ABSTRACT
Eighteenth-century American and European literature made the Muslim world a counterpoint to the idea of individual autonomy, the central feature of the emerging American ideology. American misunderstanding of the Muslim world rested on a profound ignorance of the Islamic religion, Muslim society, and the wild misinterpretations of the prophet Muhammad, who was known to eighteenth-century European and American writers as "Mahomet." In 1645, as novelist and naval historian James Fenimore Cooper tells that, a ship built in Cambridge, Massachusetts, fought an Algerian ship in the Atlantic, in what Cooper called the first American naval battle. In the 1680s, New Yorkers raised money to redeem sailors captured in North Africa, and in 1700, an American sailor returned to Boston from captivity in Algiers. The Puritan clergy used his story of captivity and resistance to Islam to bolster the faith of their flocks.
