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“Athiests.”)
    9. For a study of American views of the Islamic world as “a remarkably useful rhetorical device,” see the important analysis of Robert J. Allison,
The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776–1815
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 35–59, quote on 59. A specialized form of American “Orientalism” is defined by Timothy Marr,
The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1–114.Edward Said first recognized “the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point” for his study of European views of the Middle East, even though America’s foreign policy there at that time did not conform to the model of emerging European military superiority, which Said describes as “the ineradicable distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority.” America in the eighteenth century inherited key European ideas about Islam and the Middle East that could be termed Orientalist, but the United States was not yet in a position of political or scholarly dominance in defining the area. Instead, the United States remained less militarily powerful than the Islamic world but still vulnerable to negative European precedents about the area; see Edward Said,
Orientalism
(New York: Vintage, 1979), quotes on 3, 42. Others who have nodded to Said’s powerful precedent includeThomas S. Kidd, “ ‘Is It Worse to Follow Mahomet Than the Devil?’ Early American Uses of Islam,”
Church History
72, no. 4 (December 2003): 767–78; Thomas S. Kidd,
American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 12. Scholars of American literature and culture have repeatedly drawn upon Said’s precedent, but with caveats; for example, see Malini Johar Schueller,
U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790–1890
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 3; Battistini, “Glimpses of the Other before Orientalism,” 447, 468–69; Fuad Shaban,
Islam and Arabs in Early American Thought
(Durham, NC: Acorn Press, 1991), 199–205; Marwan M. Obeidat,
American Literature and Orientalism
(Berlin: K. Schwarz, 1998); Jennifer Costello Brezina, “A Nation in Chains: Barbary Captives and American Identity,” in
Captivating Subjects: Writing, Confinement, Citizenship, and Nationhood in the Nineteenth Century
, ed. Jason Haslam and Julia M. Wright (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 201–19
.
    10. Thomas S. Kidd,
God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution
(New York: Basic Books, 2010), 16–20; Jon Butler,
Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 52, 198.
    11. There is evidence of similar ideas of toleration even earlier, in the late fifteenth century; see chapter 2 in Stuart B. Schwartz,
All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 53.
    12. Mary V. Thompson, “Mount Vernon,” in
Encyclopedia of Muslim-American History
, ed. Edward E. Curtis IV, 2 vols. (New York: Facts on File, 2010), 2:392.
    13. Michael A. Gomez,
Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 166; Michael A. Gomez,
Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 66.
    14. The only historical reference to “six” Muslims who served in the American Revolutionary War may be found on a Web site that includes several chronological errors about Muslims in the eighteenth century. It provides only five names. One such was the slavePeter Salem, who was freed for his participation in the battle of Bunker Hill in Boston. He is assumed to be Muslim based on his surname, which might not