So I've submitted the following to NCA for the November 15-19 conference. It's (obviously) a variation on the paper below that I read for my Early American Novel seminar.
Against the backdrop of riots in Muslim nations protesting the publication of renderings of Mohammed, we might consider Royall Tyler’s popular early American novel, The Algerine Captive (1797). Exposed to Muslim culture when captured by pirates, protagonist Updike Underhill carefully describes Islamic practices in Algiers. In a curious moment, Underhill writes, "the language of the alcoran is so ineffably pure, it can never be rendered into any other tongue." As opposed to the "miserable, vitiated translations of the christians," the scriptures of Islam remain unprofaned by remaining untranslated. This relation to text reveals fundamentalism, which Terry Eagleton describes as "a textual affair," an "attempt to render our discourse valid by backing it with the gold standard of the Word of words, seeing God as the final guarantor of meaning" (After Theory, 202-03).
But the question of how a people regards a text and its meaning shouldn't trouble a tolerant people, such as the America The Algerine Captive addresses and reveals. This tolerance marks what Stanley Fish describes in the July 2002 Harper's as American "civic religion": the agreement that "differences of belief" won't preclude "commercial and social cooperation." Moreover, the West invokes this tolerance in discussing the Danish newspapers that published the images of Mohammed by saying: The images may indeed be offensive or blasphemous, but the principle of free speech demands we tolerate these pictures, prevents us from censoring or censuring the publishers, and ought to cause offended Muslims to accept the existence of despicable representations of sacred icons if only for the principle of freedom itself.
But the question is: Can our freedom of press recognize the Islamic regard for the text as incapable of being rendered in any way other than the original (surely what's at the heart of Muslim bans on reproducing Mohammed in any format)? What happens when we fail to understand that reproduction itself is offensive and shift the stasis from definition—is this offensive?—to policy—should liberal societies have a free press? Do we recognize this as the limit of our tolerance? More than merely the question of whether American tolerance is just another fundamentalism insofar as it cannot tolerate intolerance, the larger challenge is to see where our commitments to textual determinacy conceal our own fundamentalism at the same time that they are our fundamentalism. Does Derrida's notion of the context which contains an event (Limited Inc.) indicate a site where the West fails to connect with Islam? Where the Western reverence for the meaning of a text is too fundamentalist to tolerate Islamic fundamentalism, though not fundamentalist enough to agree with Islam's reverence for the text? If so, can a less fundamentalist attitude for the West not open the possibility for more tolerance of fundamentalisms?
My paper addresses these questions by analyzing similarities between the 1797 American position in relation to Islam, reactions to the September 11 attack of 2001, and the 2006 riots. Such an analysis has particular relevance at the moment and may help us see opportunities for more tolerance of difference—hence, greater possibility for connection.
