First Encounters Between the Unites States and the Muslim World

Journal of American Studies of Turkey 9 (1999) : 61-70. First Encounters between the United States and the Muslim World Robert Allison Captain Bainbridge set a unique table. Each quarter of the globe, America, Asia, Africa, and Europe, was represented by a decanter of fresh water drawn from it. He had samples of foods from each continent brought to the table simultaneously, to the great delight of his guests, who also came from the four corners of the world. This multicultural banquet was made possible by its location. Bainbridge entertained his guests just outside İstanbul, on board the USS George Washington, the first American warship to visit Turkey. Could there have been a more appropriate place for this multi-national gathering, drawing together people from all over the world, than on board an American ship named for the hero of the American revolution and first President of the United States, at the precise point where Europe meets Asia? Bainbridge had made a strong impression some weeks earlier (9 November 1800) when he first arrived in Turkey, despite the fact that no one in the government recognized the American flag, nor had anyone heard of the United States. Bainbridge finally was asked if his country was not also called the “New World.” When he said indeed it was, the messenger left for the shore, returning in a few hours with a lamb, a symbol of peace, and flowers, as a mark of welcome. Sultan Selim III permitted the ship to enter the inner harbor, and as the George Washington passed his palace the Sultan paid particular attention to its flag. He noted a heavenly convergence: stars on the American flag, and the crescent on Turkey’s flag, that suggested “analogy between the people and the laws, religion, habits and manners of the Americans and Mussulmen [sic.]” (Dearborn 20; see also Harris). A trading relationship had already opened. In July 1800 the merchant ship Martha had arrived in İzmir, where it spent a month discharging one cargo and taking on another. To have George Washington follow Martha so closely, to have the Sultan note the similarities between the flags of his empire and the United States, boded well for future relations between İstanbul and Washington (Ship Martha Log). Bainbridge arrived in Turkey after a long series of false starts in this relationship. In May 1784, Congress had authorized its agents in Europe, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, to meet with representatives of the Ottoman Sultan. But France’s minister of foreign affairs, the Comte de Vergennes, a former French minister to İstanbul, had told Adams that such a treaty would benefit Americans little (and presumably benefit France less) (Paullin 126-127). Though Franklin did meet with at least one Turkish official (in 1800, the then Capudan Pacha’s secretary would ask Bainbridge about his old friend Franklin), Adams dropped the idea. In 1786, after Algiers had captured two American merchant ships, Adams and Jefferson again considered a Turkish negotiation, but again did nothing. William Carmichael, American agent in Madrid, wanted the Americans to act, and not heed the counsel of France: “We shall never be respected until we respect ourselves,” he wrote Jefferson on 15 July 1786 (Papers of Thomas Jefferson 10:137-138). The latter proposed a multi-national alliance of non-aligned states with a naval force led by John Paul Jones, the American naval hero who had written to him on 31 July 1785 that military action against Algiers would show that the Americans were a “great people who deserved to be Free” (Papers of Thomas Jefferson 8:334). Jefferson proposed this idea to diplomats from Portugal, Russia, and Naples, but abandoned the idea when Vergennes again stepped in, telling Jefferson’s chief French ally, Lafayette, that France would not permit such a plan to be developed on French soil. Jones served Catherine the Great’s navy in Russia’s war against Turkey. Writing to Jefferson (from Saint Petersburg) on 31 January 1789, he said that “if the new government of America determines to chastise the Algerines [sic]” they should make “a common cause with Russia in the Mediterranean,” with American sailors serving on Russian ships under his command (Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States of America 7:395). Nothing came of this intriguing idea. Ten years later, the US made a completely different move on the Turkish front, this time to join Turkey in an alliance against France, with whom both were at war. John Pickering, son of the American secretary of state, was dispatched on a mission to Turkey, but the project was cancelled because the Mediterranean was deemed too dangerous to travel (see Timothy Pickering’s letter of 5 May 1799 from Philadelphia to John Pickering; and John Pickering’s letter of 3 June 1799 from Lisbon to Timothy Pickering in Pickering Family Manuscripts). Bainbridge arrived in Turkey not as an official emissary of the US, but as a courier for the Dey of Algiers, who had commanded Bainbridge, bringing the US tribute to his regency, to carry the Dey’s gifts to the Sultan. Not an auspicious beginning, but a beginning of which Bainbridge made the most. Would his dinner party symbolize a growing friendship between these two distant nations, each estranged from the politics of Europe? Did it portend future gatherings hosted by the United States, a place where all people of the world could find welcome? Positive answers to these questions lay far in the future, beyond the lifetimes of Bainbridge and his guests. Americans had a profound ignorance of the Muslim world, seeing Muslim societies in general, and the Ottoman state in particular, as powerful symbols of the wrong way to build political and social organizations. Americans, in fact, had inherited a particular European idea on the nature of Muslim societies, and as they built their own political society they used this image of Islam as a model for what to avoid. For Americans the Ottoman state and other Muslim societies were as much symbols as they were countries. Americans had an image of these nations rooted in ideology and history, and this image shaped the American reaction to the real Muslims they encountered. Encounter them they did, as over a hundred American sailors were captured by Algiers in the 1790s. The US followed the policy of other European powers in paying tribute to Algiers and the other Barbary states, though Jefferson, Bainbridge, Jones, and Carmichael all believed the US should set a different example. The Americans were creating a new kind of political society which would not succumb to the corruption and avarice of the old world. For the US to follow the corrupt practices of the Old World would inevitably corrupt the society Americans were trying to create. They would then share the same fate of every other nation in the world, and ultimately degenerate into a political system like the Ottoman empire, about which they had read in John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon’s (...truncated)