Karine V. Walther's excellent new study is the first overview of American relations with the Islamic World in the years between the Barbary Wars and World War II. The last two decades have seen a burst of important publications on American relations with the so-called Barbary states in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At the same time, the rapid pace of publications of books and articles on post-World War II American interaction with Islam continues and even accelerates in light of current events. Sacred Interests fits neatly in the trough between these two historiographic peaks.

Because the United States had little in the way of official contact or conflict with the Islamic world between the second Barbary War in 1815 and the invasion of the Philippines in 1898, Walther focuses primarily on “how nonstate actors, including missionaries, religious organizations, journalists, academics, businessmen, clergymen, philanthropists, and the wider American public collaborated with diplomats, colonial officials, soldiers, and political elites in shaping foreign relations in the Islamic world” (5). The most important of these organizations was the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), which assiduously publicized its considerable missionary activities in Islamic lands during the entire period covered here.

Walther argues that the United States viewed the nations and people in the Islamic world through an orientalist framework shared with the larger European powers. Indeed Americans mostly “understood conflicts in the Islamic world on purely religious grounds and as part of a global war of Islam against Christianity” (23). As Walther demonstrates throughout, nineteenth-century Americans were as likely to gain perspective on Islam and Muslims from European experts as from American sources. Walther does a good job of trying to tease out the extent of American influence in the Islamic world, which in the case of ABCFM missionaries was no doubt extensive, but the difficulty in distinguishing between American perspectives or initiatives and European influence can occasionally be confusing, particularly early on.

The first section of Sacred Interests examines American involvement and reaction to the Greek (1821–1832) and Bulgarian (1876) revolts against the Ottoman Empire. Despite some public pressure to intervene on the side of the rebels, U.S. administrations and particularly John Q. Adams (author of the Monroe Doctrine which forbade U.S. intervention outside the Western Hemisphere) successfully resisted and maintained U.S. neutrality. Nevertheless, American missionaries and the American-backed Robert College in Istanbul offered much support to Greek and Bulgarian Christians, often in conjunction with European actors, particularly the English.

Next, Walther's narrative moves to North Africa, where she examines the American response to perceived depredations against Moroccan Jews. With the growth of America's Jewish population, new leaders such as Rabbi Stephen Wise and new organizations, such as the Board of Delegates of American Israelites began to pressure the U.S. Government to protect Jews from persecution abroad. Although the U.S. never intervened in Morocco, concerns about “savage” Muslim attacks on Jews prompted it to participate in two European conferences that ultimately helped pave the way for French rule. Walther argues the problems of Moroccan Jews resulted more from the Spanish invasion of Morocco and European and American abuse of the protégé system that allowed consuls to create their own fiefdoms than from actual Islamic persecution. Regardless of the extent of Islamic intolerance, she argues, the U.S. used such allegations as a premise for exerting influence in North Africa and as a means to deflect concerns that the Theodore Roosevelt administration was not doing enough to stop the persecution of Jews in Russia. At the same time, the rhetoric produced in this episode served to convince Americans further that Islamic rulers were naturally savage despots.

With the conquest of the Philippines in the early twentieth century, the United States government found itself directly involved with an Islamic state for the first time in nearly a century. Walther's third section covers American efforts to convert, conquer and govern the Islamic Moros who were mostly in the Mindanao region of the Philippines. She demonstrates how American military and civilian officials drew from earlier American–Muslim interaction, domestic Native American policies (Native Americans were often compared to “savage” Muslims), and European imperial precedents when considering how to rule over a substantial, purportedly savage Muslim population. In doing so she adds an interesting dimension to the already rich literature on the connections between the Philippine wars and American conceptions of race.

A final section examines U.S. involvement in the declining Ottoman Empire. One chapter recounts the massive missionary-led public response to the massacre of Armenians in the 1890s and the Grover Cleveland administration's refusal to become involved. A second chapter covers the United States’ role in developing the mandate system in the Middle East during the years surrounding World War I. Walther concludes that these policies “reflected the continuation of more than a century of American beliefs regarding the incapacity of Muslims to rule over themselves or others” (317). Indeed, while she refuses to draw a straight line from nineteenth century attitudes and practices to current prejudices, she concludes that “it would be equally erroneous to discount the ways in which American discourses about Islam have persisted in the recent relations of the United States with the Muslim world, albeit in varied forms” (329).

While an excellent first attempt at covering this neglected middle period of U.S.–Islamic relations, Walther's volume is more episodic than comprehensive. Considering the rich missionary and diplomatic sources that remain woefully under-utilized by historians of American–Muslim interaction, many more monographs ought to follow.