Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive and the Barbary Orient An Example of America’s Early Literary Awareness of the Muslim Near East

Abstract

There stood the infidel of Modern breed, Blest vegetation of infernal
seed, Alike no Deist, and no Christian, he; But from all principle,
all virtue, free. To him all things the same, as good or evil; Jehovah,
Jove, the Lama, or the Devil; Mohammed‘s braying, or Isaiah’s
lays; The Indian’s Powaws, or the Christian’s Praise.
Timothy Dwight,
The Triumph of Infidelity (1788)
The American literary acquaintanceship with the Muslim Near Orient,
or the Near East as some prefer to say, in the eighteenth and in the nineteenth
century respectively, was principally an enterprise based on indirect encounter
and exotic experience. A handful of inquisitive travelers and curious religious
missionaries had some opportunity to observe directly, but most authors had
to rely on the printed page-books and other sources written by students
who had no real chance of penetrating into the Orient first hand. European
writers, the British romanticists in particular, played a tremendous role in
the formation of the American perception of Muslim thought and character.
While part of the problem was fragmentary sources and faulty knowledge,
the root cause was the deeply established Occidental preconception of Islam
and Muslims, which is a subject that lies beyond the scope of this paper ...