"The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism explores the heritage of how Americans have long pressed orientalist images of Islam into service to globalize the authority of domestic cultural power. By delving deeply into rich and interdisciplinary archives of expression from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, the book examines how Muslim history and practices provided a contentious global horizon that Americans engaged to orient the direction of their national project, the morality of their social institutions, and the contours of their romantic imaginations. Early Americans first viewed the Islamic world as an antichristian and despotic threat but progressively revised these images into a resource for fashioning more comparative and cosmopolitan alternatives.

Readers will better understand how long-held habits of intercultural perception have shaped present impasses between the United States and the Muslim world."--Jacket.