Scratch a phobia and you’re sure to find philia just underneath. Anti-Islamic thought is centuries old, but so is its opposite, especially among late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers who were fascinated by Islam, believing that it represented a purer, more honest grappling with dilemmas found in the “West.”
Reporting on the remarkable ruse pulled off by Babo, Mori and their companions on Amasa Delano, the Peruvian viceroy wrote that it was Islam’s “perverse ideas”—namely its effort to find a balance between free will and fatalism under conditions of extreme suffering, along with its insistence on human dignity—that made the religion such a threat to Christian slavers.
In Europe, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a founder of German nationalism and one of the most influential philosophers of his era, thought Islam more rational and less self-abnegating than Christianity, believing that faith in Allah represented a higher form of universalism: “We all live and die in Islam,” he wrote. In Great Britain, Thomas Carlyle felt Islam a useful alternative to the materialism, fragmentation and egoism of modern life. It might be a “bastard kind of Christianity,” he said, but it was “a living kind; with a heart life in it.” For his part, Hegel complained that too much “abstraction swayed the minds of the Mahometans,” and then proceeded to reduce all of world history to an abstraction.
Like others of his day, Melville swung easily between caricature and admiration when considering Muslim culture. He might use a turbaned “Moor” to signal opulent despotism, even as he appreciated Islam’s sublimity. Melville toured Turkey, Palestine and Egypt in 1856–57, and was both fascinated and repelled by the mass of humanity he witnessed. In Cairo, the city’s minarets, he wrote in his journal, were “wonderfully venerable” and “gleam like lighthouses.” In Istanbul, scattered among towering cypress trees, they reminded him of the “intermingling of life & death.” One wonders what he would have done with the character of Babo had he known that the real West African, along with many of his co-conspirators, were Muslim. That they were, though, is appropriate, for Melville too thought that the real meaning of freedom was found, as that ancient Sufi mystic put it, in recognizing the limits of freedom.