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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. 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. 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.” She describes Thomas Jefferson’s familiarity with Islam and its history as follows: