The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776-1815 (review)

As this review is being written, American missiles are again dropping on Iraq, in what is but the most recent chapter in the long and unhappy story of the United States’s relations with the Middle East. It was another chapter in that story that inspired Robert Allison to write The Crescent Obscured. Vacationing in Iran when the 1979 Revolution began, Allison realized that the Iranian people’s fury was directed more against America’s rulers than against their own. This aroused his curiosity as to the roots of United States’s troubled relations with the Middle East and, more generally, with Islam. Allison’s research, based on a firm bedrock of primary archival materials and an imaginative use of literary sources, led him to America’s first overseas military adventure, the 1801–5 war with Muslims of coastal North Africa.

The book’s title comes from the third verse of a song Francis Scott Key wrote at the conclusion of that war—a revised version of which became the American national anthem—that clearly identifies Islam and the Muslim world as the enduring enemies of the United States:

And pale beam’d the Crescent, its splendor obscur’d By the light of the star-spangled flag of our nation, Where each flaming star gleam’d a meteor of war, And the turban’d head bowed to the terrible glare

(205).

How and why did Islam and Muslims become so identified, and why was this war with Tripoli fought? Allison’s first chapter explores the diplomatic background to the conflict, highlighting the policy debate that arose in the young United States over commerce and shipping in the Mediterranean Sea. For decades, Arab princes there routinely detained merchant vessels unless paid “tribute,” a practice that European powers, and in America pragmatists like John Adams, regarded as simply part of the cost of doing business. But idealists like Thomas Jefferson, interpreting such behavior as extortion and payment as bribery, were determined to show the world that the American republic was a new sort of nation that would not follow the old world’s “corrupt” practices.

Behind Jefferson’s bellicose stance toward the Barbary “pirates,” however, lurked deeply ingrained attitudes toward Islam and Muslims that pervaded the American public. Allison explores how contemporary theater and literature transmitted Orientalist stereotypes of “Mahomet” and the “Saracens,” especially those portraying Islamic civilization as despotic and opposed to liberty, from Europe to Revolutionary America. Jefferson himself translated a French essay warning that, historically, Islamic fanaticism had ruined flourishing civilizations in Egypt and Syria. Allison also shows how eighteenth-century stereotypes of Muslim gender relations, in which tyrannical men exploit soulless women, possessed a special resonance among people who had only recently freed themselves from the perceived parental tyranny of England. In short, Americans were reshaping earlier European perceptions of Islam to serve as reference points for understanding their own state and society.

The Islamic reference point, however, proved a double-edged sword. The rationale for America’s war in the Mediterranean—that a nation that had just wrested its independence from tyranny could not tolerate the “enslaving” of American merchants and seamen by Arab “pirates”—only exposed a deeper contradiction. How could Americans condemn Arab Muslims for enslaving a handful of Americans when Americans had themselves enslaved millions of Africans? American abolitionists seized on the Barbary coast conflict to advance their own arguments against American slavery. In a 1797 novel, for example, a mullah observes that whereas Muslims practiced true brotherhood and never enslaved one another, Christians of the American plantations routinely baptized Africans and then used their Christian brothers as brutes. Such arguments helped polarize Federalist or abolitionist New Englanders and slave-holding Virginians, whose enthusiastic support for French Revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality exposed them to charges of hypocrisy.

As soon as the conflict ended, however, its unsettling implications for American slavery swiftly subsided, at least temporarily, while a brazen triumphalism...