Bearing Witness

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 and Islam stands out—not because of its scrupulous presentation of the long record of Christian statements about Islam and not because it does a magnificent job compiling such views, but because, in the end, the author, a practicing Christian and associate professor at Baylor University, is compelled to take some stand and draw conclusions, however tentative and prudent, from his exposé.

Sensitized by the anti-Muslim vitriol that followed in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy, Kidd was surprised to find echoes of the present denunciations of Islam in American religious history, going all the way back to the seventeenth century. The anti-Muslim rhetoric landed in America with the first Pilgrims, even though America was considered to be safely distant from Islam. A number of prominent preachers from all colonies regularly used Islam in their polemics all the way to the days of the American Revolution, at which time the themes they had developed about Islam became well ensconced in the public imagination, political rhetoric, and early missionary ideology. "Although one should hesitate to describe early Americans as conversant with Islam," Kidd comments, "they certainly conversed about Islam regularly. In doing so, they established views of Muslims that would persist, in very different contexts, through our own day" (p. 1). It is this rather unchanging discursive pattern that leads Kidd, in the end, to agree with Edward Said's main thesis in Orientalism (1978).

Islam in early America was part of a larger Protestant triumphalist eschatology, one that anticipated the defeat of those evil and unwitting allies, Roman Catholicism and Islam, either through military defeat or, in less violent ways, conversion. This theology includes the restoration of Jews to their promised land (itself to be followed by their conversion) as a prelude for the much-prophesied millennium. (Sometimes, as with Jonathan Edwards, the Jews are lumped together with Catholics, Muslims, Deists, and other lesser species.)

Early Barbary captivity narratives were used to preach against the depredations of Islam. The dissemination of Humphrey Prideaux's The True Nature of Imposture Displayed in the Life of Mahomet in late eighteenth-century America did much to strengthen the motif of Mohammed and his concocted heresy as impostures; for, as Kidd notes, "Prideaux's treatment of Muhammad was likely the most influential in eighteenth-century Anglo-America" (p. 9). In addition to his imposture, Mohammed was alternately seen as either an epileptic or an immoral hedonist who promulgated a religion promising sensual delights. Compared to the bright light of Christianity, with its gentle mores, Islam represented violence, sensuality, deceit, and ignorance, among other traits. These views of Islam, stripped of their religious overtones, were condensed into mere despotism by the time of the American Revolution.

Thus, the negative images of Islam were familiar to Thomas Paine, who compared the abuses of the British monarchy to those of the papacy and Islam in Common Sense; or to John Quincy Adams who compared his rival Thomas Jefferson to the Prophet Mohammed...