Last week in History: Malcolm X

The YouTube Blog noted the assassination of Malcolm X last week along with a video review of Spike Lee's biopic from The New York Times:



Democracy Now has had several programs on Malcolm, including an interview with Oakland Japanese activist Yuri Kochiyama and this one with Manning Marable:

George Bush's biography of Muhammad, + Henry Stubbe

Reading American history can take you back further into other contexts... Two curious old out-of-print biographies of the Prophet Muhammad popped up on Google Books and elsewhere on the Internet more recently.

The Life of Mohammed: Founder of the Religion of Islam, and of the Empire of the Saracens is by Rev. George Bush (1796-1859), an actual relative of the infamous presidential family. This copy was scanned from Harvard Library and printed by J. & J. Harper in 1833.

I'd seen this book mentioned when flipping through a book by Fuad Sha'ban at City Lights Bookstore and later seen an actual old copy in Black Oak Books. It's partially sympathetic to Islam as a step away from paganism but at the same time calls Muhammad an imposter, which apparently was an issue in Egypt a few years ago. The context of the period, according to American Palestine by Stanford professor Hilton Obenzinger, is the view of America as a New Israel, a promised land chosen to do God's work on Earth, along with a "Holy Land Mania" of tourism to Palestine where natives were seen much the same as the natives of North America. If you visit the Stanford University quad and see the mural on the outside of the church, you might see California as a Promised Land!

Another even older book on the same subject has also been made available, and it's amazingly accurate on a number of levels for a book from 1670 or so (for example, on Christian history).

An Account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometanism: With the Life of Mahomet and a Vindication of Him and His Religion from the Calumnies of the Christians is by Henry Stubbe (1632-1676), a royal physician, classics scholar, and expert on chocolate. The copy you can download from Google was scanned from the UC Berkeley collection, prepared by Mahmud Khan Shairani from a manuscript from the Disney Catalogue, and published by Luzac (London) in 1911. There's another copy scanned from an Indian source on Archive.org.

Until more recently much of what was commonly known about Stubbe and his advocacy of Unitarianism or "Mahometan Christianity" was from British historian Christopher Hill, best known for his work on the English Revolution and period groups like the Diggers and Levellers, and the Quakers, Shakers, Ranters, and Seekers. A cool view of the relations between England and Islamic states in this period can be found in Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (pictured left), when the views of Muslims were more nuanced than the later period of Rev. George Bush, the European Conquest, and colonialism.

Update: other similar free old books include Ivan Ilych And Hadji Murad by Leo Tolstoy and The Crescent And The Rose Islam And England During The Renaissance by Samuel C. Chew.

Star Spangled Blues

Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock


Back-to-back, chicken shack

Robert J. Allison noted in The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim world, 1776-1815 that the early version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" contained lyrics saying that the banner obscured the crescent as heathens were killed. More recent books after 2001 have a different bent, so many people might not know many of the facts. Someone interviewed Allison at Newsradio 1040 WHO, if anyone wants to listen.

More on the background of the Tripolitan War and this earlier song is at Triplopia, which adds: "This 'Song' was even set to the same music as 'The Defense of Fort McHenry' later called 'The Star-Spangled Banner' -- the English drinking song, 'To Anacraeon in Heaven'! So 'The Star-Spangled Banner' has its roots not in an Anglo-American war at all, but in a war with an Islamic country, so it’s interesting to see how that relates to current events."

This is from an 1805 version of the Star-Spangled Banner:

Columbians! a band of your brothers behold,
In the conflict resistless each toil they endured,
...
'Till their foes fled dismayed from the war's desolation;
And pale beamed the crescent, its splendor obscured
By the light of the star-spangled flag of our nation.
Where each radiant star gleamed a meteor of war,
And the turbaned heads bowed to its terrible glare,
Now mixed with the olive the laurel shall wave,
And form a bright wreath for the brow of the brave.

Our fathers who stand on the summit of fame,
Shall exultantly hear of their sons the proud story,
How their young bosoms glowed with the patriot flame,
How they fought, how they fell, in the blaze of their glory.
How triumphant they rode o'er the wondering flood,
And stained the blue waters with Infidel blood;
How mixed with the olive the laurel did wave,
And, formed a bright wreath for the brows of the brave.