A Muslim in Victorian America: The Life of Alexander Russell Webb

Reviews A Muslim in Victorian America: The Life of Alexander Russell Webb. By Umar F. Abd-Allah. Oxford University Press, 2006. 388 pages. $35.00 cloth. This book is a biography of Alexander Russell Webb, also known as Mohammed Alexander Russell Webb. Born in Hudson, New York in 1846, Webb was educated at the progressive Claverack College (also attended by President Martin Van Buren), and after a career in journalism was appointed U.S. consul to the Philippines. There, in 1888, he became the first notable American to convert to Islam—on the basis of his reading—without actually having met any Muslims. The conversion to Islam of a U.S. consul attracted considerable attention in both America and India. In 1892, Webb resigned his post as consul, and after a tour of India established a Muslim “mission” to America in New York in 1893. He represented Islam at the Parliament of Religions that was part of the Chicago World Fair of that year. His mission failed, however, if only because promised financial assistance from Indian Muslims failed to materialize, and was abandoned in 1896. By 1898, Webb had returned to small-town journalism. Umar Abd-Allah has researched both Webb’s life and its circumstances very thoroughly, and presents what will probably be the definitive biography of Webb. The book is highly readable, and brings to life not only Webb but also late nineteenth-century America, including the journalism and the alternative religiosity of the time. Webb was a Theosophist before he became a Muslim, and remained a Theosophist after becoming a Muslim. During his Indian tour, he spoke in Madras alongside Colonel Olcott, who spoke warmly of him. “Theosophy and esoteric Mohammedanism are almost identical,” Webb later maintained (p. 59). Webb was also in contact with the century’s two most important new religious movements of Islamic origin, the Ahmadiyya and the Bahais. Webb is of interest as an early American Muslim, and it is on this aspect of his significance that Abd-Allah focuses. Webb, contends Abd-Allah, “embraced Islam in the spirit of classic American individual initiative 119 Nova Religio in religion” and remained American in his “relatively broad-minded spirit, his frank opposition to fanaticism, and his lasting civic commitment,” as well as his attempt “to take interpretative control over his faith” (pp. 15, 19). In no way did Webb seek to change his ethnicity. Though he spoke in public of the excellences of Muslim society—and even got into trouble in Chicago for appearing to promote polygamy— he wrote in his diary during his tour of India that “procrastination and utter unreliability are the curses of the people of this country—after laziness, hypocrisy and a few other curses,” a condition which he ascribed to “climate and racial influence” (pp. 129, 136). Although Abd-Allah recognizes the importance of Western alternative religiosity for Webb, he does not discuss the importance of Webb for the history of Western alternative religiosity. This, to be fair, is not Abd-Allah’s topic. It is, however, probably the topic that will make this book most important for the readers of this journal. The extent to which the early history of Islam in the West is entwined with that of alternative religiosity is only just coming to be appreciated, and Abd-Allah’s biography contributes important elements to the picture that is now beginning to emerge. A difficult question—which, reading between the lines, some of Webb’s early Indian supporters may also have asked—is whether Webb adopted Islam, as Abd-Allah believes, or whether he adapted Islam to his own pre-existing conceptions. Abd-Allah identifies Webb’s Islam as of the Modernist variety associated with the Aligarh Movement, compounded with a certain amount of factual ignorance (for example, in mistaking the “universal brotherhood of man” for the fourth “pillar” of Islam). Modernist Islam certainly allowed Webb to present “practical Mohammedanism” (contrasted with esoteric Islam) as “a sensible, pure, every-day religion” and to maintain that “there is nothing in it that does violence to reason or common sense” (p. 170). This was precisely how the Modernists were then engaged in re-understanding Islam themselves. Western currents, however, may have been even more important for Webb. He wrote from the Philippines that he had “for several years been convinced that there were unseen influences at work bringing about a condition of things calculated to . . . establish mankind in the one true [religious] system. But which that system was to be,” he continued, “was to me uncertain until I arrived at a comprehension of the character and doctrine of Islam” (pp. 156–57). What he found was not just rationality but also “primordiality,” an esoteric “higher philosophy,” a “priceless jewel which has been preserved to man through all the ages” among “a vast pile of rubbish” (pp. 67–68). What Webb identified as the “priceless jewel,” and what he consigned to the “pile of rubbish,” may well have owed more to Theosophy and related currents than to Islam as generally understood in the Muslim world. Mark Sedgwick, University of Aarhus, Denmark 120