CONCLUSION

BRITONS, MUSLIMS, AND THE SHADOW OF THE AMERICAN INDIANS

When Joseph Pitts was captured by Algerian pirates in 1678, his first fear was that they might eat him: “I being but Young the Enemy seem’d to me as monstrous ravenous Creatures, which made me cry out, O Master! I am afraid they will kill us, and eat us.”¹ In the mind of this terrified youth from Exeter, the “Moors” and the “cannibals” had become interchangeable in savagery and violence. Pitts’ reference to Muslim cannibalism, however, is curious in that it had never appeared before in anti-Muslim writings. Rather, it had appeared in Muslim anti-Christian invective during the Crusades when Christian taffurs, as the Muslims called them, ate the bodies of the Saracens. Meanwhile, from the beginning of the conquest of America, cannibalism had been associated with the Indians. For Pitts, the literature he had read or the stories he had heard about the Indians had now come to define the Muslims. North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and North America were all the territory of the cannibalistic and savage Other. It is no wonder that when Thomas Phelps, a captive in Morocco in the 1680s, tried to describe the savagery of the Moroccan ruler Mulay Ismail, he could find no analogy more suitable than that of the American Indians: “I have been several times in the West-Indies, and have seen and heard of divers Inhumanities and cruelties practised there . . . but indeed I forget them all, they are not to be named in comparison with this Monster of Africk.”²

By the end of the seventeenth century the Muslim “savage” and the Indian “savage” became completely superimposable in English thought and ideology. But it was only in the eighteenth century that this superimposition was transferred into the colonial discourse; in that century a colonial discourse against Islam in the full sense of the term evolved. After over two centuries of conquering, dominating, and enslaving Americans and sub-Saharan Africans, Britons found that their discourse of empire had become fully articulated and fully transferable anywhere in the world. They had begun to conceive of a new imperial world order to be ruled by Britannia. And in this new order the Mediterranean was ready for Britannic domination.

This transferability of discourses can be traced in the works of Daniel Defoe. In 1728, about a hundred years after the beginning of the Great Migration to America, Defoe reflected on the history of English commerce and the prospects for its future. He was deeply satisfied by the extent of British trade when he viewed the vast territories that were colonized by his compatriots or serviced by their merchant ships. Defoe, however, was aware of competition, and hoped that England would expand its markets by integrating the natives of many parts of the world into the commercial cycle. For, he noted, while the Portuguese and the Spaniards had made the native populations of South America and Africa “subservient to Trade as well as to Government,” England had failed to do so in her American colonies, and had not integrated the native populations into the commercial and political infrastructure. Rather, Britons had developed an ideology of excluding natives and relying completely on themselves both as producers and consumers. They had failed to create markets among the native populations, although the natives offered an “Ocean of Commerce” that would reward both exploration and exploitation.³

Aside from this failure the only thorn in Defoe’s English side was that of the “Turks or Moors of Tunis, Tripoli, Algier, and Sallee.” These Muslims were delaying and sometimes threatening the fulfillment of Defoe’s imperial dreams of trade by attacking British ships in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. And for Defoe there could be no evil greater than a people who were not eager to pursue trade. For him the world was divided between nations who traded and nations who did not—the two “cities” of modern capitalism. As he reflected on the North African states that did not trade he recalled Carthage, which had been a great trading city, and lamented that it had been overrun by the non-trading Vandals, and then “some Ages after them the Saracens, Arabians, and Mahomitans, came in over the Heads of the Vandals.”⁴ The Muslims in North Africa inherited the legacy not of commercially enterprising Carthage, but of the pillaging Vandals. And that, to Defoe, was an unforgivable flaw in their character: “These Mahometans, as I have said of the Turks, have very little Inclination to Trade, they have no Gust to it, no Taste of it, or of the Advantages of it; but dwelling on the Sea-coast, and being a rapacious, cruel, violent, and tyrannical People, void of all Industry or Application, neglecting all Culture and Improvement, it made them Thieves and Robbers, as naturally as Idleness makes Beggars: They disdain’d all Industry and Labour.”⁵ For Defoe, the Muslims were indolent non-traders, and the only way to confront them was for France, England, Spain, and Holland to unite their forces and “fall upon them [North African Moors] in separate Bodies, and in several Places at the same Time.”⁶ Just as a century before, the apologists for the colonization of America had advocated a “falling upon” the Indians, Defoe advocated attacking the North Africans for the same commercial and imperialist reasons.

This way of resolving the conflict with North Africa was not, of course, new. Over a century earlier, Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Thomas Roe, and others had hoped for a similar united European front against the Barbary Corsairs. That hoped-for unity never materialized. Now, however, after centuries of European colonization, Defoe was certain about how the conflict with the Barbary states would be conducted; it was not going to be simply a battle or a war in which the enemy would be defeated and subdued. Rather, it was to be a reenactment of the American experience of conquest and colonization. The Muslim “natives” were to be pushed southward—as the American Indians had been pushed westward—emptying the land, whereupon “Multitudes of [European] People would be encouraged by the Advantages of the Place, to go over and settle upon it.” The “Barbarians” would be removed from the “Cities and Provinces of Algier, Tunis, Tripoli & c.”—note the etcetera—so that the cities would be “peopled with a new Nation, or new Nations made rich by Commerce.” Such an act of ethnic cleansing would surely, concluded Defoe, “bring more Glory to the Christian Name.”⁷

Defoe’s call for the colonization of Muslim territory was not motivated by Christian zeal despite his repeated allusions to Christianity. At no point in the text did Defoe mention the hope of converting the Moors by such an invasion, even if mentioning it were to be, as it had been with other imperialists, a camouflage for conquest. Rather, Defoe’s was a studied call for domination and possession based on market needs, not on God’s will—on greed, not religion. Defoe’s proposal is important because it marks the transition of the conflict between Christian Europe and Muslim North Africa and the Levant from the religious to the commercial, from a holy war to a trade war, from battle to invasion. It further demonstrates how the model of the conquest of the American Indians was continuing to inspire British imagination and ideology.

The conquest of America had set the pace for the conquest of the rest of the world. Just as the English and other Europeans had conquered America by displacing and annihilating its “idle” and “sodomitical” population of Indians, they were also to conquer the non-trading and lascivious Moors and Turks. Given that the Moors and the Indians and the other ethnic groups all appeared the same to the enterprising Briton—they were either consumers or natives to be dominated or removed—there was no obstacle to duplicating and triplicating the American process elsewhere. The world was ready to be refashioned by Britain.

Defoe reveals how British ideology against the American Indians was superimposed on the Muslims. In the same way that the Indians had been “removed” and their lands repeopled by new nations, North Africa, too, was to be repeopled and divided into “several and separate Allotments of Territory upon the Coast, and in the Country adjacent.”⁸ In advocating this goal, Defoe confirmed the British rather than the Spanish model for dealing with the Indian/Muslim Other. Throughout the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century conquests the Spaniards had tried, and succeeded, in Christianizing and hispanicizing the conquered, whether by force or by conviction, whether Moors in reconquered Iberia or native Americans. The Spaniards sought to integrate rather than to exclude. Britons, on the other hand, did not try to anglicize the colonized. Although there were missionaries who wanted to Christianize the American Indians, the overwhelming attitude of the colonists was simply to ostracize them—even the converted and anglicized ones. For the colonists, particularly in New England, the Indians were not only culturally inferior, but racially too; their skin color doomed them to “evil” Otherness.⁹ And this is exactly the attitude that developed in England and Scotland toward Muslims in the early modern period. Britons simply did not want to be near the “Turks,” even if they were converts to Christianity. As Indians, relegated to praying villages in northeastern America, were mocked and ostracized, so would the Muslims.

Consistent with Britain’s ideology to want land rather than people, the desire to possess more than to proselytize is reflected in the account that was published at the end of the eighteenth century. In 1797 the first autobiographical account by a Muslim convert to Christianity in England was published. The Muslim was Ishmael Bashaw, a Turk, who had settled in England and fallen into such poverty that he dictated his life story so it could be published and sold: “Printed for the Benefit of I. Bashaw and his Family, and sold by him” (title page). This was the first English text describing a Muslim’s experience in England in the Muslim’s own voice—or at least as close to his own voice and sentiment as was possible.¹⁰ Bashaw had been born in Constantinople in 1735, had been married, had been lustful and brutal in his youth—as the English readers expected Muslims to be—had joined a merchant ship that was captured by Spanish pirates, had been imprisoned and had escaped, and then had hidden in the house of the English Consul in Lisbon for three years, after which he fled to England. In London, still dressed in his Turkish clothes and turban, he “met with much abuse from the common people, carters, porters, & c. some of whom pulled me by my whiskers, and others threw me down.”¹¹ He was attacked and robbed, after which he left the metropolis and started wandering from village to village, living on the roads, sleeping on “butchers’ shambles,” ¹² sometimes receiving money from church collections that were made for him, and at other times simply enduring abuse and disgrace. He could not speak English and communicated only with those who spoke French or Italian, one of whom was the duke of Buccleugh at Durkeith, in Scotland. The duke preached Christianity to him in French and Latin, whereupon Bashaw was convinced of the truth of Christianity and the falsehood of “Mahometanism” and asked to be baptized. But the duke refused and “advised me to exercise patience.”¹³ Upon leaving the duke Bashaw met again with thieves who robbed him and “abused me as a Turk.”¹⁴ To be a Turk in England or Scotland, he discovered, was to be an object of Christian ridicule, persecution, and violence.

In Richmond, Yorkshire, Bashaw met a woman named Elizabeth Formes, fell in love with her—conversing with her in Spanish—and married her. How a Muslim could marry a Christian without being converted and baptized is not explained, but, strangely, Bashaw, who always described the difficulties he encountered, did not seem to have faced any problem marrying a Christian in church. The Edinburgh minister who performed the ceremony tried to dissuade the woman from such a marriage, not for religious or theological reasons, but for cultural ones. He alerted her to the different treatment women received in Turkey. Again, it is interesting that no theological argument was presented by the minister against the marriage between a Muslim man and a British Christian woman.

After the marriage the couple wandered from place to place, sometimes eking out a living, at other times, relying on the charity and kindness of people, especially the Quakers. Bashaw meanwhile was pleading to be baptized, but as one minister in Norwich retorted to him: “‘Do you think I will baptize a Turk who cannot say the Lord’s prayer?”¹⁵ Christianity, for the minister, was a religion of and for the English. Later in Lynn, Bashaw met with similar refusal: “I applied for Christian baptism, but was refused on account of the trouble of preparing me for it.”¹⁶ Six weeks later he met with another refusal. No Briton would accept a turban-wearing, non-English-speaking “Turk” in the Christian fold; Christianity had linguistic, cultural, and national requirements, which Bashaw did not meet.

In his despair, while in the village of Spalding, in Lincolnshire, Bashaw went to a church. The congregation gazed at him in surprise, and when he sat down the sexton approached and “offered to take off my turban, which I refused.”¹⁷ Bashaw soon realized that he was in the right place, for the minister was the first to agree to baptize him. And in order for him to learn the “Lord’s prayer, the creed, and the ten commandments,” the minister gave him a “book containing instructions to the Indians”¹⁸; Christianizing a Muslim was the same as Christianizing an Indian. As the minister looked at the “Turk,” he could think only of the heathen Indians. And as the Indians had been baptized after reading the book, so would this “infidel.” The fact that Bashaw, as a Muslim, was a monotheist while the Indians were pagans, did not seem to make any difference to the zealous minister.

The baptism of Bashaw entailed the same cultural and personal changes that were required in the baptism of Indians. Just as Pocahontas had had to become English in her apparel, habits, and looks, so did Bashaw. He was told that he could not be baptized with his whiskers, so the bishop conducting the baptism turned barber and clipped them. He then removed Bashaw’s Turkish clothing and brought him new ones. “Now Ishmael,” the bishop said, “you look like an Englishman and a Christian.”¹⁹ He then gave him the English name James, just as Pocahontas had been given an English name. To become a Christian was to become English in looks, name, clothing, and religious belief. Unfortunately, Bashaw’s becoming English did not lead either to reliable work or to a home; with his wife by his side he continued to wander from city to city, having and burying children as they went along so frequently that he had to sell his story in order to sustain himself, his wife, and their single surviving child out of ten. Neither conversion nor anglicization could effect his integration into the Christian society of England or Scotland. Bashaw was an Other, defeated, impoverished, and alterized. He was in the same situation as the straggling American Indians who entered New England towns, sometimes to be beaten, sometimes pitied, and always to be viewed as outsiders.²⁰

It is an interesting coincidence that in the same decade Bashaw published his account about the Muslim-as-Indian, another similar account was published in the United States. American writers had generally shown little interest in Islam or Muslims, except in the context of theological polemics or allusions to captives among the North African corsairs.²¹ If they were aware of Muslims at all, they were aware of them as yet another nonwhite race from whom whites should be segregated. In 1693, the House of Burgesses in Virginia declared “Negroes, Moores Molattoes, & Indians Slaues,” and in 1705 the law stated that no “Negroes Mulattos, or Indians, although Christians, or Jews, Moors, Mahametans, or other Infidels shall, at any Time, purchase any Christian Servant, nor any other, except of their own Complexion.”²² By the end of the eighteenth century, however, United States merchants had begun trading in the Mediterranean, and many American sailors were captured by North African corsairs and kept for ransom. Indeed from 1775 on, hundreds of sailors and merchants were captured and enslaved in Algiers.²³

Completely unfamiliar with the civilization of Islam, laymen and politicians immediately realized the need for information about the sociological and anthropological conditions of North African slavery; they feared that more Americans might be captured in the future. Congress felt a particular sense of responsibility, and therefore when one John Foss published a hasty account of his captivity around 1796, Congress urged him to prepare a second edition in which he would elaborate on the religious and cultural environment of North Africa and correct inaccuracies that had appeared in his earlier account. Foss complied and in 1798 he published his Journal of the captivity and sufferings of John Foss; several years a prisoner at Algiers; together with some account of the treatment of Christian slaves when sick: and observations on the manners and customs of the Algerines. 2nd ed. Pub. according to act of Congress.This was the first detailed account of a captivity among the Muslims to be published in America.²⁴ As with the English captivity accounts, this account was intended to provide information about the Muslims and their strange new world—new at least to the Americans.

In line with the wishes of Congress, Foss emphasized that his text was for the “utility” of Americans: “should, at any future period, from causes not seen, more Americans be doomed to wear the galling chain . . . a knowledge of the habits, manners, and customs of the place, may not be unserviceable” (Preface). To make the text useful, Foss realized that he had to situate it within a society whose construction was already familiar to the American reader. And no better society presented itself to Foss than that of the American Indians, who had been amply described in scores of captivity accounts over the previous two centuries. The image of the savage Indian would define and legitimate the image of the Muslim. For Foss, the account would not be “serviceable” unless he used the criteria of the Indian captivity genre with which his audience was familiar. In the same manner that Defoe had superimposed models of colonization, Foss superimposed models of captivity. In both cases, one model explained two peoples.

Such superimposition was possible because it was being controlled by the White Man, who was not daunted by cultural complexity; he could simplify and translate everything that belonged to “natives.” If Foss was aware of the early English and European writings about America, where the Moors had been superimposed on the Indians, he may have felt justified in his own superimposition. He was simply explaining the Muslims by situating them in the familiar context of the American Indians.²⁵ Inevitably, such clarification of the Muslims, based on the representation of the Indians in a literary genre that derived from half a globe away from Algiers, led Foss to confuse the differences between the Indian and the Muslim worlds. By confusing the differences between the two environments of captivity, Foss produced a Journal that represented the Muslims in the same hostile and disdainful manner as late eighteenth-century narratives of Indian captivity represented the Indians.

By the time Foss wrote his account, the Indian captivity narrative, which had passed through various phases in its development toward a genre, no longer served religious puritan goals as it had in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; rather, as Roy Harvey Pearce has shown, this narrative represented a “vehicle of Indian-hatred.”²⁶ The narrative elaborated on Indian horrors and physical outrages to show the “savagery” of the captor, and to solicit pity for the authors, many of whom used for that purpose a sensationally excessive and rhetorical style. The narratives reflected the contemporary American ethos that was against accommodating the Indians and very much in favor of “cleaning up the wilderness.” The accounts therefore proved instrumental in invigorating the emergent nationalism of late eighteenth-century America.

Foss followed this criterion faithfully, and like the Indian captivity accounts of the late eighteenth century, his Journal excluded theological allusions; there was not in the whole account a single reference to the New Testament or to Christ. For Foss, the three-year ordeal of captivity had no religious relevance. This indifference to religion did not, however, prevent Foss from advancing a strong anti-Muslim invective. Just as the Indian captivity account served to foment anti-Indian hatred, Foss used his own account to generate anti-Muslim sentiment. He made the analogy quite clear: the Moors of North Africa were similar to the Indians of North America in skin color and stature. The Americans, however, were similar to the Turks in being “well built robust people, their complexion not unlike Americans.”²⁷ The reason for the latter superimposition was that the Turks were the rulers of North Africa—they were conquerors of the native Moors. But then Foss added that the dress of the Turks makes them “appear more like monsters than human beings.” There were no humans among the Muslims. Either there were monster-like Turks, or Indian-like Moors.

To confirm this image of the “barbarians”—a term that would henceforth be used repeatedly in American accounts of captivity among the Muslims—²⁸ Foss described in great detail the cruelty of the Muslims to the slaves, and elaborated on the various kinds of punishment that were meted out in North Africa. As in the numerous accounts that described Indian cruelty and torture, ²⁹ Foss was graphic in his description of “oriental” horror. He described the “bastinadoe,” and spent pages distinguishing between the numerous methods of execution and reflecting on the brutality of pain the “Algerines” inflicted: “But for murder of a Mahometan he [the perpetrator] is cast off from the walls of the city, upon iron hooks, which are fastened into the wall about half way down. These catch by any part of the body that happens to strike them, and sometimes they hang in this manner in the most exquisite agonies for several days together before they expire.”³⁰ Further evidence of Muslim cruelty and heartlessness was derived from episodes about slaves who were crushed under the rocks they were moving. Foss also recorded the story of a “blackman belonging to New-York,” who died the same day he left the hospital because the man’s master had taken him out before he had fully recovered.³¹ The Muslims were ruthless.

Finally, Foss tried to show that Muslims had no historical legitimacy in North Africa—an argument similar to one used since the seventeenth century to legitimate a holy war against them. Similarly, other American writers in the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century claimed that there was a manifest destiny that upheld their right to the American Zion, a right that necessitated the destruction of the Indian “usurpers.” Foss used a similar argument, although he did not apply to Algiers the biblical model of the promised land; North Africa was and had been the land of the great civilizations of Carthage and of Rome. Under those civilizations the land had “abounded with many populous cities, and to have residence here was considered as the highest state of luxury.”³² Muslims had violently replaced the Carthaginians and the Romans—who had become the Christians of North Africa, according to Foss—and as usurpers, had devastated the land. What greatness in “science” and “wisdom” that once prevailed among the Arabs no longer remained. Foss lamented the loss of Carthage and Rome to those “merciless Barbarians, whose very breath seems to dry up every thing noble, great or good.”³³ Just as the barbarity of the Indians had justified their conquest, the barbarity of the North Africans also justified their conquest and destruction. Only after they were expelled would the old glory be reinstituted. Only with their annihilation would the Euro-American civilization of the classical world reassume its rightful land.

This argument by Foss is similar to American arguments against the Indians. A contrast between a sordid present and a glorious past, whether of Zion or Rome, resulted in the illegitimization of the present, whether of Indians or of Muslims, and the aspiration toward a glorious future by the chosen and the American. In both cases, the present was without legitimacy because it was either a usurpation of the past or a hindrance to the future. Foss was emphasizing here that North Africa in the past was different from the world of cruel and strange “Mahometans” of his day, and very different from the world of the Americans. That is why he showed in his description not what the Muslims had, but what they lacked, since what they lacked was precisely what Americans had and what made Americans the measure of civilization. The world of the Muslims was different from the world of the Americans, and therefore, like the world of the Indians, alien, undesirable, and ultimately expendable.

A unique literary genre in American writing about the Indians defined the Muslims. The Journal, which served future Americans in understanding North African Islam, confirmed a construction of Islam that drew on a literary narrative completely alien to the environment it purported to portray. It confirmed that just as the Indian—who had been a danger in the past—was Other because of his “violence” and primitiveness, the Muslim—who was a danger of the present and the future—was Other in his violence and “Mahometanism.” The first document in American writing about a Muslim captivity described the Muslims through an Indian-hating American lens.

The triangle was then complete. As John Smith had viewed the Indians through the lens of his Muslim/Turkish antipathy, John Foss viewed the Muslims through the lens of Indian antipathy. And as the lands of the North American Indians had been “allotted” to the French, the English, and the Spanish, the lands of the Muslims were to be allotted, as Defoe hoped, to “new [European] Nations.”

Exactly a century after the second edition of A Plan of the English Commerce was published, in 1830, France invaded, de-peopled, and dominated Algiers and turned it into a satellite in its empire of trade and power. Defoe’s prophecy of empire was fulfilled; the conquest of the Middle East had begun.