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The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism. By Timothy Marr. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xiv, 309 pp. Cloth, $75.00, ISBN 978-0-521-85293-7. Paper, $24.99, ISBN 978-0-521-61807-6.)
Timothy Marr's study offers a persuasive foreground to an enduring American involvement in the realms of Islam, which he identifies as American Islamicism, dating since the earliest English settlements. A multidimensional American engagement with Islam involved religious groups, polemicists, politicians, generals, novelists, playwrights, abolitionists, feminists, travelers, and even artists, who often sought arguments for building their own respective cases by othering Islam. That preoccupation with Islam served domestic cultural configurations, harnessed specific intellectual representations, and offered a raft of routinely exaggerated religiopolitical trajectories. Such an attitudinal proximity with Muslims was not known even to Edward Said, who defined orientalism mainly as a European construct and absolved the United States of any such tradition....