Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [195]
In his first inaugural address, on March 4, 1801, after a fiercely contested election, which eventually tied at thirty-seven electoral college votes with his opponent Aaron Burr, Jefferson warned of a crabbed and constricted political imagination: “And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions.” The success of the young United States depended, in his view, upon a “sacred principle”: “Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle … If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”90
Is this just another of the sententious platitudes that often figure in Enlightenment public rhetoric? I think not: here is a uniquely powerful, combative idea. Reason, in Jefferson’s view, is a weapon that will undermine or neutralize “error of opinion.” It is more adaptable, more resilient, and more dangerous to “error” than the blind certainties of faith. Lurking in these words, it seems to me, is the germ of the antiviral, a powerful ideology more than capable of resisting this new “viral” enemy. Maledicta or a “crusade against evildoers” is a decrepit and antiquated response to an enemy who might appear to take an ancient shape, but who is in reality infinitely adaptable, more postmodern than modern. The alternative is to follow the language and ideology implicit in Jefferson’s resonant phrases.
Conclusion
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Better Angels of Our Nature
THIS BOOK ENDS FAR FROM WHERE IT STARTED: THE TRAIL THAT began in the Old World—the Levant—ends in the New. This is not an arbitrary conclusion, for the United States has been involved with the world of Islam from the first years of its independent existence. There were trade agreements signed with the North African pashas from the 1790s, and a short war in 1805, when the Stars and Stripes were raised over a captured Tripolitanian citadel. Later in the nineteenth century the history of American relations with the Ottoman Empire developed quite differently from those of the European states, largely because of the success of American missionaries among local Christians.
The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, founded in 1810, became effective in winning converts in the Ottoman heartland, especially among local Armenian Christians.1 The board poured money and resources into sustaining these Christian communities, often isolated clusters within a larger Muslim population. Missionaries became a powerful influence on U.S. foreign policy, providing a constant flow of information on conditions in these distant “mission fields.” Significantly, they secured the appointment of U.S. consuls in many areas of the Ottoman lands, and consuls and missionaries together presented an image of oppression and atrocity; much of this evidence was effortlessly transmuted into savage anti-Ottoman (and anti-Muslim) propaganda.
The killing of Ottoman Christians in the 1890s and the mass murder of 1915, both events profusely and horrifically documented, had a long-lasting effect on American perceptions of the Middle East. This modern savagery reinforced the older and more remote memories that have appeared in earlier pages.2 The Armenian slaughter stimulated a galvanic reflex, similar to the British response to the Bulgarian atrocities of 1875–76, described in chapter 1. Henry Morgenthau, U.S. ambassador at Istanbul from 1913 to 1916, told the engineer of atrocity Mehmed Talaat Pasha:
You look down on Christian missionaries but don’t forget that it is the best element in