Islamic and Comparative Mosaic-Jewish and Christian Law and Ethics in Cotton Mather, George Sale, Abraham Hyacinth Anquetil-Duperron and Key American Founders, 1700–1800

This chapter begins by briefly situating American engagement with Muslim legal traditions in Transatlantic perspective. Americans encountered Muslim peoples through their merchant and military encounters with what came to be known as “the Barbary states” of North Africa as well as other Muslim regions within and just beyond the Turkish Ottoman Empire. These encounters went as far back as the seventeenth century when American colonial merchants engaged in trade under the British imperial flag. As America gained independence, they began navigating their trade ventures under the now sovereign, independent flag of the newly established United States. This included negotiation of trade agreements, ransoming of captives and naval protection of and intervention into those trade relations and resulting captivities. Their main interactions were with the generally autonomous governments of Morocco, Tunisia, Tripoli, and Algeria, though at times they reached into other domains of the Ottoman realms. Americans also directly engaged certain Muslim literature which had been translated into English from as far back as the 1700s. With this in view, the chapter moves on to look at understandings of and views toward Islamic-Sharia and comparative Mosaic-Jewish as well as Christian legal-ethical traditions in the other select writings of Cotton Mather in the early eighteenth century. Consideration is then given to some brief though significant references to Islamic legal and ethical practices within the correspondence of American Founders in the middle and latter part of the eighteenth century. Thereafter the chapter returns to connections between England and the American colonies, inclusive of some of American Founders, diplomats, and other notable figures. This includes extended coverage of the many and far-reaching ramifications of the in-depth treatment of Islamic-Sharia Law in George Sale’s “Preliminary Discourse” on The Koran, …Translated into English, which he produced in 1734 in London. Sale’s volume, along with two other European translations of the Qur’an, went on to influence American views both at home in the colonies and among Americans serving or taken captive among the Northwest African Muslim states as part of their Mediterranean trade and diplomacy.