AMERICAN PURITAN ENCOUNTERS WITH ISLAM: FAITH, CIVILISATION, AND EARLY AMERICAN REFLECTIONS

Abstract

The melodramatic tone of Barbary captivity narratives enabled influential Puritan ministers such as Cotton Mather and John Cotton to consolidate a distinct Christian identity in deliberate contrast to a perceived Muslim Other. This article examines how such Puritan portrayals of Islam were shaped by theological anxieties and moral self-definition rather than sustained engagement with Islamic intellectual traditions. It further interrogates whether Puritan assumptions about Islam were grounded in objective knowledge or primarily reflected subjective projections. To situate these portrayals within a broader civilisational and ethical context, the study introduces the works of Aḥmad Bābā al-Timbuktī, Muḥammad al-Maghīlī, Ḥusayn Efendi, al-Ghazālī, and Ibn ʿArabī—figures who articulated sophisticated moral, legal, and metaphysical conceptions within the Islamic tradition. Their reflections on justice, moral order, spiritual unity, reason, and love reveal a markedly different ethical landscape from the one constructed in Puritan discourse. Through a comparative reading of Puritan texts and Islamic thought, the article argues that early modern encounters with Islam were characterised by a complex interplay of subjective distortion and ethical projection, in which each tradition interpreted the Other through its own moral and spiritual categories.