Timothy Marr
Timothy Marr became interested in the history of how Americans viewed the difference of Islam while teaching Moby-Dick in Pakistan during the Russian phase of the war in Afghanistan. American engagements with Muslims and the life and writings of Herman Melville have remained central fascinations for my intellectual inquiry. His book The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism (Cambridge 2006) explores how Islamic orientalism became an important transnational resource for early American global imaginings. In 2011 an Arabic translation was published by Kalima Foundation in Abu Dhabi. In 2008 he edited the first version of Peter Markoe's The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania to be published in 221 years. He is presently writing a relational history that explores the century-long enterprise of military conflict, collaborative governance, industrial development, and intercultural education between US Americans and the Muslim Moros of the southern Philippines, and how these historical engagements reveal a more planetary scope to the study of American ethnicity, the history of Muslim peoples relations with Americans, and the present plight of the global struggle over islamist terrorism. He is a co-editor of Ungraspable Phantom: Essays on Moby-Dick (Kent State 2006, paperback 2010) and has published on Melville in The Historical Guide to Herman Melville, Melville and Women, Melville “Among the Nations,” and in the journal Leviathan. He serves as an executive member of the Melville Society Cultural Project and a contributor to the Melville and the Digital Humanities project of the Melville Electronic Library.
Address: Department of American Studies
CB #3520, Greenlaw Hall
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3520
Address: Department of American Studies
CB #3520, Greenlaw Hall
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3520
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Saleeby was valued as a cultural intermediary whose facility with Arabic and Islam empowered his rise as the foremost American expert on the Muslim Moros of the southern Islands of Mindanao and Sulu. Saleeby’s story
dramatizes the political advancement possible for an educated “Syrian” who aligned his mission with the American “duty” of teaching self-government to the Filipinos. However, his own background as a migrant from Asia and his sympathy for Moro history and
culture raised unfair suspicions about his ultimate allegiance. Dr. Saleeby never settled in the United States but dedicated his whole career to the welfare of the Filipino peoples through his medical profession, his post-colonial advocacy for bilingual education, and his criticism of how imperialism compromised American democracy.
Saleeby was valued as a cultural intermediary whose facility with Arabic and Islam empowered his rise as the foremost American expert on the Muslim Moros of the southern Islands of Mindanao and Sulu. Saleeby’s story
dramatizes the political advancement possible for an educated “Syrian” who aligned his mission with the American “duty” of teaching self-government to the Filipinos. However, his own background as a migrant from Asia and his sympathy for Moro history and
culture raised unfair suspicions about his ultimate allegiance. Dr. Saleeby never settled in the United States but dedicated his whole career to the welfare of the Filipino peoples through his medical profession, his post-colonial advocacy for bilingual education, and his criticism of how imperialism compromised American democracy.