Islam and the English Enlightenment, 1670–1840

Acknowledgments

a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s A book of this massive scale and chronology will inevitably be disputed among scholars for years to come, but the many debts I have acquired while writing it, from a dissertation to a final manuscript, are beyond dispute. My primary debt is to Robert Markley. As a dedicated advisor and meticulous reader, he spent innumerable hours reading and rereading multiple drafts of this book during different stages. His constructive feedback and encouragement have helped me rewrite and reorganize this book and figure out what I actually wanted to say. I also have benefited from the strong encouragement and engaging criticism of Bernadette Andrea, Ted Underwood, and Leon Chai. I also thank Vanderbilt University for a one-year research leave that enabled me to complete revisions for this book, as well as Vanderbilt colleagues who have offered their advice and support. In particular, I want to recognize Jonathan Lamb, Bridget Orr, and James Epstein for providing invaluable suggestions—and even challenges to—different chapters and parts of this book. The Johns Hopkins reader Rajani Sudan undoubtedly helped to make this book more coherent, effective, and readable. Matthew McAdam has proved to be a very attentive editor who was willing to take on, without reservations, the ambitious and lengthy project of a first-time author. I thank David Coen for a fine copyediting job and the hardworking staff at the Johns Hopkins University Press for overseeing the publication of this book. The theoretical inspiration for this work was kindled, in part, during my participation in a two-week seminar sponsored by the University of California Humanities Research Institute Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory and titled “Cartographies of the Theological-Political,” convened at UC Irvine by Saba Mahmood and Charles Hirschkind in the summer of 2007. Composed of speakers, faculty, and graduate students representing many disciplines and fields, this seminar reflected on interrelated questions about Islam, secularization, and religious belief that have changed the way I look at the eighteenth century. I acknowledge the members of the Southern California Eighteenth-Century Studies Group, particularly Felicity Nussbaum, for providing last-minute feedback on a precirculated version of chapter 2, “Letters from a Female Deist: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Muslim Women, and Freethinking Feminism.” I thank the Huntington and Clark Memorial Libraries for allowing me to use their collections , without which this book’s research would have remained incomplete. Funding for this library research was generously provided by the Vanderbilt Summer Scholars Program in 2008. I also made extensive use of the library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I am especially grateful to Jack Stillinger for nurturing my interest in Romantic Orientalism; he was the first scholar to listen attentively to a young graduate student raving about visionary poets and Islamic republics. I thank the University of Pennsylvania Press for permission to use material in chapter 1 that appeared in an earlier version in “A Hungarian Revolution in Restoration England: Henry Stubbe, Radical Islam, and the Rye House Plot,”The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 51.1–2 (2010): 1–25; and the Trustees of Boston University for permission to use material in chapter 4 that appeared in an earlier version in“The Hermetic Tradition of Arabic Islam and the Colonial Politics of Landor’s Gebir,” Studies in Romanticism 46.4 (2007): 433–59. Finally, I wish to thank my parents and my wife, Shimy, who has firmly stood by my scholarly endeavors through good and bad times. xviii   Acknowledgments Islam and the English Enlightenment, 1670–1840 This page intentionally left blank ...