The Fate of Abraham

Why the West is Wrong about Islam

Peter Oborne

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781398501058
• eBook ISBN: 9781398501041
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Ideologies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As the Cold War faded into history, it appeared to have been replaced by a new conflict - between Islam and the West. Or so we are told. After the events of 9/11 and the advent of the 'war on terror', this narrative seemed prophetic. But, as Peter Oborne reveals in this masterful new analysis, the concept of an existential clash between the two is a dangerous and destructive fantasy. Based on rigorous historical research and forensic contemporary journalism that leads him frequently into war-torn states and bloody conflict zones, Oborne explains the myths, fabrications and downright lies that have contributed to this pernicious state of affairs. He shows how various falsehoods run deep, reaching back as far as the birth of Islam, and have then been repurposed for the modern day.Many in senior positions in governments across the West have suggested that Islam is trying to overturn our liberal values and even that certain Muslims are conspiring to take over the state, while Douglas Murray claims in his new book that we face a 'War on the West'. But in reality, these fears merely echo past debates, as we continue to repeat the pattern of seemingly wilful ignorance. With murderous attacks on Muslims taking place from Bosnia in 1995 to China today, Obornedismantles the falsehoods that lie behind them, and he opens the way to a clearer and more truthful mutual understanding that will benefit us all in the long run.

PART ONE The United States and Islam

‘As long as a white man does it, it’s all right, a Black man is supposed to have no feeling. But when a Black man strikes back, he’s an extremist, he’s supposed to sit passively and have no feelings, be non-violent and love his enemy no matter what kind of attack, verbal or otherwise, he’s supposed to take it.’

MALCOLM X, speaking at an Oxford Union debate on 3 December 1964, eleven weeks before his assassination

1 THE AMERICAN RELATIONSHIP WITH ISLAM

The American relationship with Islam has always been determined by imagination rather than reality.

There have been Muslims on the North American continent since Columbus – perhaps even before. Many arrived as African slaves, and their character, beliefs and culture were almost totally unknown to the white majority who shaped early American society.¹ Removed from their homelands and living a marginal existence, many adapted to a Christian-dominated environment before and after emancipation by outright conversion to orthodox Protestant Christianity or by inventing new forms of religious practice in which Islam played a minor and private part.

During the first century of the United States, very few white Americans would ever have encountered a Muslim at all, let alone on equal terms. This meant that Americans were free to view Islam through travellers’ tales which had a great vogue in early American life. These generally presented Islamic societies in distant lands as cruel, despotic and backward, tempered by the romantic mystery of the Orient and barely suppressed eroticism.

Although some of the Founding Fathers, notably Thomas Jefferson, treated Islam seriously and respectfully, negative stereotypes were established early in American history and were powerfully reinforced by the two so-called Barbary Wars of 1801–05 and 1815. These wars are often ignored in histories of the United States (for example, Paul Johnson does not mention them at all in over 800 pages of his 1997 book A History of the American People), but they were hugely important, both politically and culturally.

They were the first wars fought by the US on overseas soil, in this case North Africa, nominally against the fading Ottoman Empire but actually against the independent rulers of Tripoli, Tunis and Algiers, whose fleets preyed freely against American merchant ships, kidnapped sailors and traders, and extorted heavy ransoms and tributes (what would now be called protection money). The Barbary pirates, as they were called, made early Americans as frightened of militant Islam as those of today became after 9/11. As with all foreign wars fought by the US, the Barbary Wars were preceded by a barrage of propaganda and fake news, mostly featuring enslaved Americans enduring appalling cruelty. (These accounts were exploited by abolitionists, who pointed out the irony of the US going to war against Muslim slavery while preserving Christian slavery on a far larger scale.)

The Barbary Wars established a lasting image of valorous Christian Americans prevailing over backward, cruel Muslims and spreading the blessings of civilisation to benighted lands. They are celebrated to this day in the opening words of the official hymn of the US Marine Corps: ‘From the halls of Montezuma / To the shores of Tripoli / We fight our country’s battles / In the air, on land, and sea.’²

After the Barbary Wars, the United States had almost no contact with any Muslim society for another seventy years, with the exception of minimal and usually inaccurate accounts from traders, missionaries and travellers.

The Holy Bible and its impact

Unlike the British and French, who ruled millions of Muslims through their colonial empires, the Americans encountered few Muslims in the conquest of the continental United States, nor in the Caribbean and central and southern American regions where they became the dominant power.

Up to the twentieth century, the most widely read book in the US was the Holy Bible. Until the nineteenth-century many Americans read nothing else,^I and had little regular entertainment other than listening to sermons. In the early part of the century, the US underwent a series of religious revivals which engendered sects such as the Mormons, the Shakers, the Millerites and the Seventh-day Adventists. Although these sects argued fiercely with each other, they shared two powerful ideas in common.

The first was that Americans were a people chosen by God, like the Jews. Indeed, the Mormons professed that Americans were descendants of lost tribes of Israel (some believe that they managed to cross the Mediterranean and the Atlantic in midget submarines).³ The second was that Americans and Jews had a special role in the end of the existing world and the Second Coming of Christ, events which were imminent and precisely foretold in biblical prophecy. As we shall see below, the latter belief is still held by millions of American voters incited by popular (and profitable) Evangelical media in alliance with the Israeli government. This belief was the single most powerful influence on the overseas policy of the Trump administration.

The Bible, of course, makes no mention of Islam, as the religion followed its last book by several hundred years. The Bible therefore gives readers no understanding of Muslims. Anyone from Donald Trump upwards who relies only on the Bible as a source of authority can view Muslims at best as an aberration, ignorant and deluded people unaware of the will of God, and at worst, as enemies of the will of God and of his chosen people. For Americans increasingly obsessed by the imminent apocalypse, it has become easier and easier to identify Muslims as the shadowy figures mentioned in biblical prophecy who will dominate the world in the end times before being destroyed at God’s hands. I shall return to this troubling subject in much more detail, but I want first to tell the forgotten story of the Muslim population of early America.

Muslim slaves

Muslims went to the Americas with Columbus and all the other early European explorers. Indeed, there are persistent legends that they got there first, exploited notably in 2014 by Turkey’s President Erdogan.⁴

Columbus is said to have followed navigation charts created by Portuguese Muslims as far back as the twelfth century. However, because these Muslims were unpaid sailors and labourers, they are almost all anonymous and unknown. One exception is a certain Istafan, described as a ‘black Arab originally from Azamor’ in Morocco, renamed by his Spanish masters Estevanico de Dorantes. Istafan’s story is as dramatic as that of any European explorer, but he barely figures in any history of exploration. He survived desert and shipwreck, and was the first non-American to meet many American Indian peoples, who adopted him as a medicine man.⁵ Other exceptions barely count, as they involve invention such as the semi-fictional Kunta Kinte, the young Muslim from Gambia kidnapped and transported into slavery, who is the progenitor of the dynasty in Alex Haley’s novel Roots (1975). He probably was a real person, son of a Muslim merchant and sold into slavery in 1767. But the facts remain obscure and Haley’s imaginative treatment of his central character paradoxically drives home the anonymity of the Muslims who travelled to America. Very few early African American Muslims became known in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries because they were taken up by powerful white men to further their political, commercial or religious agendas – especially if they had become identified as Christian converts.⁶

Muslims were part of the slave population of the Americas from the earliest times but there is no consensus about the actual numbers. The lowest estimate is about 40,000 from a total slave population of 4.5 million in the 1860s. Given the incentives and pressures for slaves to convert to Christianity a figure of 40,000 professing Muslims in the 1860s is striking.⁷

There is some evidence (from the records of their masters) that Muslim slaves considered themselves superior to others and that they were used as supervisors and in skilled occupations.⁸ ‘Moorish’ slaves were regularly identified as the leaders of slave rebellions in the Caribbean and South America from 1526 to the early nineteenth century.⁹

Within the slave population, there are accounts of men who maintained a knowledge of Arabic and kept up Muslim rituals as both a mark of separation from the rest and in an attempt to find a better place in white-dominated society. Such efforts had little or no success, and indeed when emigrants from Syria and Palestine reached the United States on a large scale in the late nineteenth century, they had a better chance of being classified as white if they were Christians rather than Muslims.

The general pattern was for Muslim slaves in the US to lose their identity as Muslims. One reason was the absence of Muslim women slaves, who had a high death rate and were outnumbered by men. The ‘surplus’ male Muslim slaves formed unions with non-Muslim women and had children by them who were not raised as Muslims. Islam survived in isolated island communities off Georgia and South Carolina. Elsewhere, Muslim men gravitated to Black Baptist churches which gave them a degree of protection from the worst conditions as slaves and, after emancipation, from the lynchings of the Jim Crow era.¹⁰ As a result, Islam virtually disappeared from the US until the Muslim revival among African American communities in the early twentieth century. Living a marginal life, as a fraction of the slave population of the US, it is not surprising that a substantial native Muslim population had no influence on early American society. By contrast, Muslim powers overseas had a profound impact.

The United States fights its first foreign wars

American independence ended the protection of the British navy (and British tribute money) for the new nation’s merchant ships in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic approaches to it. They therefore became easy prey for pirates based in North Africa.

The United States in 1783 had no navy, no money and no constitution. Its government was largely in the hands of individual states, with limited powers for the Continental Congress. The convoy which took the American delegates home from the peace negotiations with Britain encountered Algerian pirates in the Atlantic. The pirates’ swift, three-masted xebecs were lightly armed, but they did not need to be well armed against the virtually defenceless Americans.

A year later, three American merchant ships were seized by the Algerians, and their crews taken hostage. In Algiers, they were imprisoned, tortured and enslaved. The pirates created widespread panic: even the bold sailor John Paul Jones thought they could ‘extend themselves as far as the western islands’, by which he probably meant the Canaries or Azores. Fear of the enemy within meant that four innocent Virginian Jews were banished as suspected agents of the Algerians.¹¹

Much as it would two centuries later in the Iraq War, the United States tried to organise a coalition of willing European powers to suppress the pirates, which the French refused to join, even though they were still formally allied to the Americans. (As over Iraq, the French became very unpopular and were widely suspected of secretly conspiring with the pirates to destroy American commerce in the Mediterranean.) The French response was a bitter disappointment to the American envoy to Paris, Thomas Jefferson, who oscillated between a policy of force against the Barbary pirates and the use of diplomacy (with the payment of tribute).¹²

Jefferson had more understanding of Islam than any American leader then or since. He kept a much-studied copy of the Holy Quran in his library. He had campaigned for religious freedom in his native Virginia and demanded recognition of the religious rights of the ‘Mahamdan [sic], the Jew and the pagan’. Later, in the long debates on the future American Constitution, he would campaign for Article VI, which ensures to this day that no public office in the United States, including the presidency, may be withheld on religious grounds.¹³

However, he and his colleague John Adams (then minister to London, later the second president) were shocked by the response of Abd al-Rahman, the negotiator for the Barbary State of Tripoli, with whom they sought to negotiate America’s first international treaty. ‘It was written in the Koran that all nations who should not have acknowledged [the Muslims’] authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon whoever they could find and to make Slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.’¹⁴ Whether or not the Americans reported this response accurately in translation, it established for the first time a template of militant Islamic fanaticism which has now become familiar.

For lack of a navy, Jefferson and Adams stuck to diplomacy and tribute. They negotiated a treaty not with Tripoli but with the Islamic state of Morocco. It expressly denied any hostility towards Islam, as well as bearing an Islamic inscription and date.¹⁵ However, the treaty brought little or no relief from piracy and hostage-taking. The demand for a navy to defend American lives and commerce was a key component of the nationwide debate on the Constitution and a powerful weapon for the Federalists against the proponents of states’ rights. It was even suggested that without a Federal union to finance the navy, the Barbary pirates could cross the Atlantic and invade the American coast.¹⁶ Eventually, in 1794, Congress met President George Washington’s pleas by voting to create ‘a navy adequate for the protection of the commerce of the United States against Algerian corsairs’.¹⁷

Meanwhile, early Americans were fed many lurid stories of their compatriots in captivity. As at present, some were fabrications.¹⁸ One of these dubious accounts had the compendious title The Captivity and Sufferings of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Prologue
• Introduction
• Part One: The United States and Islam
• Part Two: Britain and Islam
• Part Three: France and Islam
• Part Four: The Enemy Within
• Part Five: Fate of Abraham
• Further Reading
• Timeline
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright