American Christian Orientalism

Though this recent publication focuses on 19th-century Protestants, there is a good deal of evidence that such essentializing orientalism lives on today in American evangelicalism, and Christianity more generally. Current views of, e.g., Christianity in the Middle East as seen in the eyes of many of my students would reflect this. In any event, a welcome new study: An American Biblical Orientalism: The Construction of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Nineteenth-Century American Evangelical Piety by David D. Grafton (Fortress Press, 2019), 246pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

An American Biblical Orientalism: The Construction of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Nineteenth-Century American Evangelical Piety examines the life and work of Eli Smith, William McClure Thomson, and Edward Robinson and their descriptions of the “Bible Lands.” While there has been a great deal written about American travelogues to the Holy Lands, this book focuses on how these three prominent American Protestants described the indigenous peoples, and how those images were consumed by American Christians who had little direct experience with the “Bible Lands.” David D. Grafton argues that their publications (Biblical Researches, Later Biblical Researches, and The Land and the Book) profoundly impacted the way that American Protestants read and interpreted the Bible in the late-nineteenth century. The descriptions and images of the people found their way into American Bible dictionaries, theological dictionaries, and academic and religious circles of a growing bible readership in North America. Ultimately, the people of late Ottoman society (e.g. Jews, Christians and Muslims) were essentialized as the living characters of the Bible. These peoples were fitted into categories as heroes or villains from biblical stories, and rarely seen as modern people in their own right. Thus, in the words of Edward Said, they were “orientalized."

Obsessive-Compulsive Ottoman Disorder

Well do I recall reading biographies of David Lloyd George, as well as histories of the Great War and its aftermath, and hearing again how much George loathed the Ottomans and how, if nothing else came of the conflict, he wanted to ensure their empire was smashed after the war. Even sympathetic commentators and biographers regarded this as an "obsession" on George's part, but it was apparently an obsession shared by many others, as we shall soon see. Set for release early next month is what looks to be a fascinating work exploring how we construct images of "enemies" and how we view and write history in the light of current politics: Noel Malcolm, Useful Enemies: Islam and The Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750 (Oxford University Press, 2019), 512pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

From the fall of Constantinople in 1453 until the eighteenth century, many Western European writers viewed the Ottoman Empire with almost obsessive interest. Typically they reacted to it with fear and distrust; and such feelings were reinforced by the deep hostility of Western Christendom towards Islam. Yet there was also much curiosity about the social and political system on which the huge power of the sultans was based. In the sixteenth century, especially, when Ottoman territorial expansion was rapid and Ottoman institutions seemed particularly robust, there was even open admiration.

In this path-breaking book Noel Malcolm ranges through these vital centuries of East-West interaction, studying all the ways in which thinkers in the West interpreted the Ottoman Empire as a political phenomenon - and Islam as a political religion. Useful Enemies shows how the concept of 'oriental despotism' began as an attempt to turn the tables on a very positive analysis of Ottoman state power, and how, as it developed, it interacted with Western debates about monarchy and government. Noel Malcolm also shows how a negative portrayal of Islam as a religion devised for political purposes was assimilated by radical writers, who extended the criticism to all religions, including Christianity itself.

Examining the works of many famous thinkers (including Machiavelli, Bodin, and Montesquieu) and many less well-known ones, Useful Enemies illuminates the long-term development of Western ideas about the Ottomans, and about Islam. Noel Malcolm shows how these ideas became intertwined with internal Western debates about power, religion, society, and war. Discussions of Islam and the Ottoman Empire were thus bound up with mainstream thinking in the West on a wide range of important topics. These Eastern enemies were not just there to be denounced. They were there to be made use of, in arguments which contributed significantly to the development of Western political thought.