The Islamic Lineage of American Literary Culture

Jeffrey Einboden is Associate Professor of English at Northern Illinois University.

• Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1: "Blessed Be Allah, Most Fair": Ezra Stiles's Arabic Revolutions Chapter 2: "I most sincerely wish an Arabic Manuscript of the Koran": William Bentley's Islamic Archives Chapter 3: "Intermingled with texts of the Koran": Washington Irving's Moorish Renovations Chapter 4: "To look at the Koran through his spectacles": The Muslim Progress of Lydia Maria Child Chapter 5: "He knows the Koran by heart": The Sufi Circulations of Ralph Waldo Emerson Appendix Notes Bibliography Index

"The first to unearth multiple manuscripts exhibiting American investment in Middle Eastern languages and literatures, Einboden argues that Islamic precedents helped to prompt and propel creativity in the young Republic, acting as vehicles of artistic reflection, religious contemplation, and political liberation. Intersecting informal engagements and intimate exchanges, Islamic sources are situated in this timely study as catalysts for American authorship andidentity, with U.S. writers mirroring the defining struggles of their country's first decades through domestic investment in the Qur'an, Hadith, and Persian Sufi poetry."--Reading Religion"The Islamic Lineage of American Literary Culture, like Einboden's previous monographs, is an exemplary piece of scholarship. Few scholars possess the unusual combination of linguistic, literary historical, and archival skills to pursue a project of this sort. The book makes an original and invaluable contribution to the study of Islamic influences on late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American thought and literature, and secures Einboden's placeamong the leading pioneers of this field."--Eric Ziolkowski, Helen H. P. Manson Professor of the English Bible, and Head of the Department of Religious Studies, Lafayette College"This study, once and for all, reveals how intimate and how early the relationship between the new American Republic and Islam was. It will change how we understand the sensibilities of American literary tradition. Islam was an intimate affair for early American authors, and it is this intimacy that the book uncovers, from notebooks, margins written on books, translations and correspondences. A real triumph, a must read, and a timely work."-- Walid A. Saleh,Associate Professor of Islamic Studies, University of Toronto"Jeffrey Einboden's superb investigation of the overlooked presence of Islam and Arabic and Persian literature in early America invites us to re-imagine such widely disparate figures as the Revolutionary minister Ezra Stiles, the Jeffersonian scholar William Bentley, the renowned storyteller Washington Irving, the abolitionist icon Lydia Maria Child, and the Transcendentalist sage Ralph Waldo Emerson. The scholarship is deep and precise, the writing eloquent,and the topic timely and urgent."-- Brian Yothers, author of Sacred Uncertainty: Religious Difference and the Shape of Melville's Career"[B]rilliant scholarship...this book is enormously relevant and timely, and it will serve as a formidable source not only for scholars of literature but also for those interested in linguistics, religion, cultural studies, and history."--CHOICE