Ottoman Algeria in Western Diplomatic History with ... - Bibliothèque

is shown here by Franklin’s gratuitous stance and confirmed by many United
States founding fathers.
2. 4. Anti-Algiers Attitudes in American Political Thought
Offspring of Old World religion and culture, the Americans were
already imbued with some knowledge about the history of relations between
Christian Europe and the Muslim countries and the crusades were no secret for
them. They certainly understood that those relations were in fact long contests
between Europeans on one side and Arabs, Turks, and North African Moors
and Moriscos on the other or simply between two religion enemies: Christians
and Muslims. Ultimately, they represented those contests as a struggle between
what they came to call ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarity.’ So, the Americans not
only “inherited this understanding of the Muslim world from the Europeans,
but chose to pursue this enemy even more relentlessly than the Europeans had
done.” 88 Thomas Jefferson, the ‘sage of Monticello’ and one of America’s
foremost founding fathers, jubilated at news about a European scheme for
“driving the Turks” out of Greece: “I could wish them success, and to see
driven from that delightful country a set of barbarians, with whom an
opposition to all science is an article of religion,” he wrote in 1785. 89 With a
zealous New World spirit, another founding father who was no more than John
88 Robert J. Allison, “The Jihad of America’s Founding Fathers,” Sept., 2001. (Accessed 14 June
2007). http://www.theglobalist.com/DBWeb/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=2155
89 Thomas Jefferson, Memoir, Correspondence, Miscellanies, From the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 4
vol. (Charlottesville, VA: F. Carr, and Co, 1829), 1:289, To John Page, August 20, 1785.
188