Timothy Marr is Assistant Professor in the Curriculum in American Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill where he teaches seminars on such topics as cultural memory, captivity, tobacco, birth and death, and mating and marriage. He became interested in the subject of this book while teaching Herman Melville's Moby-Dick at Lahore American School in Pakistan in the late 1980s. He is the co-editor of Ungraspable Phantom: Essays on Moby-Dick.
Introduction: imagining Ishmael: introducing American Islamicism; 1.
Islamicism and counterdespotism in early national cultural expression; 2.
'Drying up the Euphrates': Muslims, millennialism, and early American
missionary enterprise; 3. Antebellum Islamicism and the transnational
crusade of antislavery and temperance reform; 4. 'Turkey is in our midst':
Mormonism as an American 'Islam'; 5. American Ishmael: Herman Melville's
literary Islamicism; Conclusion: American Howadjis: the gendered pageantry
of mid-nineteenth-century Islamicism.