The Makings of a Muslim Missionary

chapter 3 The Makings of a Muslim Missionary

Many factors contribute to the success of a producer in a deterritorialized, comparatively free market. Circumstances of birth are of course major deter- minants of one’s access to the material, social, and intellectual resources nec- essary for gaining a competitive market position. Not only does one need to exploit particular resources to enter into a market, but frequently even the knowledge and desire to use these resources is determined by one’s earlier exposure to them. If, for instance, George Bethune English had not been born a white man to well-off parents in Boston, the chances that he would have become an early nineteenth-century student of oriental religions, let alone a published sympathizer of Islam, would have been very small. Still, English, like most individuals, was not a simple product of his environment. Whether because or in spite of their birth, some people are able to transcend their circumstances and innovate, breaking into economic and cultural markets in unforeseen ways. Determining precisely how much of innovators’ actions are indeed attributable to their unique internal qualities is one of the goals of the historian. The story of Alexander Russell Webb’s journey to Islam and his becoming a Muslim missionary is an example of the complex interplay between circumstances and the uniqueness of individuals. Webb was, by all accounts, a creative, ambitious innovator who was rarely satisfied with his circumstances and had the skills to achieve things that no one else in his family had achieved before him. Nevertheless, he benefitted greatly from his birth. Webb was from an educated, skilled, and well-off white family in an America where these traits were virtual necessities to make a name for oneself. He was not required to risk his life in the Civil War, which commenced when he was fifteen years old, and he was permitted to pursue the trades and hobbies of his choice. In terms of his coming to Islam, however, probably the single most important circum- stance was Webb’s involvement with the St. Louis spiritualist newspaper men in the early 1880s. Had Webb lived in any other city, or chosen a different career and pastime, it is unlikely he would have become America’s first leader of a prominent Islamic propaganda movement. Webb was an intelligent man who was not afraid to pursue what he believed in, and he might have even con- verted to Islam in another environment. But had he not come into contact with the St. Louis Theosophical Society and the occult revival when he did, he most likely would have never left his mark on the history of Islam in America.

The Makings Of A Muslim Missionary 89

Before Islam

Alexander Russell Webb was born in Hudson, New York on November 9, 1846.1 In 1847, his father, Alexander Nelson Webb, purchased the temperance newspaper for which he had worked as a printer, the Columbia Washingtonian, continuing its publication and, at the same time, establishing a secular news- focused newspaper, the Hudson Daily Star. Webb later remembered his father as being “outspoken and fearless,” and his newspapers became the mouth- pieces for expressing his Jeffersonian Democratic views. Alexander Nelson remained in the newspaper industry until his retirement in 1873, at which point Alexander Russell’s brother, Herbert, inherited the business. Alexander Russell, meanwhile, chose to not follow in his father’s footsteps. Webb, it seems, had a rather creative and independent spirit. As a child and young man, for instance, having no interest in religion, he tried to avoid attending his Presbyterian church and Sunday school as often as he could, and instead began attending an Episcopalian Sunday school simply to meet girls. Intellectually, he was similarly independent-minded. Webb reportedly com- posed essays and shorts stories as a teenager and he attended Claverack College and Hudson River Institute, a school that was known for encouraging intellectual freedom and liberal values. After leaving school and attempting to find a career, instead of apprenticing with his father, he chose to learn the jewelry trade under a jeweler whose shop was in the same building as the office of Alexander Nelson’s newspaper. In 1869, Webb moved to Chicago where he worked as a jeweler, married, and then partnered with his new father-in-law to start a jewelry business. When the business was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of October 1871, he went home to Hudson for a few years, where his father secured a job for him as a jeweler. In 1873 Webb returned to Chicago to be with his wife and newborn son, but by the end of the year, his wife’s father, who had moved to Unionville, Missouri, had purchased interest in a local newspaper and invited his son-in-law to be its assis- tant editor. Webb, an able writer who surely had learned much about the newspaper editing business during his youth, accepted the offer and moved his family to the northern Missouri town. For the next two-and-a-half years, he faithfully and capably edited the paper. This was not an easy job, however. The

1 The following section draws largely from the two best biographical works on Webb: Umar F. Abd-Allah, A Muslim in Victorian America: The Life of Alexander Russell Webb (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) and Brent D. Singleton, introduction to Yankee Muslim: The Asian Travels of Mohammed Alexander Russell Webb ([Maryland]: Borgo Press/Wildside Press, 2007), 9–54.