, between 2010 and 2018, forty-three states introduced 201 bills aimed at banning sharia law as a looming danger to the West. Of course, Selim’s post-1517 reform of sharia courts never entered these discussions. If it had, perhaps state legislators would have come to understand that the overwhelming majority of the resolutions in the millions of cases adjudicated in sharia courts over the centuries have had next to nothing to do with sharia law—either the real law itself or their caricature of it. Perhaps they would have learned that Islamic courts served Muslims and non-Muslims alike, and that Christians and Jews often preferred the Islamic court to their own. Taking a comparative perspective, they might have discerned that sharia courts in Selim’s day provided more rights to religious minorities, especially to women in the realm of family law, than did Christian courts in Europe. Needless to say, in such polemical conversations, historical reality is usually beside the point.
Examples of this sort abound. Again tapping deep into the fantastical vein of the rhetoric of Islam-as-threat in the United States, many on the American right assert that President Barack Obama is a Muslim (or, even worse, a crypto-Muslim), in a direct echo of the founders’ debate over whether a Muslim could ever be president. Far more than an echo, however, was the statement by Ben Carson—Republican candidate, one-time front-runner, and subsequently President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development—during the 2016 presidential campaign: “I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that.” With millions more Muslims living in the United States in the early twenty-first century than in the eighteenth century, the question of a Muslim president in 2016 was no longer a theoretical legal exercise but one that had enormous real-world consequences, as the post-election attempts at a Muslim travel ban made painfully clear.
After the 2016 election, one of the more extreme claims made about immigration over the United States’s southern border—through towns such as Matamoros—was that Muslims were part of the “invasion” of the United States. President Donald Trump tweeted an endorsement of a “border rancher” who claimed to have found “prayer rugs” on his property. The notion of Muslim terrorists—or, for that matter, throngs of Central American criminals and drug dealers—crossing into the United States from Mexico has been repeatedly refuted by fact, but, again, fantasy does not pay heed to fact. The imaginary moros of 1492 have become today’s imaginary border-crossing Muslim terrorists. We might do well to remember that in the last three decades, it is the United States that has invaded Muslim countries, not the other way around. As of 2020, America continues to battle the Muslim world in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere, with the Afghan conflict holding the dubious distinction of being the nation’s longest war. In these wars, Americans fly Apache and Kiowa helicopters over Muslim towns and cities and shoot Tomahawk missiles at their targets below. Black Hawk helicopters ferried the Navy SEALs in the nighttime raid dubbed Operation Geronimo that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. Thus for centuries now, the American psyche has drawn a durably resilient conceptual link between violence against Native Americans and the Muslim world.
Indeed, the idea that Islam is a deep existential threat to the Americas is one of the oldest cultural tropes in the New World. Its history is as long as the history of European colonialism and disease. It must, therefore, be a part of any understanding of the history of the Americas. After 1492, European colonialism, as we have seen, folded the Americas into the long history of European–Islamic relations. Seeing American history in this way allows us to give a more holistic accounting of the American past.
The history of the United States does not begin with Plymouth Rock and Thanksgiving. The first European foothold in what would become the continental United States was not Jamestown, but a Spanish Catholic outpost in Florida. The origins of the American people must obviously include the history of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and the Americas, West Africans, and the Jewish and Catholic subjects of mainland European polities. This history must also include Muslims, both African slaves and Selim’s Ottomans, for Islam was the mold that cast the history of European racial and ethnic thinking in the Americas, as well as the history of warfare in the Western Hemisphere.
ISLAM IS PROJECTED TO supplant Christianity as the world’s largest religion by the year 2070, so an understanding of Islam’s complex role in world history becomes ever more imperative. We must move beyond a simplistic, ahistorical story of the rise of the West or a facile notion of a clash of civilizations. Without understanding the role of the Ottomans in the history of the last five hundred years, we cannot hope to understand either the past or the present. The Ottomans stood, in 1492, at the very center of the known world. The Ottoman Empire made the world we know today.
CODA
. . .
SHADOWS OVER TURKEY
Sultan Selim the Grim Bridge
NEARLY FIVE CENTURIES AFTER SULEYMAN INTERRED HIS FATHER in the mosque complex that has been his home ever since, another head of state has become a frequent visitor to Selim’s tomb: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s current president and former prime minister. The Turkish leader has displayed a keen interest in Selim—far more than in any other figure from the Ottoman past—and has expended enormous resources and energy in promoting the sultan’s legacy.
Nowhere did Erdoğan and his associates in the Islamist Justice and Development Party (Ak Parti) more clearly evidence their attraction to and respect for Selim than on the western shores of the Bosphorus Strait, on May 29, 2013. They gathered there with other government dignitaries, bureaucrats, business leaders, engineers, and local and foreign media for the groundbreaking ceremony for a third bridge across the famous waterway. The name of the new bridge had been kept secret until that day. May 29 is a date of colossal significance in Turkey; it commemorates Mehmet II’s 1453 conquest of Constantinople. So important is it, in fact, that one of the two earlier bridges that span the Bosphorus bears Mehmet’s name. (The other, the first to have been constructed, is known simply as the Bosphorus Bridge.) On the 560th anniversary of Mehmet’s conquest, it was announced that the third bridge would be named for Mehmet’s grandson: the Sultan Selim the Grim Bridge (in Turkish, Yavuz Sultan Selim Köprüsü).
Naming this new connector of continents after Selim serves Erdoğan’s political project. He and his Islamist party colleagues regularly describe themselves as the “grandchildren” of the Ottomans, making Erdoğan unique among modern Turkish leaders. From Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who founded the republic in 1923 in the aftermath of World War I, until Erdoğan, Turkey’s political elite emphatically made a clean break between the empire and the republic. The republic was established, indeed, to correct all that was wrong with the empire and had led to its demise. Modern Turkey would replace Islam with secularism, the sultan with a parliament, the Ottoman alphabet with a Latin one, Ottomanness with Turkishness.
Turkish nationalism would, as declared by its republican proponents, excise from Turkey’s political body all the “weak abscesses” that had handicapped the empire during its long history: Armenians, Kurds, Arabs, Greeks, and all other “feeble non-Turks.” Turkey’s leaders thus pointedly rejected the longstanding Ottoman governing principle of allowing various ethnicities and cultures autonomy within its realm in exchange for their recognition of Ottoman authority. As elsewhere, Turkey’s national project would prove extremely controversial and violent. To the extent that the rulers of modern Turkey have ever admitted to having employed violence, they have defended it as vital to “correcting” the empire’s “mistakes”—its multilingual, multidenominational, multicultural character. All the leaders of Turkey from Atatürk until Erdoğan emphasized Turkish republicanism over
any connection to the Ottoman past.
Part of Erdoğan’s exceptionality, therefore, is his calculated embrace of aspects of Turkey’s Ottoman heritage. He casts himself as a new kind of Turkish politician, one who celebrates Turkey’s Ottoman lineage instead of rejecting it and one who positions himself, at least symbolically, in the tradition of the sultanate. In these and other ways, Erdoğan seeks to reconcile the republic and the empire in the service of his own political goals. One of his primary tools in this process is religion. Alternately describing himself as an Islamic secularist and a secular Islamist, Erdoğan has increased the visible markers of Islam in public life in Turkey. He regards Islam as a common cultural idiom stretching across time and space, connecting him both to the Ottoman past as well as to Muslims—albeit only certain Muslims—outside Turkey’s borders. Thus, Selim represents the crucial fulcrum, as it was Selim who made the Ottoman Empire a majority Muslim state, won the caliphate, and preemptively attacked any power that stood in the way of Ottoman ambitions.
Erdoğan finds much to be lauded and emulated in Selim’s expansionist politics and his emboldening of orthodox Sunnism. Understanding Selim first and foremost as a resolute bulwark of Ottoman—and therefore Turkish—power, Erdoğan and his ardent followers seek to aggressively project their own Turkish Islamist power. Selim’s Ottoman Empire was vastly more powerful on the world stage than Turkey is today. Erdoğan seeks to revive that global influence. As he would explain it, one of the reasons the republic lost its clout in the twentieth century was its staunch secularism. Erdoğan and his supporters see Islam as a cultural and political reservoir of strength, a vital component of the glories of the Ottoman past which they seek to emulate in contemporary Turkey.
