Roundtable Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse Roundtable and Web Production Editor: George Fujii Introduction by Andrew Patrick

Karine V. Walther. Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821-1921. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. ISBN: 978-1-4696-2539-3 (hardcover, $42.00). URL: http://www.tiny.cc/Roundtable-XIX-17

Contents

Introduction by Andrew Patrick, Tennessee State University .......................................................... 2

Review by Christopher Dietrich, Fordham University ........................................................................ 5

Review by Michael Limberg, University of Connecticut .................................................................. 10

Review by Sarah Miglio, Wheaton College ........................................................................................... 14

Author’s Response by Karine V. Walther, Georgetown University ............................................... 17

© 2018 The Authors. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.

2018

H-Diplo @HDiplo

Roundtable Review Volume XIX, No. 17 (2017) 3 January 2018

H-Diplo Roundtable Review, Vol. XIX, No. 17 (2017)

Introduction by Andrew Patrick, Tennessee State University

n early September of 1914, the Ottoman Ambassador to the United States was angry. In the midst of calls to send American warships to Ottoman waters to defend both American missionaries and Ottoman Christians, Ambassador Ahmet Rüstem made a rather undiplomatic public statement about the treatment

of Turkey in the American press. Rüstem could not understand the American fixation with the Ottoman treatment of Armenians and Maronites who, he claimed, were “political agitators engaged in undermining the Ottoman state.” No similar American intervention, he argued, had been seriously contemplated in Russia during anti-Jewish pogroms, or in Algeria during the French slaughter of Algerian independence fighters, or in India when the British had killed Indian insurgents in large numbers. After noting that Americans treated their African-American citizens and Filipino colonial subjects with similar violence, he further hypothesized about what would happen to African-Americans if they were found to be conspiring with the Japanese to facilitate an invasion of the United States, which he believed was akin to the situation with the Armenians and the Russians. “How many of them would be left alive to tell the tale?” he wondered.1

While numerous historians have recounted this incident as an example of an outsider calling attention to American hypocrisy, Rüstem had perhaps unwittingly illuminated another aspect of American society. Turkey, he argued in a subsequent letter to Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, “had been the object of systematic attacks on the part of the press … [which] has poisoned public opinion in the United States in regard to the Turkish people.” This, in turn, was conditioning the American people to call for government actions that could lead to war between the two countries.2 What he was observing, however, was not a new phenomenon. The press was merely reproducing and reinforcing an anti-Islamic discourse which had been prevalent in the United States throughout its history and often became more vociferous in times of conflict.

The implications and persistence of this discourse are the subject of Karine V. Walther’s new book, Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821-1921. Walther’s main argument in this episodic history is that deeply engrained American anti-Islamic and pro-Christian attitudes (with civilizational and racial corollaries) influenced numerous American policy debates and decisions pertaining to Muslim polities throughout the time period in question. Walther shows how this discourse shaped debates about Greek and Bulgarian revolts against the Ottomans, the treatment of Jews in Morocco, the governance of the Moros in the Philippines, and the reaction to Armenian massacres in the Ottoman Empire. In all of these debates, most Americans advocated for those they believed to be on the higher rungs of global human and religious hierarchies (Christians and Jews) in opposition to those they believed to be oppressive and inferior (Muslims).

The reviewers in this roundtable unanimously praise Walther’s book and commend it in similar ways, calling it nuanced, compelling, valuable, and persuasive. They also praise the global nature of the work, the connections it makes between domestic debates and foreign relations, and the degree to which Walther is able to situate the book in the historiography of religion, empire, and humanitarian intervention. Rather than rehash their respective commendations (each of which is worthy of your time), I would like to use this

1 “Say Britain Gave No Advice to U.S.-Turkish Ambassador’s Statement,” The Evening Star (Washington), 8

September 1914.

2 “Turkish Ambassador Rustem to the Secretary of State,” 12 September 1914 in Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States. The Lansing Papers, 1914-1920, vol. 1, 68-69.

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introduction to highlight a few of the points brought up by the reviewers that could help to further scholarship in the field.

In his review, Christopher Dietrich notes that he appreciates the thrust of the work but also states that the book raised a number of questions for him. Walther discusses the place of missionaries in the episodes which are focused upon in this book and, throughout this era, one can see their influence rising as the missionary movement became larger and more organized. Dietrich raises questions about the existence and influence of regional and global missionary networks, and wonders if the manner in which missionaries approached foreign governments determined “their interpretations of politics and policy recommendations.” Dietrich also adds other valuable “questions for another day” about how further discussions of international law and American global commercial interests might expand Walther’s thesis.

Sarah Miglio raises a historiographical point in her review, stating “one may question the decision to focus on crisis touch-points since rebellions, uprisings, organized resistance to anti-Semitism, and genocide all stand out for their lack of ordinariness.” Walther does offer a solid defense of this decision (6-7), but it nonetheless prompted Miglio to wonder if “anti-Islamic rhetoric” lost power during times when conflicts involving Muslims were not a major American concern. In other words, it is certainly true that politics of difference gain power in times of conflict, but is the inverse also true? It is a thought-provoking observation for future study.

Lastly, Michael Limberg notes that the actors in Walther’s stories are almost exclusively American, as fits her research focus, yet he argues that there is surely much more to be learned about “how Muslims talked about Americans or worked to shape U.S. policies.” Limberg is correct to note that while there is still work to do be done from the American and European archives, there is likely much to be learned from archives in other parts of the world. In the current academic climate, however, many researchers have difficulty finding the time and funding (or even finding the time to apply for funding) to visit these archives, or to obtain/maintain the language skills necessary to effectively utilize archives in, for example, the Middle East or the Philippines. It is difficult to see this situation changing any time soon.

Such is the catalytic nature of Walther’s work. Sacred Interests, as these reviewers argue, is an excellent synthesis of major American foreign policy debates in which Islam played a significant role between 1821 and 1921. It proves the prevalence and the power of anti-Islamic sentiment in the United States during this era, yet it also alludes to the problems this brought to the United States in the succeeding century. It is plain to see that the lingering persistence of this discourse of superiority has not served the United States well during the ensuing century. Though Ambassador Ahmet Rüstem certainly had discursive blinders of his own, in 1914 he correctly perceived that such beliefs lead to the easy vilification of a group and increases the likelihood of conflict.

Participants:

Karine Walther is an Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University-Qatar. She holds a PhD in history from Columbia University, a Maîtrise and Licence in sociology from the University of Paris VIII and a BA in American studies from the University of Texas, Austin. Her first book, Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821-1921 was published by UNC Press in 2015. She is currently working on her second manuscript, Spreading the Faith: American Missionaries, Aramco and the Birth of the US-Saudi Special Relationship, 1889-1955 to be published by UNC Press in 2018.

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Andrew Patrick is an Assistant Professor of History at Tennessee State University in Nashville. His research focuses on American involvement in the Middle East, particularly during the World War I era. Patrick’s publications include America’s Forgotten Middle East Initiative: The King-Crane Commission of 1919 (London: IB Tauris, 2015), “Jesus Optional: World War I and the Shifting Institutional Identity of the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut,” First World War Studies 7:1 (2016), and “‘These people know about us’: A Reconsideration of Greater Syrian Attitudes Towards the United States in the First World War Era,” Middle Eastern Studies 50:3 (2014). He received his PhD in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Manchester in 2011, and has also taught in Turkey and Abu Dhabi.

Christopher R. W. Dietrich is Assistant Professor of History and American Studies at Fordham University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2012. His first book is Oil Revolution: Anticolonial Elites, Sovereign Rights, and the Economic Culture of Decolonization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a history of the United States and foreign oil in the 20th century.

Michael Limberg is an adjunct lecturer at the University of Connecticut. His recent dissertation, “Abundant Life: U.S. Development in the Near East, 1919-1939” examines the network of missionaries, philanthropists, and diplomats encouraging economic and social development in Turkey, Palestine, and Lebanon during the 1920s and 1930s.

Sarah Miglio completed her Ph.D. in American history at the University of Notre Dame. She is the Director of Core Curriculum Studies and Assistant Professor of History at Wheaton College. She is the author most recently of “The Near Eastern Front of the Great War and the Self-Secularization of Christian Humanitarian Work,” in Remembering Armageddon: Religion and the First World War, ed., Philip Jenkins (Waco: ISR Books, 2015). Her current book project, Civilizing the World: Practical Christians, Progressive Religion, and Politics from Chicago to the Middle East, 1890-1925, analyzes social reformers who defied categorization within the Social Gospel or secular progressive movements.

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Review by Christopher Dietrich, Fordham University

Christianity, Attitudes toward Islam, and American Diplomacy

n October 2001, Lynne Cheney criticized educators who called for closer study of Islamic societies. To do so, she said, “implies that the events of September 11th were our fault, that it was our failure to understand Islam that led to so many deaths and so much destruction.”1 Later

that year, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, the conservative academic group that Cheney had founded after she quit the National Endowment for Humanities, published a 37-page pamphlet that warned university administrators and trustees that too many classes on the Middle East and Islam threatened to undermine Western civilization.

Cheney and other conservative ideologues are not alone in the longer trajectory of American history, either in their calls for a more insular, triumphalist reading of the American past or in their dismissal of Islamic societies as inherently threatening or inferior. As Karine Walther writes in Sacred Interests, crass images of Islam helped shape American life and diplomacy in the nineteenth century. Walther builds on this general argument through a series of detailed diplomatic case studies: the United States and the Greek War of Independence, Jewish American activism in the Ottoman Empire and Morocco, the ‘Moro Problem’ in the U.S.-ruled Philippines, U.S. diplomacy during the 1894 to 1896 Armenian Massacres, and U.S. diplomacy toward the Ottoman Empire in its last decade. A dominant narrative about Islam and Muslims emerged in each case, she writes: “When Americans witnessed and participated in diplomatic and global events that involved Christians and Muslims on opposing sides, negative and vociferous attacks on Islam predominated in popular and official discourse” (6).

The polarity that emerged in the nineteenth century between the civilized Christian West and the barbaric Muslim East was not especially sophisticated. But the bias against Islam was not the result of simple forces, Walther writes. It arose from deeply set cultural and ideological components. For one, Americans were part of a larger transatlantic network of intellectual conceptualizations that set ‘Western Civilization’ against the ‘Muslim World.’ For another, the religious revival of the Second Great Awakening fortified a connection between American national identity, based on a secular celebration of democratic participation, and Christianity. Islam thus came to serve as “a convenient foil by which Americans could advance and celebrate their own republican liberal government,” Walther writes (15). As important, anti-Islam thought carried with it a set of policy prescriptions that tended towards the violation of sovereign Islamic territories either through humanitarian intervention or downright imperialism. The interventions, like those against Native American populations, often found their justification in the legal exclusion of Muslim societies from “the law of civilized nations,” a historical logic that she argues extended to include “American beliefs about the legitimate and morally justifiable use of imperial violence and state power” (22).

1 http://www.historyplace.com/pointsofview/cheney-dallas.htm

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That understanding of Islam extended to different diplomatic questions at different times, beginning with the ‘Greek Fever’ of the 1820s and 1830s, which condemned the rule of the Ottoman Empire over white, Christian Greeks (35-36). Greek revolutionaries understood this dynamic and worked through a variety of means to turn Hellenism, which had begun as a literary project, to their advantage. In doing so, they emphasized a religious reading of Greek suffering in which Ottoman political repression emerged from Muslims’ religious faith. Many parts of society took up the cause. Newspapers described in vicious detail Ottoman atrocities, Senators decried the plight of Christian women, and the largest organizations for Greek independence in the United States raised more than $95,000 (47). Notably, even Secretary of State John Quincy Adams – who wrote his now-famous line that the United States did not go “abroad in search of monsters to destroy” in direct response to U.S. Minister to France Albert Gallatin, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster, and others’ calls for intervention – shared the basic assumption that the United States was “a benevolent global force for political freedom and liberty” (43-46). War between Christendom and Islam would continue as long as the “merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action,” Adams later wrote. This was not just the struggle of “the Greeks against their Mahometan oppressors.” Greek Fever was one battle in a war between the “dominion of matter over mind; of darkness over light; of brutal force over righteousness and truth” (52-53).

Afterwards Americans tended to depict conflicts as part of a greater war between Islam and Christianity. But just because that dialectical strain of American Islamophombia was insistent did not mean that its influence was uniform, as revealed by Walther’s discussion of the pressure former abolitionists put on the U.S. government to intervene in the Cretan Insurrection from 1866 to 1869 (57-67). That and other arguments reveal one strength of Walther’s analysis: her close attention to the particularities of the relationship between American culture, ideology, and diplomacy in each of her studies. Another example lies in her analysis of the diplomatic influence of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) regarding the Bulgarian rebellion of 1876 and the Russo-Turkish War of 1877. The missionary-founded Robert College, which was founded in 1863, crucially shaped elite and public opinion. By the time the ABCFM missionary George Washburn took the helm from his father-in-law in 1872, the college had educated a number of Bulgarian students who went on to become vocal nationalists. Washburn collected information on the crushing of the April 1876 uprising from them and passed it on to the British ambassador in Istanbul and the London press. His one-dimensional view of Islamic violence glossed over the fact that the Circassians in Bulgaria were refugees from the ethnic cleansing policies of Russia in the Caucasian Wars. But it was “a powerful emotional draw to both political elites and the British public” (80).

Here, as in other cases, Protestant missionaries played an outsized role not only in identifying Christians as superior to Muslims but also in shaping U.S. foreign policy towards the Ottoman Empire. Journalists, immigrants, and philanthropists all played important roles too. During the Bulgarian crisis, for example, the Irish-American journalist Januarius MacGahan worked closely with the American consul-general in Turkey, Eugene Schuyler, to build up sentiment against the Ottoman Empire in Great Britain and United States. “There is a capacity of fanaticism in the

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Mohammedans which is almost unknown to European races and religions,” the New York Times opined after reviewing McGahan’s reports (83).

Walther is alert to the importance of establishing the connection between religious motivation and policy. In the study of U.S. colonial policy toward the ‘Mohammedan Wards’ in the Phillippines, the narrative moves between the topics of civilizational arguments of Christian superiority, official occupation policy, and the deployment and justification of brutal violence and systemic prejudice against Filipino Muslims. The opinions of Spanish officials, Jesuit priests, and European colonial officials were collected and recorded, and reaffirmed Americans’ biases (170-173). The European colonial model was especially important in the attempts to prevent an alliance between the northern nationalist leader Emiliano Aguinaldo and the Sultan of Sulu and in the clauses of the Cooper Act that granted civil government and some local representation to Christians, while keeping Moro areas under military control (175, 180). American official and military action was shaped by the oft-expressed belief that Muslims were “uncivilized, violent, and, importantly, incapable of self-government” (157).

There is no doubt that the religious identity of Filipinos was a factor in the United States’ most brutal policies once colonial rule was fully established. Of particular importance was the violent first military governor of the Moro Province, Leonard Wood, whose views were shaped in part by conversations with his close friend President Theodore Roosevelt and the colonial ruler of Egypt, Lord Cromer. Wood wrote to Roosevelt and the Governor of the Philippines” William Howard Taft that the Sultan of Sulu was “degenerate, dishonest, tricky, dissipated, and absolutely devoid of principle” before he met him (203). This view of Islam was part of a larger logic that led Wood to recommend the creation of tribal wards as well as the violent suppression of Moro Rebellions. “While these measures may appear harsh it is the kindest thing to do,” Wood wrote in his diary (209). “To abandon all control over the Moros would amount to releasing these Moros to prey upon the Christian Filipinos, civilized or semi-civilized, as well as upon the commerce of other peoples,” Roosevelt said in his 1904 speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination (210).

That view of barbarous Islam and American benevolence was shared across American culture. The popular operetta, The Sultan of Sulu, was based on the life “the incompetent and immoral leader of the ‘Mohemmedens, polygamists, and slave-holders’” played 192 performances in multiple cities across the United States (193). At the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, the head of anthropology for the program described the overall exhibit as “family groups of people still living in the stone age.” The Moros were “the most savage of the savages,” according to one contemporary book, which warned fairgoers to keep their distance when taking photos (195, 196).

Walther uncovers several common attributes that bind her cases together. For one, Americans’ belief in their racial and religious superiority blinded them to their hypocrisy. Critics of Islam often failed to see that the United States failed to live up to its own liberal mythology. John Shanks, a congressman from Indiana, could say without irony, for example, that Turkish cruelty was “without parallel even in the annals of the Apaches” (64). Walther also keeps a close eye on how these stories

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were shaped by the broader international politics of the time. In the chapter on the 1820s, for example, she notes that cabinet discussions about Greek Independence occurred within the context of the Monroe Doctrine and the threat of European intervention against Latin American independence movements. In the section on Bulgaria, she is sure to mention that the British cabinet was more concerned than anything else that the Bulgarian uprising would open the door to Russian expansionism toward the Dardanelles and the Mediterranean (86-87).

This sense of the broader world allows her to take into consideration the importance of other actors than her central characters. In her sections on Cretan and Bulgarian revolutionaries and the 1876-1877 Constantinople Conference she notes that Christian minorities in Muslim societies were savvy about emphasizing the religious ties that bound American Christians to them (59, 74, 127-128). In other cases, Americans imagined the oppression of religious minorities, such as during the debated about the League of Nations mandate system and when Secretary of State Elihu Root used civilizational and commercial arguments to press the French to address Jewish rights in Morocco during the 1906 Algeciras Conference (150-152, 297). The influential missionary James Barton captured not just the feeling of others, including U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Henry Morgenthau, but also the effect of that policy when he wrote in 1917 that Muslim states were not fit for self-governance because their religious beliefs were “not only incompatible with, but are diametrically opposed to the principles of modern democracy, modern state-craft, and modern governance” (297).

That general sentiment is part of a larger rhetoric of humanitarian intervention for Walther. Sacred Interests thus also accounts for the role of religion as the United States began to push outward the limits of its role in the world at the end of the nineteenth century. The book shows how missionaries and other nineteenth-century Americans provided the most basic ideas that later became important strains of twentieth century U.S. policies, in seeking to mold other societies in America’s image and in gaining an economic foothold in the region. A sense of Christian superiority and the previous century’s anti-Islam beliefs provided a central driver and justification of expansion, as Walther convincingly argues.

There are interesting questions Sacred Interests does not pursue at length. As Walther notes, American missionary work to Muslims and anti-Muslim visions in American policy stretched past the areas she discusses.2 The book had to stop somewhere. But in each of her chapters a more thorough sense of the greater network around local Christian ministries might have been revealing. Aside from American visits with Lord Cromer and a brief mention of Muhammad Ali Pasha, the influence of Egypt and Egyptians is largely absent. This begs the question of the regional links between actors. What connections did the missionaries discussed here have with their ABCFM

2 In her ample footnotes and discussion of the secondary literature, Walther cites recent work by Ussama

Makdisi, Artilleries of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), and Heather Sharkey, American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in the Age of Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

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counterparts in Cairo? In Beirut and Damascus? Did missionaries located in other regions approach the government in similar ways? Were those relationships important in determining their interpretations of politics and policy recommendations?

It also would have been interesting if Walther had extended her discussion of international law as a justification for intervention into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Did the Family of Nations framework she discusses in the first half of the nineteenth century apply in the statutes regulating U.S. rule over the Moros? Regarding the break-up of the Ottoman Empire? How exactly so? Likewise, as she does briefly in the Moro and Moroccan cases, Walther might have examined how missionaries in particular and Christianity in general reacted with commercial interests, especially regarding the way in which the Wilson administration understood the Ottoman Empire. What relationships existed between religious interests and American businesses in the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century? How did they change during and immediately following World War I, when the U.S. government invoked the Open Door principle on behalf of American companies? Were such liaisons encouraged by the U.S. government?

These are interesting questions for another day. Sacred Interests is excellent for its close study of the impact of religious belief on U.S. foreign relations, its excavation of complex routes of policy influence, and its use of multiple perspectives. The figures she provides are exciting and will be useful for teaching: census maps showing the distribution of ‘civilized’ and ‘wild’ peoples; opera programs, World’s Fair exhibits, and political cartoons. Walther tells a nuanced story, presents complex ideas clearly, gives depth to her characters, and graces her text with expressive examples and quotes. It is a compelling study that should reach a broader audience than just diplomatic historians.

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Review by Michael Limberg, University of Connecticut

arine V. Walther argues that Americans, whether diplomats, missionaries, or the general public, have consistently embraced a vision of a Christian ‘sacred interest’ in the Islamic world. They constructed a durable set of racial and religious hierarchies relegating Muslims or Islamic governments to a place

outside the ‘family’ of civilized nations. Walther argues that imagined hierarchies in discourses of race, religion, and civilization shaped U.S. responses to humanitarian crises from the early nineteenth into the twentieth centuries as well as colonization policies in the Philippines. Americans perceived the actions of Muslims as driven primarily by their religious beliefs, rather than understanding the nuances of local conditions. They saw Muslim societies and polities across the globe uniform. As an example of the ‘religious turn’ in U.S. foreign policy history, Walther’s work makes an important contribution by arguing for consistency in U.S. policies and attitudes towards Muslims across regions and circumstances.

Walther’s idea of a religious lens shaping American views of Muslims adds to a wave of recent scholarship by Ussama Makdisi, Heather Sharkey, Mehmet Ali Doğan, and others exploring the deep historical roots of American encounters with Islam in the Middle East.1 Walther also builds on existing scholarship in humanitarian intervention and genocide, including the work of Davide Rodogno and Gary Bass.2 Sacred Interests broadens the lens of encounter beyond the Middle East to include the Philippines, where she builds on the work of Paul Kramer to focus on imperialism and policies toward Muslim Moros.3 She also works to show how other actors, particularly Jews and Armenians, sought to mediate encounters and shape tropes of Islam for their own ends. Walther examines a mix of State Department cables, private letters, and public statements from missionaries, and a number of different periodicals.

The book proceeds in four parts, corresponding to different ‘moments of crisis’ in different regions and time periods. The first section, which focuses the ‘Eastern Question’ of nationalist uprisings in Ottoman-controlled Greece and Bulgaria, traces the ways American missionaries and newspapers shaped U.S. perceptions of Ottoman actions. Americans largely heard of the Greek insurrection against Ottoman rule during the 1820s through newspaper accounts of brave civilized Greeks “enslaved” by Muslim rule (48). Philhellenes expanded on those reports by arguing, as Park Street Church minister Sereno Edwards Dwight did in 1824, that U.S. intervention would help “‘to rescue a nation of Christians from extermination, to deliver the ancient churches, [and] to overthrow the Mohammedan imposture…’” (50). Thanks in large part to Secretary of State John Quincy Adams’s opposition, the United States ultimately chose to avoid military intervention. Walther argues, however, that rhetoric and perceptions of Islam forged in that debate remained persistent, including during the Cretan rebellion of 1866. During the Bulgarian rebellion of the 1870s, a network of American

1 Ussama Makdisi, Faith Misplaced: The Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations, 1820-2001 (New York: Public

Affairs Press, 2010); Mehmet Ali Doğan and Heather Sharkey, eds, American Missionaries and the Middle East: Foundational Encounters (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2011).

2 Davide Rodogno, Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, 1815-1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Gary Bass, Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (New York: Vintage, 2009).

3 Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

K

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missionaries used close ties to the State Department and pressed to shape American and British views of the conflict. Walther shows the ways in which American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions [ABCFM] missionaries and members of the Robert College staff worked with diplomats and sent influential reports home that perpetuated images of uncivilized, violent Muslims.

The second section, which focuses on the ways Jews in the United States and in the Middle East sought to use and reshape tropes of Islam, is a fascinating new approach. Walther traces the emergence of transnational Jewish activism to fight discrimination in the late 1800s, particularly in France, but also in U.S.-based groups such as the Board of Delegates of American Israelites. She argues that American Jews used the ideas of civilization and religious hierarchy by claiming a higher, more civilized status for themselves in comparison to Muslims. American Jews hoped that this claim could win them inclusion in a secularized U.S. society, a way to resist claims of Christian national identity during the late 1800s. Jewish activists lobbied the U.S. government to help Jews in North Africa based on claims of “fanatical discrimination” by Muslims (101). Their activism, however, obscured the actual reality of Moroccan Jews’ integration into their society and ability to obtain redress from within established government channels. Walther ends this section by examining American involvement in the 1906 Algeciras Conference, which President Theodore Roosevelt justified in part as protection for persecuted Jews ruled by an uncivilized government.

Walther’s analysis of U.S. policies towards Moros in the Philippines demonstrates the global applications of Americans’ tropes regarding Muslims. This section builds on Kramer’s analysis of U.S. imperialism to show how ‘civilizing’ the Moros intersected with the formation of American masculinity or religious identity. Walther argues that Americans could easily justify violence against Muslim groups by using tropes of their lack of civilization and savagery. She also points out the close ties between missionaries, business interests, and U.S. Army officers that shaped the American civilizing mission in the southern Philippines. The religious hierarchy Americans reified would continue even under the gradual transition to Filipino rule during the 1930s and 1940s.

Finally, Sacred Interests ties American tropes of Islamic violence and civilizational inferiority to Americans’ outpouring of humanitarian relief and calls for direct intervention in response to the Armenian massacres of the 1890s and 1910s. Walther argues that Americans responded to reports of massacres between 1894 and 1896 with outrage and calls for European intervention, but their protests “ignored the fact that previous European diplomatic interventions had exacerbated existing tensions in the region” (243). Aid for Armenians during the Genocide beginning in 1915 and Americans’ calls for a U.S. mandate over Armenian or Turkey after World War I likewise relied on notions of Muslims’ violent nature and civilizational inferiority. In both chapters, Walther points out the important role ABCFM missionaries played in conveying information to U.S. diplomats and the public, using a mix of missionary papers and newspaper stories. Even as President Woodrow Wilson’s proposal for a mandate failed and U.S. diplomatic relations with the Muslim world began to change to reflect growing strategic interests and the rise of new governments across the Middle East, older ideas of Islam continued to shape U.S. perceptions of Muslim societies.

Sacred Interests rightly points out the intersections between issues that some may characterize as ‘domestic’ and the actions of the United States abroad. Walther demonstrates connections between American views of Muslims and U.S. policies toward Native Americans, the struggle of Jews and other immigrant groups to attain whiteness, and conceptions of masculinity. She also connects the activities of U.S. diplomats and organizations with concurrent European imperial actions, such as making note of American missionaries meetings with Lord Cromer in Egypt or American Jews working with the French Alliance Israelite. Ultimately,

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Walther argues that American actions were far more deeply rooted in ‘exceptionalist’ concepts of identity than European power politics, but she demonstrates how similar rhetoric about Muslims and justifications for colonization resulted. While this book focuses primarily on the creation and mobilization of ideologies or cultural tropes, it raises a number of questions regarding the uncertain process of turning ideology or public activism into policy. In many of the cases Walther explores, media exposure or public protests failed to generate a meaningful policy response. By noting the complicated intersections between American ideas of Islam and specific political circumstances or bedrock foreign policy principles such as non-entanglement, Walther creates a nuanced picture, based on a blend of diplomatic sources alongside missionary publications or newspaper stories, of persistent ideologies that are negotiated in the real world.

Walther introduces the book as “a very American story” that focuses on the exploration by U.S. actors of the responses or actions of Muslims in the societies in question (xi). While this is understandable given the large global and temporal scope of the book, undoubtedly further explanation to demonstrate how Muslims talked about Americans or worked to shape U.S. policies would be a useful follow-up. Walther shows fascinating glimpses of how Muslim diplomats or individuals acted for themselves, such as Sultan Abdulhamid’s telegram to two Moro chiefs using his authority as caliph to order them to work with the American government (176-177). The Arab Christian and American University of Beirut AUB graduate Najeeb Saleeby’s role as a Muslim expert in the Philippines is an example of how Christian Arabs also sought to position themselves as part of American society by using religious hierarchies and their own direct experience (163, 193).4 The role of Jewish-Americans in shaping perceptions of Islam is a large part of the book, and Walther follows Kramer in noting how Filipino Christians claimed their own paternal role over uncivilized Moros. Examination of the role of Arab Christians as interlocutors both in the Middle East and as immigrants in the United States occurs in examples such as Saleeby but perhaps could be expanded. Another actor who is mentioned briefly but deserves greater attention is Samuel Zwemer, the “Apostle to Islam.” Zwemer’s periodical The Moslem World and extensive book publications had a huge influence on Protestant perceptions of Muslim societies and showed an increasingly professionalized method of studying and understanding Islam, making him perhaps a transitional figure between older missionary experts and the early creation of Islamic studies in religious scholarship or Middle Eastern area studies programs.

Overall, by showing the persistence of American attitudes towards Islam in shaping U.S. responses to crises across space and time, Sacred Interests is a valuable contribution to scholarship on U.S. foreign policy. Walther combines elements of scholarship on religion, humanitarianism, and empire across a series of case studies with a global rather than a regional lens. This book joins several recent dissertations and publications by Sarah Miglio, Keith Watenpaugh, Omar Dphrepaulezz, and others in opening up new explorations of Islam, the role of non-state actors, and humanitarian intervention in the Philippines and the Armenian Genocide.5 While her book stops in 1921, when a host of new ideas regarding race, religion, and the global role of the

4 See also Timothy Marr,“Diasporic Intelligences in the American Philippine Empire: The Transnational

Career of Dr. Najeeb Mitry Saleeby,” Mashriq & Mahjar 2:1 (2014): 78-106.

5 Sarah Miglio, "’Civilizing the World’: Progressive Religion and Politics from Chicago to the Middle East, 1890-1925” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 2012); Omar Dphrepaulezz, “’The Right Sort of White Men’: General Leonard Wood and the U.S. Army in the Southern Philippines, 1898-1906” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Connecticut, 2013): Keith David Watenpaugh, Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015).

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United States began to layer on top of older stereotypes of Islam, the persistent impact of the ideas Walther traces to the early 1800s is clear to see even into the present.

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Review by Sarah Miglio, Wheaton College

or too long we have told the story of the United States’ involvement with the Islamic world by emphasizing America’s increased engagement as a newly emergent superpower following World War II. This narrative assumes U.S. engagement with the Islamic world is best traced to the geo-political acts of

a nation with vested military interests in a region. Karine V. Walther’s careful reconstruction of American and Islamic encounters from 1821-1921 effectively counteracts this mistaken narrative and contributes to a growing body of scholarship that expands our understanding of the long history of U.S. encounters with Islam.1 Walther demonstrates the considerable influence of non-state actors in shaping American domestic politics and foreign relations prior to formal military commitments in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. While using the analytical lens of religion, Walther contends the religious discourse of non-state actors reveals remarkable continuity between contemporary bias against Islam and the history of nineteenth and early twentieth-century American beliefs about Islamic religion and culture. Sacred Interests explains the enduring realities of anti-Islamic thought among American elites and the American public more broadly by tracing Islamophobia’s origins to the religious binary through which Americans viewed their world.

Walther offers a provocative re-telling of American foreign relations with Muslims that expands our understanding of how domestic and international affairs shaped one another. Americans, according to Walther, have long classified Christian, Western cultures as ‘civilized’ while labeling Islamic, non-Western cultures as ‘barbaric’ and ‘uncivilized.’ This civilizational rhetoric relied upon assumptions of racial, religious and cultural superiority that justified “American desires to convert, reform, colonize and control Muslims in Islamic societies . . . .” (5). This American impulse to reform Islamic societies cannot be understood apart from the United States’ self-conscious identity as a highly advanced democracy and Christian nation. Walther’s argument advances our understanding of the cultural embeddedness of foreign relations and official state action. Walther resists simplistic divisions between state/non-state and personal belief/official acts by taking seriously the significant impact of religious belief and praxis upon the formation of foreign policy. Sacred Interests clarifies the primacy of culture and beliefs in shaping American encounters with Islam.

Walther’s analysis of the centrality of religion in American civilizational discourse and foreign relations opens up multiple pathways for future study while adding depth and nuance to our understanding of historical

1 A few examples of the growing scholarly literature on the encounters between the U.S., Islam, and the Middle

East more broadly include Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2003); Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media & U.S. Interests in the Middle East Since 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Ussama Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008); Heather J. Sharkey, American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Mehmet Ali Dogan and Heather J. Sharkey, eds., American Missionaries and the Middle East: Foundational Encounters (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2011); Timothy Marr, The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Robert Allison, The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1176-1815 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Thomas S. Kidd, American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the War on Terror (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Adam H. Becker, Revival and Awakening: American Missionaries in Iran and the Origins of Assyrian Nationalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Christine Leigh Heyrman, American Apostles: When Evangelicals Entered the World of Islam (New York: Hill and Wang, 2015).

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American perceptions of Islam, especially in the under-studied nineteenth century. This work serves as a model for carefully sourced argumentation and an impressive bibliography in scope and range. Her methodological choice to assess American anti-Islamic discourse reflects her intellectual debt to Edward Said’s Orientalist critique. Walther builds upon Edward Said’s critique of the West’s binary vision that imagines a despotic East with desire to subjugate and control it, and she offers a deeply contextualized study for how this Orientalist vision imbued American civilizational rhetoric and condemnations of Islam.2

Walther’s work also contributes to the historiographic trend of diplomatic history’s cultural turn. She explains that “diplomatic historians have often discounted the impact of cultural and religious beliefs on American policymakers, preferring to emphasize other more ‘rational’ motivations, including ideologies such as realism, considerations of grand strategy or promotion of commercial interests” (25). Her willingness to read the culture for patterns of thought allows for an appropriate expansion of what may be classified as political, or politically relevant, on the part of historical agents who are often discounted or ignored for their roles outside official state action. She analyzes the thought and activities of missionaries, ministers, journalists, philanthropists, and professors in terms of their role in the formation of cultural attitudes as well as for their influence upon or “collaboration” with state actors (5). Walther’s decision to use the primary interpretive lens of religion as embedded within imperialist rhetoric and impulses marks an important contribution – not just in the historical particulars of her study but also in the methodological implications of relying upon religion as a necessary analytic tool. Walther explains, “Although strategic motivations and commercial interests often dictated American foreign relations, American beliefs about Muslim barbarity were also an important ideological incentive to expand the country’s national interest beyond the limited boundaries of the nation-state” (321). For all of these methodological reasons, Sacred Interests will function as a valuable resource of transnational history and post-colonial theory.

Walther employs multiple case studies that offer widely divergent cultural and political contexts including multiple Ottoman imperial provinces, the North African nation of Morocco and the Philippine Islands in East Asia. She opens with the Greek War for Independence and traces from 1821-1869 the fictive kinship American philhellenes crafted between Greece and the United States in order to justify American intervention on behalf of the Greek revolutionaries who were resisting Ottoman Muslim imperialism (chapter 1). The next chapter contrasts the American framing of Ottoman violence against Bulgarians in religious terms with the Ottoman attempts to resist nationalist uprisings and prevent the loss of their colonial holdings (chapter 2). Walther pivots from case studies of Christian non-state actors to Jewish American non-state actors and the movement to protect “Oriental Jews” in Morocco and the Ottoman Empire (100). Walther explores the American Jewish repurposing of orientalist rhetoric to highlight the civilizational superiority of Jews in contrast to Muslims (chapters 3-4). She then examines the direct colonial rule and encounters of Americans with Filipinos with a close analysis of the different treatment given to Christian and Muslim Filipinos (chapters 5-6). Walther returns to the Ottoman Empire with a close case study of the American humanitarian and political responses to the Armenian Massacres and Genocide (chapters 7-8). Each of these case studies–from Greece, to Bulgaria, Morocco, the Philippine Islands and the Armenians in Turkey–reveals the persistent appeal and power of civilizational and religious rhetoric in the shaping of the American imagination of Islamic people and cultures.

2 Edward Said, Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979. See also A.L. Macfie, Orientalism. New York:

Routledge, 2013 for an analysis of the impact of Said’s critique and scholarly engagement with his theory.

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The theme of American anti-Islamic discourse as grounds for humanitarian and political intervention unifies these case studies into a carefully argued case for the long history of American discrimination against Islamic culture and peoples. One may question the decision to focus on crisis touch-points since rebellions, uprisings, organized resistance to anti-Semitism, and genocide all stand out for their lack of ordinariness. Oppositional and inflammatory rhetoric go hand-in-hand with geopolitical crises. Alternate American visions of the Islamic world–including the praise from American missionaries and social reformers for Islamic temperance, hygiene, and morality–are acknowledged but not treated at length for significance due to Walther’s primary focus on highly conflictual case studies. Given the thoroughness of Walther’s research, this potential objection does not undermine the force or persuasiveness of her conclusions or the merit of selecting those case studies. It does, however, highlight a line of future inquiry. Did anti-Islamic rhetoric lose power in periods of peace or abate in intensity? How did the embodied encounters of American missionaries and humanitarian workers change their own understanding of Islam? What were the reactions of Americans who never left the United States to positive reports about Islam and the Muslim people in missionary reports?

The power of civilization discourse in American culture has been noted by historians of gender, race, and diplomacy.3 Walther’s contention that American religious belief–both Christian and Jewish–shaped the rhetoric of civilization and helped to fashion the American Orientalist vision of the Islamic world is an important contribution. Walther demonstrates the powerful role played by these “beliefs in the cultural, religious, and civilizational inferiority of Islamic societies,” and her research points to the importance of understanding the intersections of American anti-Islamic discourse with discourses of progress, gender, human rights, and modernization (321). Her careful explication of the force and power of anti-Islamic thought as ethnic and religious minorities faced mistreatment does raise questions for additional future study about the self-perception of minority colonial subjects under Ottoman imperial rule.

Ultimately, Walther presents a persuasive case for why American history must be situated in world history, and she succeeds in demonstrating the power of anti-Islamic rhetoric and the central role of religion as it intersected with civilizational and anti-Islamic discourse. She seeks to highlight the intimate connections between domestic and international realities, and Sacred Interests decisively illustrates not only why this is the case but how historians should undertake such a task. Sacred Interests teaches us that anti-Islamic rhetoric and civilization discourse in the early nineteenth century reveal how global the young nation’s outlook was, long before the extensive globalization of the twentieth century. Walther’s Sacred Interests also helps explicate current U.S. entanglements in the Middle East with a careful reconstruction of the cultural beliefs and attitudes that have fostered a longstanding American interest in intervening in the Islamic world.

3 See Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States,

1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign People at Home and Abroad (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000); Mary Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Margaret D. Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science and U.S. Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

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Author’s Response by Karine V. Walther, Georgetown University

write my response to the H-Diplo Reviews of Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821-1921 with recent events in mind, which include an act of domestic terrorism in Charlottesville, Virginia during a protest held by groups that seek to define U.S. national identity as White and Christian.

Only a few days later, President Donald Trump tweeted a response to a terrorist attack in Barcelona in which he alluded to a thoroughly debunked myth that General Pershing had put an end to ‘Islamic terrorism’ in the Philippines by dipping bullets into pig’s blood before shooting them at Filipino Muslims.1 These two events are connected by an important thread: they both point to the uses, or more importantly, the misuses of history to justify actions in the present day. Historians have responded to these events by attempting to enlighten the public about the more complicated realities of the past, and challenging the simplistic stories and false narratives some have put forward about the United States and its relationships with non-Whites and non-Christians, both at home and abroad. Of course, attempts to misuse the past for the political ambitions of the present have a longer history. As Christopher Dietrich notes in his review, “conservative ideologues are not alone in the longer trajectory of American history, either in their calls for a more insular, triumphalist reading of the American past or in their dismissal of Islamic societies as inherently threatening or inferior.”

When I began working on this project in the shadow of the events of 9/11, I felt compelled to challenge hostile narratives about Islam and Muslims that emerged during this time period. Many scholars at that time were also responding to the crude and ahistorical portrayals of the ‘West’s’ relationship with Islamic peoples and Muslim-majority countries advanced by the late Samuel Huntington, in his now famous essay and book, The Clash of Civilizations.2 As I argue in Sacred Interests, Americans’ misinformed beliefs about Islam and Muslims have long led them to act in ways that have serious and violent repercussions for all of those involved. Nineteenth-century American beliefs about Muslims and the Islamic faith shaped important policies and left unfortunate legacies that can still be seen today in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Philippines.

Given the topics covered by this book, I am therefore incredibly honored to have my book reviewed by Christopher Dietrich, Michael Limberg and Sarah Miglio and I would like to thank them for the time and effort they put into such thoughtful responses. I would also like to thank H-Diplo editor Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse, managing editor for organizing the roundtable and Andrew Patrick for introducing the reviewers and providing an overview of their comments and the avenues for future research in our field. The collective work and knowledge of these academics on the history of U.S. foreign relations in the Middle East is inspiring. I look forward to reading Limberg’s dissertation and Miglio’s book in the near future, both of which will delve even more deeply into how American Christians shaped American foreign relations in the

1 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/898254409511129088; https://www.nytimes.com/live/south-

carolina-nevada-2016-election/donald-trump-2/

2 Samuel Huntington’s essay, “The Clash of Civilizations” was first published by Foreign Affairs in the Summer of 1993. He later expanded on his ideas in his book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, published in 1996.

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Middle East in the period before World War II.3 Similarly, Christopher Dietrich’s recent Oil Revolution: Anticolonial Elites, Sovereign Rights, and the Economic Culture of Decolonization also makes a strong contribution to our field by analyzing how U.S. foreign relations in the Middle East was shaped by questions of empire, anticolonialism, commerce, and global access to petroleum.4 His work reinserts the United States into the global phenomenon of empire and anticolonialism, from which analysis of more formal U.S. foreign relations has often been excluded, and which Sacred Interests also sought to address.

The three reviewers all raise important and valid questions, less about what the book covered, than about what it omitted and how these omissions shaped the overall argument of the book. In writing this book – and more importantly, in editing it down to a semi-manageable size that already forced me to cut the book by over a third – many interactions between the United States and Muslim-majority countries had to be left out of the story. For the most part, the case studies I chose were the ones that solicited the greatest involvement by Americans at multiple levels of society, and which including both diplomats and non-state actors, working at times together, at other times, side by side. For this reason, the book focused almost exclusively on what Miglio describes as “crisis touch-points” including “rebellions, uprisings, organized resistance to anti-Semitism, and genocide” which “all stand out for their lack of ordinariness.” She follows this observation by noting that: “Oppositional and inflammatory rhetoric go hand-in-hand with geopolitical crises.” This is an astute and important observation. Indeed, as a result of focusing exclusively on such moments, the book overlooks more positive relationships that certainly did exist between Americans and Muslims abroad in circumstances less fraught with violence, imperial repression, war, or justified horror in response to massacres and genocide. This leads Miglio to ask: “Did anti-Islamic rhetoric lose power in periods of peace or abate in intensity.”

While time, space, and diplomatic impact were certainly central in my choosing these specific case studies, it would be disingenuous to state that such factors were the only ones that led me to focus on these specific moments in history. As scholars, we are all shaped by the historical moment in which we write. Writing after the events of 9/11, my project developed alongside the rise of Islamophobic rhetoric expressed by media, some policymakers, and segments of the American public which targeted, and at times attacked, Muslims both at home and abroad. Alongside the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, similar rhetoric called for the resurgence of American Empire in the world. I was struck by how the depiction of Muslims in diverse areas of the globe recalled earlier nineteenth-century tropes that emerged from European Orientalism, itself shaped by its imperial relationships with Muslims. Of course, wartime rhetoric, like the language of empire, is often steeped in Manichean language that seeks to dehumanize and ‘decivilize’ its opponents. I acknowledge this fact in the book’s introduction, but I also recognize that choosing such moments shaped the overall argument in important ways.

3 Michael Limberg, “Abundant Life: U.S. Development in the Near East, 1919-1939,” Ph.D. Diss., University

of Connecticut, 2017. Sarah Miglio’s current book project is entitled Civilizing the World: Practical Christians, Progressive Religion, and Politics from Chicago to the Middle East, 1890-1925.

4 Christopher Dietrich, Oil Revolution: Anticolonial Elites, Sovereign Rights, and the Economic Culture of Decolonization (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press: 2017).

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I am comforted by the fact that other historians have published studies which reveal alternative depictions of U.S.-Muslim relations abroad and U.S. beliefs about the Islamic faith during less fraught moments in world history.5 There is also an increasingly rich body of work that details Muslim migration to the United States. As Sylviane Diouf taught us in her path-breaking work, Muslims were among the first African slaves who, through forced labor, helped build the United States into the global force it would become.6 Other work has detailed the migration of Muslim immigrants to the United States beginning in the late nineteenth century, many of whom went to work for the first Ford Motor plants in Detroit, Michigan.7 These studies demonstrate that far from being ‘interlopers’ in American society, Muslims have been present and actively contributing in shaping American society since its very origins. Other recent works point to early American attitudes towards Islam and how the Islamic faith became a test case for introducing religious toleration into the U.S. Constitution.8 Scholars have also demonstrated that American missionaries working amongst Muslim populations were not always antagonistic to the faith.9 I believe these studies begin to answer Miglio’s question and reveal that American attitudes about Islam and Muslims were never static nor universally negative. But while noting that studying these other moments is necessary and incredibly valuable, I would nonetheless caution that focusing exclusively on the positive views that some Americans had about Muslims and the Islamic faith does not tell the full story either. I would particularly caution against (re)engaging in depictions of the past that advance exceptionalist, celebratory narratives of the United States as a beacon of religious tolerance dating back to its very origins.

Echoing Miglio’s observation, both Limberg and Dietrich call for future studies that address other issues overlooked by the book. Limberg notes the need for scholarship that focuses on “how Muslims talked about Americans or worked to shape U.S. policies.” This is also a crucial point and one that I recognized very early on as the biggest challenge I faced in writing this book. International and global history pushes us to use multiple archives and languages to tell a more balanced story, one that integrates the voices and actions of those who were on the receiving end of American foreign relations. More generally, global histories that decenter the role of the United States and incorporate multiple foreign-language archives undoubtedly produce some of the best and most nuanced histories. These histories will allow us to complicate our own national histories in profound ways.

5 Timothy Marr’s The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism (2006) does an excellent job at looking at

American beliefs about Islam and Muslims in other time periods, including more positive understandings of the Islamic faith. Both Timothy Kidd and Kambiz GhaneaBassiri’s work has also covered some of this history.

6 See for example, Sylviane Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (New York: New York University Press, 1998).

7 This includes the work of Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Jane Smith, Timothy Kidd, Edward Curtis, Sarah Gualtieri and Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, to name just a few.

8 Denise Spellberg, Thomas Jefferson’s Qu’ran: Islam and the Founders (New York: Basic Books, 2013).

9 Ussama Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008); Faith Misplaced: The Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations, 1820-2001 (New York: Public Affairs Press, 2010); and Christine Heyrman, American Apostles: When Evangelicals Entered the World of Islam (New York: Hill and Wang, 2016).

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The geographical scope of the book, which travels from the Ottoman Empire to Morocco to the Philippines and back to the Ottoman Empire, engages with populations that amongst themselves spoke over a dozen languages. Unfortunately, in many of these areas, there was no accessible primary source base to rely on, nor did I have the language capacity to properly analyze such sources if and when they existed. This leaves those of us who seek to write good international history with a conundrum about how we tell these stories. Whenever possible, I tried to solve this problem by relying on the work of other historians who possess the language skills and who are themselves experts of these regions. I believe this is one of the best alternatives we can find when we wish to tell more complex stories about the past. I owe these historians a heavy debt, for they allowed me to include the voices of Muslim actors whenever possible. Nonetheless, I concede in the introduction that this remains a very ‘American story.’ While recognizing these limitations, I still believed that these stories merited being told. I would strongly agree with Limberg’s observations that more work on Muslim attitudes towards the United States in the nineteenth century, be they in the Philippines, the Ottoman Empire, North Africa or elsewhere, open great lines of future research. This research will be essential for its own sake, but will also allow other historians to tell more nuanced depictions of the past in their own work. Such work has already begun but more still needs to be done.

Finally, Limberg and Dietrich point to two other important areas which the book did not cover. As Limberg notes, the book does not take on the role of the infamous Samuel Zwemer, the American missionary, religious scholar, and so-called ‘Apostle to Islam’ who played an outsized role in shaping American theological, scholarly, and public understandings of Islam in the first half of the twentieth century. More generally, he also asks what role American Protestant missionaries might have played in “the early creation of Islamic studies…or Middle Eastern area studies programs.” Meanwhile, Dietrich notes that in each of the chapters, “a more thorough sense of the greater network around local Christian ministries might have been revealing.” This includes the role of Egypt and Egyptians and missionaries in Cairo, Beirut, and Damascus. Dietrich also asks “What relationships existed between religious interests and American businesses in the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century.” He concedes that “The book had to stop somewhere,” an observation my editor, Brandon Proia at the University of North Carolina Press, made several times. I am sure many historians share my frustration with what we have to leave out of our manuscripts.

But Limberg and Dietrich’s comments give me the golden opportunity to plug my next book, which touches on the very areas they identify as absent in Sacred Interests. This includes a focus on Zwemer, and the network of American missionaries in the areas he identified, Beirut, Cairo, and Damascus, but also extends to missionaries who worked throughout the Arabian Gulf, including Bahrain, Oman, Yemen, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. Moreover, this new research will specifically examine these missionaries’ interactions with American commercial interests. This book, tentatively entitled Spreading the Faith: American Missionaries, ARAMCO and the Birth of the US-Saudi Special Relationship, 1889-1955 (UNC Press, forthcoming), analyzes how American missionaries working for the Reformed Church of America helped to forge the network of contacts that American oil executives would later rely on to obtain oil concessions in Saudi Arabia in the 1930s. Addressing Limberg’s question, the book will also examine how the links between American missionaries, oil companies, and the U.S. government contributed to and drew from university programs in Islamic Studies and, after World War II and in the midst of the Cold War, the first Middle Eastern Area Studies programs in American universities. I am hopeful that this future work will address some of the important issues that could not make it into the first book.

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More importantly, I am excited that Miglio, Limberg, Dietrich, Patrick and other scholars in our field are addressing these important issues in their own work and taking our field in new and exciting directions. I thank them, and Thomas Maddux, once again for the opportunity to have my book reviewed by H-Diplo.