{"id":38560,"date":"2014-01-20T12:00:35","date_gmt":"2014-01-20T12:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=38560"},"modified":"2015-05-05T22:20:05","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T21:20:05","slug":"reading-melville-in-post-911-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/01\/reading-melville-in-post-911-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading Melville in Post-9\/11 America"},"content":{"rendered":"

The author’s half-forgotten masterpiece, <\/i>Benito Cereno<\/em>, provides fascinating insight into issues of slavery, freedom, individualism\u2014and Islamophobia.<\/i><\/i><\/p>\n

\"Hale<\/a>

Hale Woodruff\u2019s mural Mutiny on the Amistad (1939), courtesy of Talladega College, Alabama.<\/p><\/div>\n

Herman Melville didn\u2019t know that the West African slaves who inspired him to write his other, half-forgotten masterpiece, Benito Cereno<\/i>, were Muslim. And when I first learned that they were, I didn\u2019t think it more than a curiosity. I was, after all, planning to use the true incident behind the Melville story to open onto a larger history of freedom and slavery during the Age of Revolution, to which Islam seemed incidental.<\/p>\n

But the more research I did, the more the importance of Islam revealed itself\u2014and not just to the historical events Melville fictionalized. No one knows how many Muslims were among the 12.5 million Africans brought in chains across the Atlantic. Some scholars estimate as many as 10 percent. For centuries, they served as something like the New World\u2019s secret sharers, its covert operators, a key but largely unacknowledged element in the making of what the historian Edmund Morgan, decades ago, called the defining \u201cparadox\u201d of American history: the paradox of freedom and slavery.<\/p>\n

Benito Cereno<\/i> is a true story. Not true in the way Moby-Dick<\/i> is true; that book was based as much on King Lear<\/i> as it was on the actual stoving of the whale ship Essex<\/i>. In contrast, 1855\u2019s Benito Cereno<\/i> is taken wholly from an event described in the 1817 memoirs of Amasa Delano, a luckless New England sea captain: one day in late February 1805, while on an unsuccessful seal-hunting expedition in the Pacific waters off the coast of Chile, Delano\u2019s ship, the Perseverance<\/i>, came upon a Spanish cargo vessel called the Tryal<\/i>. It was in bad shape, carrying seventy or so West African men and women who, weeks earlier, as they were bound for Lima to be sold, rose up and seized the ship. They slaughtered most of the crew, along with the trader taking them to Peru, and ordered its captain, Benito Cerre\u00f1o, to return them to Senegal.<\/p>\n

Cerre\u00f1o stalled. He sailed first up and then down the coast, finally running into the Perseverance<\/i>. The rebels picked up their boarding axes and made ready to fight. But Babo, the leader of the rebels, had an idea. They let Delano come on board and acted as if they were still slaves. Babo\u2019s son Mori, who understood Spanish, pretended to be Cerre\u00f1o\u2019s devoted servant to keep watch on the two captains. He listened closely as Cerre\u00f1o told Delano a story about storms, doldrums and fevers to account for the fact that there were no other Spanish officers on the vessel.<\/p>\n

Remarkably, the trick worked. For about nine hours, an oblivious Delano\u2014an experienced mariner in the middle of his third voyage around the world and a distant ancestor of Franklin Delano Roosevelt\u2014remained convinced that the West Africans were still enslaved and that he, having provided them with food and water, was their savior.<\/p>\n

Melville left no letters or diaries, or at least none yet found, that reveal his thoughts when he read Delano\u2019s memoir, or what moved him to fictionalize his experience on board the rebel-held ship.<\/p>\n

But it isn\u2019t difficult to see what attracted him to the story. Aside from its sheer audacity, what is most fascinating about the ruse is the way it exposes a larger falsehood on which the whole ideological edifice of slavery rested: the idea that slaves were loyal and simple-minded, in possession of neither independent lives nor thoughts; or, if they did have an interior self, that it too was subject to their masters\u2019 jurisdiction, that it too was property. What you saw on the outside was what was on the inside. The West Africans used talents their masters said they didn\u2019t have (reason and discipline) to give the lie to the stereotypes of what they were said to be (dim-witted and faithful).<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

It is tempting to imagine the drama that played out on the high seas of the South Pacific as part of an epic clash of civilizations, centuries in the making.<\/p>\n

Amasa Delano, after all, was a liberal Christian, a new man of the American Revolution. He was born in the coastal Massachusetts community of Duxbury, a hothouse of natural-law republicanism. As a boy, he received his moral education from a series of ever more radical ministers who swept away the Calvinist gloom that had draped New England like a shroud since the early days of Puritan settlement. Like many of his generation, Delano was raised in optimism and taught that certain truths were self-evident: men were both in charge of their destiny and capable of perfection; moral authority was rooted within the individual; and the natural condition of humanity was freedom. Delano believed himself born free, not just free of slavery but of the master-slave relation itself, in all its forms. It wasn\u2019t the mystery of God and subservience to his will that would bring salvation; rather, \u201cpure, unabused reason,\u201d as one especially popular Duxbury minister preached, was the \u201csuitable guide to bliss and glory.\u201d<\/p>\n

The West Africans, on the other hand, were mostly Muslim, probably Sufi Muslim (a fact Delano didn\u2019t mention in his memoir, and therefore Melville didn\u2019t know), a religion often portrayed as fatalistic. Its theologians and philosophers tend to define virtue not as individual emancipation but as the psychological and spiritual submission of the self to divine authority. Sufis in particular used slavery as an analogy for nurturing an intimate relation with Allah, of freeing oneself from worldly desire and submitting one\u2019s will and being to God. \u201cLet it be known,\u201d wrote the eleventh-century Sufi theologian Abd al-Karim ibn Hawazin al-Qushayri, \u201cthat the real meaning of freedom lies in the perfection of slavery.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a way, giving themselves over is what Babo, Mori and the others did.<\/p>\n

Over the course of their nearly two-year ordeal, they used the Islamic lunar calendar to give meaning to their misery, to try to calm their fears by relating their sufferings to the unfolding of divine will. Watching the moon, they kept track of their movements around nearly half the world: first out of their homes somewhere in West Africa, across the Atlantic into Montevideo and Buenos Aires, and over the hypnotically flat pampas. They were about to begin a freezing climb up the ice-covered Andes, walking in a single-line coffle, necks chained together, in the shadow of the tallest mountain in the Americas, when Ramadan started. It was an extreme experience that must have collapsed their physical and spiritual worlds into one another, giving them the sense that they were actually approaching the absolute.<\/p>\n

Within two weeks, they were in Valparaiso, Chile. They embarked quickly on the Tryal<\/i>, and the holiest day of Ramadan fell when they were about six days out of port: Laylat al-Qadr\u2014the Night of Power, or the Night of Destiny, when the Angel Gabriel appeared to Muhammad. The event is described in the Koran: \u201cTherein come down the Angels\u2026. Peace!\u2026 This until the rise of morn!\u201d The day marks the reconciliation of free will and predestination, reminding the faithful of Allah\u2019s promise to deliver them from history\u2019s sufferings. And on the eve of this day the West Africans chose to seize the ship, execute most of the sailors and their slaver, and demand to be returned home.<\/p>\n

Then, to pull off their deception, they had to abandon the outward manifestations of the freedom they had won with their rebellion, a freedom that in any case was proving to be false: it was slipping away with each day they spent in the Pacific short on food and out of water. In order to inhabit their parts and trick Delano, they had to suppress their passions and appetites\u2014literally so, as they were starving and thirsty\u2014and take on the appearance of humble, inconsequential beings. They \u201cperfected slavery.\u201d<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

It was, of course, the political scientist Samuel Huntington who popularized the phrase \u201cclash of civilizations\u201d in an eponymous 1993 essay, the influence of which has far outlived its insight. It didn\u2019t take great vision to predict that radical Islam, after having been supported by Washington to counter the Soviet Union, would escape US control once the Cold War was over. Huntington\u2019s real contribution was to provide a pseudo-historical analysis to explain the blowback: \u201cConflict along the fault line between Western and Islamic civilizations,\u201d he wrote, \u201chas been going on for 1,300 years,\u201d and those \u201cfault lines\u201d will be the \u201cbattle lines of the future.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are many strains of contemporary Islamophobia. But one common thread insists that Muslims have no true concept of personal freedom. Christianity, the argument goes, contained within itself the seeds of a rational, emancipating individualism, which gave birth to classical political liberalism. Islam, by contrast, is said to be a servile creed: the religion needs a reformation, but reformation is impossible since its insistence on the submission of one\u2019s self to the divine is, at its core, at odds with the pluralism of the modern world. This argument is what creates the affinity between Islamophobia and other branches of the American conservative movement, dominated as they are by a cult of individual supremacy. In fact, one favorite gotcha quote used by the anti-Muslim right is the above-mentioned Sufi aphorism that the \u201creal meaning of freedom lies in the perfection of slavery.\u201d Stripped of its philosophical depth, it\u2019s read as kin to 1984<\/i>\u2019s Newspeak slogan \u201cFreedom is slavery.\u201d National Review<\/i>\u2019s Andrew McCarthy, for instance, cites it to explain why the Arab Spring hasn\u2019t resulted in a bloom of liberal democracies.<\/p>\n

The belief that Muslims somehow stand outside the West and its traditions has been critiqued elsewhere, including in an essay by Edward Said, \u201cThe Clash of Ignorance,\u201d published in 2001 in these pages. Nothing, though, better gives the lie to the idea that a \u201cfault line\u201d separates Islam from modernity than the history of Atlantic slavery.<\/p>\n

After the Spanish Conquest, Catholics tried to keep Muslims (and Jews) out of America. \u201cDo not give consent,\u201d read a 1501 royal prohibition against Muslims sailing across the Atlantic, \u201cunless they are black slaves.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unless they are black slaves: there lay the problem, for slavery was Islam\u2019s back door into the New World. Between 1501 and 1575 alone, of the more than 123,000 slaves brought to the Americas, over 100,000 were from the area surrounding the Senegal and Gambia rivers, where Islam had taken root centuries earlier. Muslims were present in the earliest slave ships that began to arrive in 1501 and, more than three and a half centuries later, they were on some of the last. They disembarked in the Americas\u2019 northernmost slave ports, in New England, and the southernmost, in Buenos Aires and Montevideo.<\/p>\n

Far from quashing individuality, belief in a universal, unseen god and membership in a larger prophetic community gave enslaved men and women a way of surviving\u2014and contesting\u2014slavery.<\/p>\n

Muslims were involved in the first major slave revolt in the Americas, which took place on Christmas Day 1521 on a plantation run by Christopher Columbus\u2019s son, and, three centuries later, led the largest urban slave uprising, in Bahia, Brazil, in 1835 (which, like the Tryal<\/i> rebellion, was launched on the Night of Power).<\/p>\n

Among the rebels who rose up and seized the famous Amistad<\/i> in 1839 were women who wore shawls, men who had been circumcised, and Africans who greeted each other by saying Sallam alaikum<\/i>, which means that when their attorney, former US President John Quincy Adams, argued for their innocence by invoking the Declaration of Independence\u2019s principles of natural-law liberalism\u2014or, as Adams put it, the \u201claw of Nature and of Nature\u2019s God on which our fathers placed our own national existence\u201d\u2014he was defending Muslims.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Scratch a phobia and you\u2019re sure to find philia just underneath. Anti-Islamic thought is centuries old, but so is its opposite, especially among late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers who were fascinated by Islam, believing that it represented a purer, more honest grappling with dilemmas found in the \u201cWest.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reporting on the remarkable ruse pulled off by Babo, Mori and their companions on Amasa Delano, the Peruvian viceroy wrote that it was Islam\u2019s \u201cperverse ideas\u201d\u2014namely its effort to find a balance between free will and fatalism under conditions of extreme suffering, along with its insistence on human dignity\u2014that made the religion such a threat to Christian slavers.<\/p>\n

In Europe, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a founder of German nationalism and one of the most influential philosophers of his era, thought Islam more rational and less self-abnegating than Christianity, believing that faith in Allah represented a higher form of universalism: \u201cWe all live and die in Islam,\u201d he wrote. In Great Britain, Thomas Carlyle felt Islam a useful alternative to the materialism, fragmentation and egoism of modern life. It might be a \u201cbastard kind of Christianity,\u201d he said, but it was \u201ca living kind; with a heart life in it.\u201d For his part, Hegel complained that too much \u201cabstraction swayed the minds of the Mahometans,\u201d and then proceeded to reduce all of world history to an abstraction.<\/p>\n

Like others of his day, Melville swung easily between caricature and admiration when considering Muslim culture. He might use a turbaned \u201cMoor\u201d to signal opulent despotism, even as he appreciated Islam\u2019s sublimity. Melville toured Turkey, Palestine and Egypt in 1856\u201357, and was both fascinated and repelled by the mass of humanity he witnessed. In Cairo, the city\u2019s minarets, he wrote in his journal, were \u201cwonderfully venerable\u201d and \u201cgleam like lighthouses.\u201d In Istanbul, scattered among towering cypress trees, they reminded him of the \u201cintermingling of life & death.\u201d One wonders what he would have done with the character of Babo had he known that the real West African, along with many of his co-conspirators, were Muslim. That they were, though, is appropriate, for Melville too thought that the real meaning of freedom was found, as that ancient Sufi mystic put it, in recognizing the limits of freedom.<\/p>\n

Melville believed in abolition. \u201cBut sin it is, no less,\u201d he wrote of slavery; \u201c\u2026it puts out the sun at noon.\u201d Yet he refused to define freedom as the opposite of bondage. All human beings, Melville thought, oscillate somewhere between the two extreme poles of liberty and slavery that defined much of the political rhetoric of antebellum America. His stories contained characters who were slaves yet made to seem free, and freemen, like Ishmael and Ahab, who were slaves, mostly to their own tangled thoughts and uncontrollable passions.<\/p>\n

The point wasn\u2019t, I think, to downplay the horrors of the actual existing institution of chattel slavery by relativizing it to other forms of oppression. Rather, it was to critique a particular definition of freedom that was taking hold in America. Later, on the centenary of the American Revolution, he would describe this truncated freedom as a \u201cvile liberty\u201d with \u201creverence\u201d for \u201cnaught\u201d\u2014not for God, not for nature and not for others. Individualism masquerading as freedom, Melville thought, was no kind of freedom: it blinded people\u2014as it blinded Amasa Delano\u2014to the social world surrounding them.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll men live enveloped in whale-lines,\u201d he wrote in Moby-Dick<\/i>. \u201cAll are born with halters round their necks.\u201d Whale lines, not fault lines. Melville is a good corrective to today\u2019s Islamophobes, who seek to cleave the world into hostile ideological camps, and a remedy to individual supremacists, who want to deny the ties and obligations that all humans find themselves caught up in\u2014the bonds, in fact, that make them human.<\/p>\n

All the tomes of \u201chuman jurisprudence,\u201d Melville wrote elsewhere in his whale book, could be reduced in essence to the whaler\u2019s rule distinguishing \u201cFast-Fish\u201d (harpooned or hooked on a line, and thus in the possession of a given party) from \u201cLoose-Fish\u201d (unclaimed and therefore fair game). \u201cWhat plays the mischief with this masterly code,\u201d Melville said, \u201cis the admirable brevity of it, which necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to expound it.\u201d<\/p>\n

And once expounded, it turns out that there is no such thing as a completely \u201cFast\u201d or a completely \u201cLoose\u201d fish. \u201cWhat are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish?\u201d Melville asked. \u201cAnd what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?\u201d<\/p>\n

__________________________<\/p>\n

Greg Grandin teaches history at New York University and is the author of <\/i>Fordlandia<\/em>, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history. His new book, <\/i>The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World<\/em>, will be published in January [2014].<\/i><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 thenation.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The author’s half-forgotten masterpiece, Benito Cereno, provides fascinating insight into issues of slavery, freedom, individualism\u2014and Islamophobia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[208],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38560"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38560\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}