The Islamic Lineage of American Literary Culture maps the Middle Eastern interiors and interiority of New World authorship, tracing neglected genealogies of Islamic source reception from the Revolution to Reconstruction. Privileging informal engagements and intimate exchanges, the book uncovers Islam’s formative impact on U.S. literary origins, excavating personal and private appeals to the Qur’ān, ḥadīth, and Sufi poetry by pivotal authors of early American literature, spanning the nation’s century of self-definition, from the 1770s to the 1870s. Domesticated in a double sense, literal and li ... More

The Islamic Lineage of American Literary Culture maps the Middle Eastern interiors and interiority of New World authorship, tracing neglected genealogies of Islamic source reception from the Revolution to Reconstruction. Privileging informal engagements and intimate exchanges, the book uncovers Islam’s formative impact on U.S. literary origins, excavating personal and private appeals to the Qur’ān, ḥadīth, and Sufi poetry by pivotal authors of early American literature, spanning the nation’s century of self-definition, from the 1770s to the 1870s. Domesticated in a double sense, literal and literary, Muslim sources are seen to permeate the home lives and household labors of five primary American figures—Ezra Stiles, William Bentley, Washington Irving, Lydia Maria Child, and Ralph Waldo Emerson—with Islamic traditions woven into the familiar fabric of their letters and sermons, journals and journalism, memoirs and marginalia. Distinct from foregoing treatments, the book emphasizes the materiality of early American appeals to Islam, publishing images from neglected manuscripts that witness U.S. engagement with the Muslim world, exhibiting the Arabic literacy and Islamic learning cultivated by the nation’s earliest authors. The book argues that the identities and idioms of foundational American figures were catalyzed through creative, and occasionally covert, acts of Islamic engagement, with Muslim sources and Middle Eastern languages acting as vehicles of artistic reflection, religious contemplation, and political liberation.