Enemies and Intimacies: Rethinking US-Middle East Cultural History

Muslims, Arabs, and other Middle Easterners, in various guises, have long been part of the US cultural and political landscape.¹ And despite the orientalist inflection of early American references to Islam and Arab culture, throughout the nineteenth-century US writers, entrepreneurs, and public figures had a nuanced relationship with Islam and the Middle East, which contrasts with the degrading experiences of Muslims and Arabs in the contemporary US.² Even at the time of the founding of the republic, noteworthy US political leaders showed significant interest in Islam and the Arabic language, as Denise A. Spellberg demonstrates in “Could a Muslim Be President? An Eighteenth-Century Constitutional Debate.”³ She describes Thomas Jefferson’s familiarity with Islam and its history as follows:

He owned Sales’s translation of the Qur’an, along with numerous works on the Ottomans and Barbary pirates. There is evidence that he attempted to teach himself Arabic. But he also explored what most of his contemporaries apparently ignored: theories of religious toleration in which Muslims were featured.

(490)

Spellberg analyzes the 1788 debate between Federalists and anti-Federalists in North Carolina over the religious test for citizenship, where the former argued that religious identity should be so insignificant in the constitution of the newly formed republic that even a Muslim could become president. Spellberg demonstrates “the emergence of a distinctly positive but problematic Federalist vision of the rights accorded imagined Muslims in the United States: positive because Muslims were theoretically accorded rights, but problematic because their reluctant advocates assumed that these rights would never be tested in practice” (487). Published in 2006, the article predicts the smear tactics used against Barack Hussein Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign in which an anonymous chain e-mail asserted the conspiracy that candidate Obama was a crypto-Muslim (Mosk), a charge that Colin Powell refuted on Meet the Press when he parried that not only was Obama a Christian, but “the really right answer is, Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president?” (Powell).

Asking in 2006, if a Muslim can be president with reference to an early republic debate allows Spellberg to address the historical place of Muslims in US political culture, even as she raises questions about their contemporary status. Spellberg establishes what can now be seen as an eighteenth-century precursor to Powell’s statement insofar as the Federalist position on the rights of imagined Muslim citizens, is oddly echoed. For the Federalists and for Powell, defending in theory the possibility of a Muslim US president declares religious tolerance that is a defining aspect of US democracy. Despite the limitations of the Federalist view of Muslims and Powell’s projection of aspirational dreams onto a hypothetical Muslim-American child, these positive assertions significantly contrast with the overwhelming hostility toward Muslims, from the era of the early American Republic to the present.

Spellberg’s argument in “Could a Muslim Be President?” “complicates scholarly conceptions of Muslims through the analysis of a momentary, and possibly momentous, exception to the prevailing rule that all Islamic references in debates on the Constitution were exclusively negative” (487). Her examination of the Federalist opposition to the religious test for citizenship and higher office aims at positively invoking Muslims within US discourse as a counterexample to the more commonly held eighteenth-century views associating Islam with the “despotism and oppression” of the Ottoman Empire (488). By affirming that Muslims not only had the right to citizenship but could also be president, North Carolina Federalists in 1788 were merely using an extreme example rhetorically to demonstrate the importance of the principle of religious tolerance in the political doctrine of the...