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Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research journal

ISSN 2278-9529

Arab Muslims in Pre 9/11 microscope of American Writing

Mubarak Altwaiji Yemeni Research Scholar Goa University-India

Using representations of the Arabs and Islam in American literary writing, this paper tries to examine the following questions. First, why does American literary Academia show a strong interest in the Middle East as evident in the works of Washington Irving and Mark Twain well before the United States economic and political interests in the region emerged in the second half of the twentieth Century? Second, to what extent can these literary writings help readers understand the American cultural encounter with the Arab World as shown in this discourse? Finally, what are the required approaches for comprehending those aspects of Arab-American relationship reflected in these works?

In modern America, it is undeniable that the 9/11 attacks have raised the American public curiosity to have an answer to questions such as Why were we attacked? Who attacked us? And what are the intentions behind them? It is also undeniable that this curiosity has promoted the American nationalism as reflected in the American literary thought in this particular spurt to write excessively on the attackers, their religion and culture. Accordingly, the majority of American literary publication pertaining to Islam and Arabs in the last ten years is written from the victims point of view without providing the Islamic view on the terrorist attacks. Therefore, no wonder to find these works based mainly on negative stereotypes and prejudices, which are clearly observable in the various narratives describing Arab Muslims as fanatics, irrational, primitive, belligerent, and dangerous. These generalizations and simplifications indicate that

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Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research journal

ISSN 2278-9529

American discourse is faulty; based on available eighteenth and nineteenth centuries discourses of Irving and Twain.

Since the eighteenth Century, the Middle East and its people appear in regular basis in the work of Irving and Twain. In their work, especially narratives, one reads of exotic cities, aggressive people, heretics, false Prophet, killing in the name of God and houris, beautiful women given as rewards for Gods martyrs. In addition, one finds distorted images of Islam and its most sacred figures such as Prophet Muhammad and his wives. As a young republic rising to power, Arabs of the Middle East have been a good and rich subject matter in its early writing. This interest in the American representation of Arabs had a special significance for American writers who identify their nation with the backward Arabs. This tendency of the early American writers to define themselves as a superior nation can be better realized in a lecture titled The American Scholar given by Ralph Waldo Emerson in August 31, 1837: If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era? (68).

In Irvings Mahomet and his Successors, distortion of the name of the Prophet of Islam begins in its title as he refers to Prophet Muhammad as Mahomet who is mentioned later as a founder of Religion of the Sword (155). Irvings manipulation of Muhammad into Mahomet and Islam into Mahometanism is a reductionist approach that articulates a sharp critique,

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Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research journal

ISSN 2278-9529

describing the apostolic mission of the Muslim prophet as wholly fallacious (Einboden. 44). In this approach, a mixture of sexuality and violence can be found in representation of the Prophet:

The sword, added he [the Prophet], is the key of heaven and hell, all who draw it in the cause of faith will be rewarded with temporal advantages, every drop shed of their blood, every peril and hardship endured by them, will be registered on high as more meritorious than even fasting or prayingthey will be transported to paradise, there to revel in eternal pleasures in the arms of black-eyed houris, His passion for the sex had an influence over all his affairs (154-155).

In Irvings tradition, Muhammad is a false Prophet, a Christian heretic and his message lacks originality of its own. Prophet Muhammads teaching has been one of the richest criteria for early American writers who follow a single criticism that Muhammad failed to be a Christian priest: Muhammad was either the Antichrist or a fallen Lucifer-like figure, a cardinal who failed to be elected pope, so he turned on the church (Quinn. 159). Christian principles, according to Irving, form the basis of Islam and it was the Christian Bahira who managed to uplift Muhammad from idolatry and Muhammad turned against Christianity at the end: One of the monks, by some called Sergius, by others Bahirawas surprised at the precocity of his intellectThey had frequent conversations together on such subjectsMany have ascribed that knowledge of the principles and traditions of the Christian faith displayed by Mahomet in after life, to those early conversations with this monk (46). Later, Muhammad failed to be a priest and turned to form a religion of his own:

Vol. I. Issue. IV

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Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research journal

ISSN 2278-9529

He now arrived at the point where he completely diverged from the celestial spirit of the Christian doctrines, and stamped his religion with the alloy of fallible mortality. His human nature was not capable of maintaining the sublime forbearance he had hitherto inculcatedIn a little while, and probably to his own surprise, he found an army at his command: for among the many converts daily made in Medina (152-53)

Islam is a religion of violence in Irvings tradition. Moreover, Irving notes that fighting in the cause of God is worthwhile: Many of the Arabian tribes had been converted by the sword, and it needed the combined terrors of a conqueror and a prophet to maintain them in allegiance to the faith (22). Irving, further, finds a strong connection between Muhammads sword and sexuality that the former is tool for achieving the latter. Irvings conception of the Prophets message is highly romantic and based on sacrificing ones life in order to get reward with blackeyed beautiful women to satisfy their lust in paradise:

...the faithful will be blessed with female society to the full extent even of Oriental imaginingshe will be attended by the Hur al Oyun, or Houris, so called from their large black-eyes; resplendent beings, free from every human defect or frailty; perpetually retaining their youth and beauty, and renewing their virginityThe intercourse with them will be fruitful or not according to their wish (359)

Sexual fantasy fills the two volumes of Irving on Prophet Muhammad and the Muslim nation. In the idolatry Arabia, Irving notes, Prophet Muhammads message to attract a good number of followers is based on sexual gratification and no spiritual one: His passion for the

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Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research journal

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sex had an influence over all his affairs (329). Prophet Muhammads excessive sexuality is left irredeemable in Irvings narrative. In addition, the Prophet is an immoral man who loses control on his desires: It is said that when in the presence of a beautiful female, he was continually smoothing his brow and adjusting his hair, as if anxious to appear to advantage (329). This immorality is vivid in the scene where the Prophet tries to have sex with Zeinab, the wife of his adopted son, Zeid: In the privacy of home she had laid aside her veil and part of her attire, so that her beauty stood revealed to the gaze of Mahomet on his sudden entrance. He could not refrain from expressions of wonder and admiration, to which he made no reply (193). The result of this meeting with the wife of his adopted son is that Zeid divorced his wife in order to allow the Prophet have a marriage as incestuous (193).

Irving may not have a prior knowledge that Zeinab is Muhammads cousin and it is Muhammad who forces her to marry Zeid. As an Orientalist romancer Irvings representation of the Prophet is complicated by uncertain facts from unreliable sources in order to unleash his imaginative skill. To a Muslim reader, Mohamet and his Successors is a narrative discourse meant to belittle, insult and dehumanize the Prophet. Hawfy argues that this marriage happened without any fabrication as Irving claims: Did not the Prophet know Zainab his cousin and how beautiful she was? Was not he the one that gave her in marriage to Zaid? Why did he wed Zainab to Zaid and did not marry her himself, considering that had he wanted? Would it not be more becoming his social position to marry his cousin first, than to marry her as the divorcee of his freed slave? (41-42). Relevant facts in Islamic history falsify Irvings description of Prophet Muhammads marriage to Zeinab. In Arab tradition adopted sons were treated like ones own sons and therefore his divorcee cannot get married to the adopter. Zeinab was Prophet

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Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research journal

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Muhammads cousin who was raised by Muhammad and later married her to his adopted son, Zeid. As a legislator for the new nation of Islam, Prophet Muhammads marriage to Zeids divorcee was to set a law to the Muslims that marrying adopted sond divorcee is not a sin. The Quran reveals:

So when Zaid had accomplished his desire from her (i.e. divorced her), We gave her to you in marriage, so that (in future) there may be no difficulty to the believers in respect of (the marriage of) the wives of their adopted sons when the latter have no desire to keep them (i.e. they have divorced them). And Allah's Command must be fulfilled. (33: 37)

Again a reader can observe that Irving might have relied on unreliable, inaccurate and antiIslamic sources. Following his description of Prophets sexual desire towards Zeinab, Irving is caught in an erroneous representation of certain occurrences and figures. Irving, for instance, while writing the Prophets biography, mentioned that the prophets father died when Muhammad was two months old: He was scarce two months old when his father died, leaving him no other inheritance than five camels, a few sheep, and a female slave of Ethiopia, named Barakat (33). This is surely false. All Islamic sources, without disagreement, tell us that his father died while he was in his mother womb and more precisely in the early stage of pregnancy. Regarding the Prophets mother, Irving, without doubt, confirms she was a Jewish: He had at an early age imbibed a reverence for the Jewish faith, his mother it is suggested, having been of that religion (73-74). Similarly, this cannot be true because the Prophets mother belonged to a family that followed Abrahams and Ishmaels teachings.

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Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research journal

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Following in the footsteps of Irving, Mark Twain introduced heaps of negative images on the Middle East and its people. Usually, Twain is looked at as the founder of American Orientalist Academia that his writings provided the required knowledge to the Americans when the Middle East was unknown to Americans, for America is a newly independent republic. With the start of The Gilded Age, a term coined by Twain, the process of imaginary representation of Arabs is launched. Hence the Middle East begins to loom larger in Twains writings he published after his trips to the region. This early American contribution in which Twain plays central role is referred to by Douglas Little, an American historian, No one probably did more to shape nineteenth-century U.S. views of the Middle East, however, than Mark Twain (13).

Twains major work on Arabs, The Innocent Abroad came as a result of his trips to different parts of the Orient at the end of the nineteenth century. The Innocent Abroad is prefaced with Twains monolithic differentiation between the civilized East and the backward east: This book is a record of a pleasure trip it is only a record of a picnic, it has a purpose, which is to suggest to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the East if he looked at them. Leaving New York about June 1st 1867 across the Atlantic, Twain reaches the East through Gibraltar that separates the East and West. Soon after Twain crosses Gibraltar, his monolithic view of the East emerges. He soon feels the foreignness and alienation in that land whose inhabitants are viewed as sub-humans: We wanted something thoroughly and

uncompromisingly foreign--foreign from top to bottom--foreign from center to circumference-foreign inside and outside and all around--nothing anywhere about it to dilute its foreignness-nothing to remind us of any other people or any other land under the sun (40).

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Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research journal

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In Tangier, Twain was more of imperial envoy than a literary traveler. As an imperial figure, Twain treats his subjects as people who must be civilized: people by nature and training filthy, brutish, ignorant, unprogressive (72). All Arabs, whether Muslims or Jews, do not mollify Twains feelings of foreignness: There are stalwart Bedouins of the desert hereJews whose fathers fled hither centuries upon centuries ago; and swarthy Riffians from the mountains-born cutthroats--and original, genuine Negroes as black as Moses; and howling dervishes and a hundred breeds of Arabs--an sorts and descriptions of people that are foreign and curious to look upon (40). Moors, Savages, monsters are the most attendant images Twain gives for Arabs. Monolithic representation of Arabs as opposite of the westerners can be understood here:

Spain is the only nation the Moors fear. The reason is that Spain sends her heaviest ships of war and her loudest guns to astonish these Muslims, while America and other nations send only a little contemptible tub of a gunboat occasionally. The Moors, like other savages, learn by what they see, not what they hear or read (47)

Arab women in Twains representation share an identical position with modern American writing that Arab woman needs libration from the Islamic oppressive rules. This view can be seen in the then American First Lady Laura Bush who states to a radio address on November 17, 2001: The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women (Smith.4). These words have an insightful resonance for a reader who has knowledge of Twains discourse that uses womens right to justify imperial domination as Gayatri Spivak puts it White men are saving brown women from brown men (296). Like Laura Bush, Twains discourse, as the syntax states, Arab Muslim women are more oppressed compared to their Jewish counterparts:

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Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research journal

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Moorish women who are enveloped from head to foot in coarse white robes, and whose sex can only be determined by the fact that they only leave one eye visible and never look at men of their own race, or are looked at by them in public (41). Twain shows his attitude towards Islam by establishing Judaism as a basis for judgment and as a ground against which he balances what he describes. Accordingly, Muslim women are more oppressed compared to the Jewish women who are plump and pretty, and do smile upon a Christian in a way which is in the last degree comforting (41).

As Twain continues his travel towards the Eastern parts of the Orient, negative representations increase. Nothing beautiful seems to have attracted his attention. His use of the term Saracens to refer to Arabs is the most reductive style of representation. The term Saracens is used to refer to Arabs residing in the Eastern part of the Orient. It equals Moors or Savages that used to refer to Arabs of the Western Orient. In Syria and Lebanon, the term to refer to savage Arabs who invade Genoa: The Saracens captured and pillaged Genoa nine hundred years ago, but during the following century Genoa and Pisa entered into an offensive and defensive alliance and besieged the Saracen colonies (97). There is a history, Emerson argues, for every word. To this effect he says as we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque (21). The term Saracens was widely used among Christian scholars to refer to Arabs, sons of Abraham from his wife Hagar. Grafton tries to trace the linguistic origin of the Latin word Saracen which is generally refers to Arabs; and came with three possible meanings. Grafton reaches to a linguistic contentment that the term Saracen equals plunderer or thief first used by the Byzantines to describe Arabs

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Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research journal

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In Syria, Twain had great sympathy for Syrians who are disturbed by an aggressive king who spoils their money: Syrians are very poor, and yet they are ground down by a system of taxationThey often appeal to the stranger to know if the great world will not someday come to their relief and save them (275). Before he reaches Damascus, Twain still had a good impression of the city: Damascus is beautiful from the mountain. It is beautiful even to foreigners accustomed to luxuriant vegetation (281). On the mountain dwelling on the city, Twain made a reference to Mahomet: Mahomet was a simple camel-driver he reached this point and looked down upon Damascus for the first time, and then made a certain renowned remark (281). Like Irving, Twains feeling of foreignness is noted to as he reaches Damascus: "The great Temple of the Sun, the Temple of Jupiter, and several smaller temples, are clustered together in the midst of one of these miserable Syrian villages, and look strangely enough in such plebeian company (276). Works Cited: Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The American Scholar. The Portable Emerson. NY: Penguin Books Ltd, 1981. Grafton, David D. The Arabs in the ecclesiastical historians of the 4th/5th centuries: Effects on contemporary Christian- Muslim relations, HTS: Vol 64, No 1. 2008 Hawfy, Ahmad Muhammad. Why the Prophet Muhammad Married More Than One. trantd. Ahmad Ibrahim El Orfaly. Cairo: supreme council for Islamic affairs. 1993 Irving, Washington. Mahomet and His Successors. 2 vols. London: John Murray, Albemarle Street. 1850 Little, Douglas. American Orientalism:The United States and the Middle East since 1945. University of North Carolina Press. 2002 Quinn, Frederick. The Sum of All Heresies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Smith, Sharon. Using women's rights to sell Washington's war. International Socialist Review Issue 21, January-February 2002

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Twain, Mark. The Innocents Abroad. Indiana: American Publishing Company. 1869 The Nobel Quran: English translation of the meanings and commentary. Tran. Muhammad AlHilali and Muhammad Khan. Medina: King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy Quran. 1984

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