Reviews in American History

Anouar Majid
Bearing Witness
Reviews in American History - Volume 37, Number 2, June 2009, pp. 185-190

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Project MUSE - Reviews in American History - Bearing Witness Project MUSE Journals Reviews in American History Volume 37, Number 2, June 2009 Bearing Witness Reviews in American History Volume 37, Number 2, June 2009 E-ISSN: 1080-6628 Print ISSN: 0048-7511 DOI: 10.1353/rah.0.0086 Bearing Witness Anouar Majid Thomas S. Kidd. American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. 201 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. 29.95. This remarkable book should be studied over and over again by anyone willing to understand the ideological origins of America's enduring clash with Islam. It conveys a sense of how a branch of the conservative Protestant narrative finds echoes in the most secular of places, like the late Samuel Huntington's clash-of-civilizations thesis, or, even more concretely, in U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. For hundreds of years, including in our troubled post-9/11 era, the demonizing of Islam has been a mainstay of some branches of the American Christian tradition, even as evangelical Christians have been doing their utmost to convert Muslims and show them the way to a gentler God. And just as American Christians have experienced a great many setbacks in their evangelical venture, this book, in the end, leaves one wondering whether we could ever find our way to some form of cultural entente. This is why I think American Christians...