David Lindsay Roberts: Republic of Numbers: Unexpected Stories of Mathematical Americans through History. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.

 

One might say that David Lindsay Roberts has written a ‘lost’ chapter of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Tocqueville does write generally on American intellectual life of the 1830s, especially education. He judges that New England remained at the forefront of American regions at that time, having been founded two centuries before by a population of immigrants among whom “there was a greater mass of enlightenment… than within any European nation of our day” (emphasis added). That is, despite the ‘secular’ Enlightenment of the European eighteenth century, still a matter of contention in Tocqueville’s lifetime, New Englanders of the 1630s were on a whole a better-educated group. The Puritans established a publicly-supported school system dedicated to teaching the Bible. “In America, it is religion that leads to enlightenment; it is the observance of divine laws that guides men to freedom.”

Being mostly Protestants, Americans then and now don’t restrict Bible learning to a spiritual aristocracy. “Primary instruction there is within the reach of each,” although “higher instruction is within the reach of almost no one.” All Americans “can readily procure for themselves the first elements of human knowledge.” These included reading, writing, arithmetic; the doctrines and proofs of one’s own religious sect; the history of the United States and of one’s own American state; and the federal and state constitutions. And New England was not alone. Although the southern and western Americans didn’t put as much emphasis on education as New Englanders did, they too took care to establish schools and churches, read newspapers, and participate in civic life (inasmuch as “genuine enlightenment arises principally from experience”). Even on the western frontier, “I do not believe that so great an intellectual movement is produced in the most enlightened and populated cantons of France.” In all this Americans reinforced their regime: “One cannot doubt that in the United States the instruction of the people serves powerfully to maintain a democratic republic.” Indeed, “in the United States, the sum of men’s education is directed toward politics,” whereas in largely undemocratic, unrepublican Europe education’s “principle goal is to prepare for private life.” With broad-based participation in public life precluded, education can have no other object.

In all the many pages of Tocqueville’s Democracy one finds no mention of American mathematics or mathematicians. As Roberts shows, there wasn’t much for him to write about at that time. Of the twenty-three “mathematical Americans” he considers, only two had come to public prominence by the time Tocqueville visited in 1831-32. Mathematics in America wouldn’t begin to mature until after the Civil War. When it did, it exhibited so many of the marks of the American regime Tocqueville had described that it is easy to imagine how unsurprised Tocqueville would have been at the worries and opportunities Roberts’s mathematicians faced. He had, after all, titled one of his chapters, “Why the Americans Apply Themselves to the Practice of the Sciences Rather than to the Theory.” “It is evident that in democratic countries the interests of individuals as well as the security of the state requires that the education of the greatest number be scientific, commercial, and industrial rather than literary.” America is a commercial as well as a democratic republic.

During the years of the American founding, mathematical education in America didn’t amount to much, if judged by European standards. There was no advanced mathematical research. Americans who used math were surveying land and navigating ships—engaged in conquest and commerce, acquisition of property. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson saw the beauty of higher mathematics, but did not commend its appreciation to the average citizen. Their younger contemporary, Nathaniel Bowditch, grew up in Salem, Massachusetts when it was the sixth-largest city in the country, a center of merchant shipping that already took New Englanders as far as Asia. Having left school at the age of ten to work in his father’s barrel shop, Bowditch taught himself math and science thanks to Salem’s library, which had a collection of science books captured at sea in 1780. Bowditch himself went on five voyages on the merchant ships around the turn of the century. Captains on such expeditions needed to calculate their longitude and latitude, typically consulting The New Practical Navigator by the Englishman John Hamilton Moore. Bowditch made substantial corrections to this book—so many that the American publisher “took Moore’s name off and put Bowditch’s name on, while altering the title to New American Navigator.” (“Copyright in the early United States was only casually observed, especially for books originating in the country from which the United States had so recently emancipated itself.”) The mathematical topic navigators need is trigonometry, which enables the navigator find his location at sea by measuring the distance of the ship from its port in relation to the North Star, the one fixed point in the sky. Given the curvature of the earth, this can work precisely “for short distances,” but Bowditch introduced refinements that overcame the problem, for practical purposes.

Practical purposes animated Bowditch throughout his life, as he retired from seafaring and entered the insurance business, where his skills were equally useful and more lucrative. Two decades later he joined the Harvard Corporation and assisted in righting the College’s shaky finances. And he hired a Harvard student named Benjamin Peirce to translate an important French math text; Peirce would go on to teach astronomy and mathematics at his alma mater, “recognized as a major national figure in science and mathematics in the United States, a status to which Nathaniel Bowditch, for all his talent, never seems to have truly aspired.” In his day, government and commerce were simply more needed, and consequently more prestigious, than academic studies.

If Bowditch represents the commercial side of American mathematics in the decades after the Founding, Sylvanus Thayer represents its military side. Thayer had two undergraduate degrees, one from Dartmouth and the other from West Point. He helped to design coastal fortifications during the War of 1812. In 1815, in the aftermath of the war, Secretary of War James Monroe sent the Thayer, now a brevet officer, to inspect military facilities in France. He returned to take command of West Point two years later. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries military engineers “were the intellectuals of the battlefield,” not only designing fortifications but measuring distances and “pondering the angles of impinging forces”—”the ones who defined the environment” of battles. Roberts recalls that no less a commander than Napoleon, “himself an accomplished student of mathematics,” collaborated with the mathematician Gaspard Monge, throughout the General’s career, “a rare and possibly unique relationship between a first-class mathematician and a powerful political leader.”

While Monge was a theoretical pioneer in mathematics—effectively inventing the field of descriptive geometry, whereby three-dimensional objects can be depicted in two-dimensional figures—the less brilliant but eminently practical American followed not Monge’s example but the example of the École Polytechnique in Paris, which he’d visited during his stay in France. “Whereas Frederick the Great’s Berlin Academy… had employed mathematicians to glorify the sovereign and sometimes to provide technical advice to the government, the Polytechnique explicitly gave mathematicians the mission of teaching and examining the new generation, thus exerting an influence beyond the achievements of any one person, or any one generation of scholars.” The despotic Enlightenment of Frederick’s Prussia deployed mathematics in service to a monarchic regime; the Polytechnique, “founded in 1794 by the Revolutionary government,” served the purposes of a democratic republic. Thayer, along with almost all other Americans, and very much in line with the democratic-republican Madison and Monroe administrations, set the American military academy on a mission to teach. As it did: West Point graduates would go on to write math textbooks and to teach in many colleges and high schools across the country. At the behest of President Monroe’s Secretary of War, John C. Calhoun, West Pointers began to design the roads, bridges, and canals needed not only in military expeditions but in western expansion generally. Civil engineering worked with military engineering to carry Americans west to the Mississippi and beyond. Thayer stayed at the Point or sixteen years, longer than any other superintendent before or since. “Consequently, his impact lingered long,” long after he resigned in irritation at the rather anti-academic tendencies of President Jackson’s administration. One of his most prominent hires, civil engineering professor Dennis Hart Mahan, named his son after his patron. Alfred Thayer Mahan went on to “become the greatest theorist of naval power of his time,” effectively the founder of the American school of geopolitics. Geopolitics requires precise mapping, which requires precise measurement or mathematical calculation. In this sense, Sylvanus was the step-grandfather of American geopolitics.

By far the most famous American Roberts recalls is Abraham Lincoln. No mathematician (having received altogether about twelve months of formal schooling—somewhat beyond the average U.S. citizen of his time), Lincoln was nonetheless profoundly influenced by mathematics. His first non-manual employment was as a surveyor in the years 1833-36. He was “respected for his work,” but his ambitions far transcended it. He began his political and legal careers at the same time, and eventually found a way of bringing the three kinds of knowledge together. By the 1840s, now an experienced lawyer, a former state legislator, and a former member of Congress, Lincoln began to reflect on what it means to prove an argument, and to do it in a way that will convince juries and voters. “He had gleaned that such certainty was a central feature of mathematics in general, and that the Elements of Euclid in particular was considered by many to be the epitome of demonstrative reasoning.” And so he taught himself the Euclidean proofs, which consist of definitions, postulates (things to be done), axioms (things to be thought), and theorems (the results of syllogisms constructed of postulates and axioms). To be certain, the truths of plane geometry must be founded upon postulates and axioms that are ‘self-evident’ or undeniable. Lincoln then saw that the Declaration of Independence was a logical syllogism, analogous to a Euclidean proof, drawing its conclusion (“these colonies are, and ought to be, free and independent states”) from self-evident propositions (“all men are created equal,” that is, “endowed with certain unalienable rights”). Hence Lincoln’s celebrated phrase in the Gettysburg Address, that by their Declaration Americans dedicated themselves “to the proposition that all men are created equal”—a striking example of using mathematical language to vindicate the principles of the American regime.

As a professional historian of mathematics in a country that has come to deny fixed principles derived from the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, Roberts is quick to jump in to object that Lincoln, “like almost all Americans then and now, had no conception of mathematics as a living, growing activity.” “He was learning what appeared to him as a fixed body of incontestable knowledge.” But in Lincoln’s lifetime “a small network of advanced mathematicians in Europe were indeed questioning” Euclidean geometry, doubting that Euclid’s fifth postulate—that “two straight lines, which intersect one another, cannot be both parallel to the same straight line”—is necessarily so, genuinely self-evident. A non-Euclidean geometry was possible; “Euclid’s geometry might not necessarily offer the best description of physical reality.” Albert Einstein “would fully exploit this new standpoint in his general theory of relativity.”

Further, the discovery/invention of non-Euclidean geometry shows that mathematics doesn’t stand still; it changes. It has a history. At the Johns Hopkins University, founded in the decade after Lincoln’s murder, historicism and the mathematics of a nature that changes would be brought together, issuing politically in Progressivism, the claim that human rights derive not from permanent natural principles but from the process of evolution, and in the valorization of government by bureaucracy—an administrative state, staffed by experts, wielding knowledge often derived from the mathematical field of statistics, guiding the direction of historical progress and the attendant evolution of rights produced in its course. Whether the undeniable (one might say, almost self-evident) progress of mathematical and scientific knowledge means that the principles of nature are themselves ‘progressive,’ evolutionary-historical; and whether those aspects of nature than (again, undeniably) do change over time alter the principles of human right remains a vexed question—one that Roberts doesn’t address here, having other fish to fry.

Roberts exhibits one of the characteristics of the changing conception, if not reality, of rights by including Catherine Beecher in his survey. Because he didn’t consult Tocqueville, however, he underestimates the status of women in the America of Beecher’s time. “In almost all Protestant countries,” Tocqueville writes, “girls are infinitely more mistresses of their action than in Catholic peoples.” Moreover, “in the United States, the doctrines of Protestantism come to combine with a very fee constitution and a very democratic social state; and nowhere is the girl more promptly or more completely left to herself.” Even as a child, the American girl “already thinks for herself, speaks freely, and acts alone,” quickly coming to consider the world “with a firm and tranquil eye.” “The American woman never entirely ceases to be mistress of herself”—as much a model of self-government in her own way as an American man is in his way. “Although Americans are a very religious people, they have not relied on religion alone to defend the virtue of woman; they have sought to arm her reason” as well, providing “a democratic education to safeguard woman from the perils with which the institutions and mores of democracy surround her.” Miss Beecher exemplified the type.

Daughter of prominent Boston clergyman Lyman Beecher, Catherine Beecher founded the Western Female Institute in 1833 in Cincinnati, where her family had moved the previous year. She later returned to New England, founding the Hartford Female Seminary in Hartford, Connecticut. For classroom use, she published a math textbook, along with other books “she could then use in her school.” Most of her books were not widely adopted, although her 1841 Treatise on Domestic Economy enjoyed many reprintings; in it, she aimed at “put[ting] a woman’s work in the home on the same footing as academic subjects,” and she undoubtedly succeeded in advancing what would later be called ‘home economics’ as a longtime staple of secondary-school education. Overall, however, it must be said her relatives and acquaintances far exceeded her own influence and renown. Not only her father but her sister, Harriet (author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin), her friend, William McGuffey (author of the famous Reader), and even her husband, Alexander Metcalf Fisher, (professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at Yale and “a leading light of the as yet tiny community of American academic mathematicians), surpassed her own respectable but modest achievements. But Roberts understands that to write history in the United States in the first quarter of the twentieth century brings with it a solemn obligation of race-class-gender ‘inclusiveness,’ an obligation he does not neglect to fulfill.

Born in the next generation of Americans, Josiah Willard Gibbs proved another sort altogether. Professor of mathematical physics at Yale, “Gibbs is often considered the greatest American scientist of the nineteenth century and indeed one of the world’s greatest scientists,” a man of whom Einstein himself “spoke glowingly.” In 1861 Yale was the first American college to award a PhD; Gibbs received his two years later. He then went to Europe, where he attended lectures in math and science in Berlin, Heidelberg, and Paris (he was also a linguist), returning to teach at Yale in 1869. There he mentored several prominent American mathematicians and physicists. Gibbs’s specialty was thermodynamics, yet another iteration of the science of change, inasmuch as it is “fundamentally concerned with irreversible processes,” such as entropy. (Roberts aptly illustrates the point by citing one of novelist Thomas Pynchon’s characters, Thermodynamic Officer Chick Counterfly, who remarks, “You can’t de-roast a turkey,” an excellent example of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.) Gibbs showed that the principles of thermodynamics could be expressed with geometric figures, using these “pictorial representations to offer a more comprehensive”—and more comprehensible—”understanding of phase transitions among solid, liquid, and gaseous forms of a substance.” He went on to provide “the foundation of the field of physical chemistry” by positing his “phase rule,” which provides a mathematical formula for understanding the way in which a given set of chemical substances will change their “phase” (that is, their condition as gas, solid, or liquid), given such variables as temperature and pressure.

Gibbs then turned to “his last great project,” statistical mechanics. Everyone can see that matter can be considered microscopically or macroscopically. But how is the “macroscale” behavior of matter (temperature, for example) caused by “the microscale behavior of the tiny particles making up the matter.” You can’t know exactly “what all the individual particles are doing.” However, “if one could estimate the likelihood that a certain proportion of the particles were moving in certain ways, then one might be able to somehow average the whole conglomeration of motions.” This Gibbs proceeded to do, publishing his findings in 1902. His Elementary Principles in Statistical Mechanics won the esteem of Dr. Einstein and of the distinguished French mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré, who called it “a little book, little read, because it is a little hard.”

Abstruse as Gibbs’s writings may have been, this did not prevent their appropriation by at least one prominent non-mathematician: Henry Adams. In The Education of Henry Adams and in his essay, “The Rule of Phase Applied to History,” Adams proposed that the natural laws of thermodynamics, and particularly entropy, explains the course of events—a sort of anti-progressivism historicism whereby decline not advancement rules the nature of things. There may have been a measure of irony in the puckish Adams’s presentation, but Roberts takes him seriously and is supremely unimpressed. Adams shows “little appreciation for or interest in the productive interplay between precise logical reasoning and shrewd approximation that characterizes modern physical science,” and this results in “a parade of undigested scientific terminology in the service of Adams’s increasingly gloomy view of the human condition. For Adams, words such as entropy, critical point, phase, and equilibrium never achieve more than amorphous content.” Against Adams’s characterization of modern mathematics as naïve idealism, with causation in the material world spurred by “immaterial motion” conceived “only in the hyper-space of Thought,” Roberts ripostes that “this entirely misses the decidedly utilitarian spirit of Gibbs’s approach to mathematics”; “the importance of Gibbs’s rule of phase for science lies not in vague implications but in its explicitly numerical character: if certain simplifying assumptions are made, certain precise results follow, and these results can be used to predict specific useful phenomena in the world.” That Adams may have offered his formulations with the intent of annoying morally earnest Progressives, among whose moral descendants we may count Professor Roberts, does not occur him.

There can at least be little doubt regarding the utilitarian character of Charles H. Davis, a naval commander who also edited the Navy’s Nautical Almanac, a publication no one has ever confused with the writings of neo-Platonists, ancient or modern. In his early career he was a man of action, helping to put down a whale-ship mutiny in the western Pacific and intervening in an ill-judged attempt by the prominent Tennessean, William Walker, to seize control of Nicaragua and turn it into a launching pad for “a great slave empire encompassing the entire Caribbean basin.” He later became served the United States as a planner of and participant in naval operations against the Confederacy, including the capture of Memphis. But his main contribution to mathematics was administrative. Although “a skilled mathematician,” he “made his most significant mark by organizing the mathematical talents of others,” introducing mathematical theorists to the experts in applied mathematics and overseeing the symbiosis during the course of preparing the Nautical Almanac, which appeared in 1852 and went through multiple editions.

Meanwhile, far removed from Davis’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, South Carolinian West Pointer and math professor Daniel Harvey Hill wrote an algebra textbook with a decidedly Calhounian edge, as in: “A planter hires a slave and the slave’s clothing at a certain annual rate and then returns the slave too his master after only eight months, with a cash payment but minus the clothes. What was the value of the clothes?” Not to neglect balance, Hill’s exercises did not overlook illustrations of Northerners “as cheaters in commercial transactions, cowardly in the face of danger, tolerant of the absurd notion of women’s rights, and hypocritically miserly when given the opportunity to buy the freedom of a slave.” Not to mention the Salem witch trials and “the disloyalty of the New England states during the War of 1812.” Simultaneous linear equations have seldom been taught with such verve. Hill also became professor of mathematics and artillery at the North Carolina Military Institute, interrupting math and science education only for the war, when he “led the entire body of the college, students and faculty, into the Confederate service” and achieved the rank of major-general in The Cause. “Hill retained to the end of his life the belief that better leadership could have saved the South as an independent nation,” although he also saw that slavery in some respects kept Southerners from learning math and science, as the planter class contented itself with master-ship at home and commerce abroad, at the same time promoting verbal and mathematical illiteracy not only among slaves but among lower-class whites.

After the Cause became the Lost Cause, the study of mathematics in America coalesced in the newly-elaborated university system, increasingly modeled on the pattern of the German research universities. Vassar graduate Christine Ladd wrote her doctoral dissertation at Johns Hopkins on “the algebra of logic,” under the eye of that genius, Charles Sanders Pierce, the American pioneer in the field of symbolic logic, which transformed logic into “a part of mathematics and not an odd appendage of philosophy” by substituting mathematical symbols for words in logical syllogisms. “By designating propositions with letters and treating the logical operations of and, or, and not analogously with the operations of multiplication, addition, and negation in arithmetic,” logicians “turned logical deductions into an exercise in rule-based symbol manipulation, like algebra.” Johns Hopkins declined to award the PhD degree to Ladd for some forty years, a dilatoriness Roberts sensibly ascribes to prejudice against women. Married to Hopkins math professor Fabian Franklin, she continued her mathematical studies. When Franklin took a job in New York, she lectured (without pay) at Columbia.

Ladd’s contemporary at Hopkins, Kelly Miller, was an African-American graduate of Howard University and “the first African American graduate student of mathematics in the United States.” He studied physics and astronomy at the graduate level, as well. He never received a degree, but returned to Howard as its only black faculty member and, “for a time, the only black mathematics professor in the United States.” Believing that “Christian faith and mathematically based scientific knowledge were the essential foundation for future advancement of African Americans,” Miller soon turned to the newly-invented discipline of sociology, which he taught exclusively in the last three decades of his career. He published extensively on the race question, bringing his mathematical expertise to bear on bogus claims of then-respected ‘race science’ quacks. And he may have had a hand in hiring Elbert Cox and Dudley Woodard, “the first two black Americans to earn a mathematics PhD,” for the Howard math faculty.

Despite such self-imposed handicaps, pure mathematics emerged “as the dominant concern of academic mathematicians in the United States” between the close of the frontier in 1890 and World War II. Mathematics moved west with the frontier, with the University of Chicago leading the way. The chairman of the Chicago math department, E. H. Moore, worked for separating the study of mathematics from the study of astronomy and physics, giving institutional recognition of mathematics as an independent discipline. On the practical side, the needs of the 1890 United States Census brought Columbia University statistician Herman Hollerith to invent a technique for aggregating data on census tally sheets. By translating the data to patterns of holes punched in cards, and then inventing a machine that could ‘read’ the card “by probing the card with pins, so that only where there was a hold would the pin pass through the card to make an electrical connection,” Hollerith enabled the federal government to present the information collected by its field workers into usable statistical tables.

This first sign of what Woodrow Wilson would call “scientific administration” in the United States was well understood by Tocqueville, who had seen the beginnings of it in European statism. Bureaucracy, he saw, is a crucial underpinning of the centralized state, and this has important implications for public education. “Education as well as charity,” he writes, “has become a national affair among most peoples of our day. The state receives and often takes the child from the arms of his mother to entrust him to its agents; it takes charge of inspiring sentiments in each generation and furnishing it with ideas. uniformity reigns in studies as in all the rest; diversity like freedom disappears from them each day.” If a time traveler were to tell Tocqueville that American students of the twenty-first century were to be instructed uniformly of the benefits of diversity, he would say only that democracy lends itself to such uniformity of opinion, and to the centralization of powers within the administrative state.

The Progressive movement appealed powerfully to school teachers, who formed the core of support for such politicians as Woodrow Wilson and, later Franklin Roosevelt. One way in which Progressives took control of the public schools was to continue and accelerate the longstanding American attempt to democratize mathematics education. Cal Tech math professor E. T. Bell wrote books popularizing mathematics as an attractive activity. His 1937 book, Men of Mathematics, obviously the precursor to Roberts’s book, sold well, touting mathematics as “the queen of the sciences” and calculus as “the queen of mathematics.” Charles M. Austin, first president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, founded in 1920, worried that as “progressive ideas of education” (and therefore of democratization) “were creeping into the schools,” “easier subjects” like social science and civics were being substituted for algebra and geometry. The NCTM was designed to fight the trend, which was given intellectual respectability among educators by John Dewey, for many years the resident philosopher at Teachers College, Columbia University. Dewey urged that “education needed to be totally reoriented to accommodate the industrializing twentieth-century world.” “Since students would be graduating into an ever-changing environment, general thinking and problem-solving skills were more valuable than any fixed bodies of knowledge.” Although Dewey didn’t intend this as a move to cut back on math in public schools, and although modern math had arisen as a challenge to the notion that mathematics and logic were static disciplines teaching fixed bodies of knowledge, his strictures were often interpreted as if justification for beheading the Queen. After World War II, Lithuanian-born Holocaust survivor Izaak Wirszup spearheaded the movement called the “New Math,” which attempted to meet both the Progressives’ desire to democratize education and the concern over ‘dumbing-down’ the curriculum.

Such worries proved somewhat overwrought because, as Hollerith had demonstrated, mathematics proved highly useful to the other dimension of Progressives’ government, the administrative state. If the Progressives talked of democracy, and moved to enhance it with such devices as the popular election of United States senators, ballot initiatives and referenda, and reform movements directed against political bosses, they also moved to establish a new form of aristocracy: a cadre of experts trained in the science of administration. E. B. Wilson, sometime chair of the MIT physics department and professor of public health at Harvard, a former student of Willard Gibbs, eventually came to teach a course in mathematical economics in Harvard’s sociology department, where he mentored Paul Samuelson. ‘Social science‘ as a would-be science would make its most lasting mark in economics, with Samuelson’s famous textbook leading the way for several generations of economics students.

Although social science claimed to be ‘value-free,’ it seldom was. In a sort of mirror-imaging of Confederate stalwart Daniel Harvey Hill, Lillian and Hugh Lieber wrote math books proclaiming that “Mathematics (capitalized throughout) with Science and Art (also capitalized)” revealed the great truth that (in their words) “Internationalism and Democracy are very deep in the human spirit.” This seems to have had something to do with the abstraction from the concrete seen in mathematics, theoretical science, and modern art, all of which take the mind away from such physical facts as armies wielded by national governments and police work at the service of social hierarchies. In a book published after the Second World War, Mrs. Lieber “made a plea for world peace and expressed alarm about the dangers of biological warfare and the atomic bomb.” By the end of the Forties, the Liebers were “an intellectual power couple in New York City”—alas, without much ‘pull’ in the Kremlin.

The war itself and the decades following saw mathematics applied to computers. Grace Hopper developed some of the earliest computers while working for the Navy in a research program at Harvard. She later joined a firm that became part of Sperry Rand. Joaquin Basilio Diaz, armed with a Brown University PhD, pursued his career in the military arm of the administrative state, never dismantled after the war because the Cold War soon followed. At Princeton, the brilliant John F. Nash, Jr. developed “game theory,” initially proposed by John von Neumann of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study in the mid-1940s, into a tool usable in both business and military strategy and organization.

Beginning in the New Left’s assault on ‘Enlightenment rationalism’ injured the Progressive ideology of such persons as the Liebers. Former NCTM president Frank B. Allen decried this “anti-intellectual counterculture,” with its “disparagement of science and technology” and its rejection of “rationality in general.” To counter the counterculture, Allen proposed an approach to algebra (the experience of which has turned no small number of high school students away from rationality in math, if not in general) which emphasized the logical character of mathematical proofs. His 1966 book, Modern Algebra: A Logical Approach, was intended to stem the tide, but his own organization, the NCTM, soon became infected by “fads such as cooperative learning and vain attempts to solve the racial, economic, and environmental problems of society through the schools.” The controversy would continue into the next century.

Roberts concludes that “the lives recounted in this book do not suggest a static future” for America mathematics, which may turn increasingly to the science of computer modeling, with results he hesitates to predict.

Edward J. Larson: George Washington, Nationalist. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016.

 

Americans understood themselves as “a people” by the 1770s, at least, as the Declaration of Independence most famously indicates. But until the Declaration they couldn’t think of themselves as a self-governing people, a nation in full. Securing that nationhood took years of war, constitutional architectonics, and commerce both economic and social. The merit of historian Edward J. Larson’s compact and incisive essay begins in selecting for consideration the ‘middle’ years of Washington’s career, those between the war and his inauguration as our first president. In them we see not Washington the general or Washington the commander in chief, but Washington the adroit and great-souled politician, the man who used the fame he won during the war to take his country from domestic unrest and geopolitical insecurity to what he called an empire, what his sometime colleague Thomas Jefferson called an empire of liberty. Jefferson wrote the Declaration; Madison, James Wilson, and their colleagues wrote the Constitution; but Washington took the indispensable steps that enabled independence fought in defense of natural rights to issue in the security of those rights within a framework of constitutional and commercial republicanism.

This book’s “simple thesis,” Larson writes, holds that Washington was “the leading nationalist of the late Revolutionary era in American history.” By “nationalist,” he doesn’t mean blood-and-soil statism or even Burkean traditionalism but popular self-government. He commits an important misstep at the outset, saying that Washington “believed in the Lockean natural right of free men and the republican ideals of government by the consent of the governed”; obviously, if right is natural, it must belong to all men, as the Declaration affirms and as Washington recognized by emancipating his slaves in his will. Fortunately, this is just about the last mistake Larson makes, and it isn’t foundational to his argument, which centers primarily on practical policies not political theory. And he is exactly right to link Washington’s understanding of natural right to his commitment to the founding of a republican regime.

Having fought major battles in five states and coordinating troop movements in all thirteen, Washington understood American politics from “a national perspective” well before he re-entered civilian life. After the war, the English continued to prey upon American shipping and to occupy New York City, Charleston, and Savannah—all major ports, vital to American commerce. The union of the states, first asserted in the 1774 Articles of Association, weakened without a battlefield enemy on the ground who daily reinforced the sentiment of hanging together, lest we hang separately. Disunion led to reluctance by states to pay debts incurred during the war to the federal government, and this led to a regime crisis. Unpaid soldiers will grumble. Officers in Newburgh, New York became restive. They received some encouragement from such nation-builders as Robert Morris and Gouverneur Morris, who hoped that fear of a coup would spur the states to pay up. Major General Alexander McDougall was the point man for the proto-rebellion, threatening Treasury Secretary Henry Knox with refusal to disband the troops until payment was received.

Washington understood that such a rebellion would threaten republicanism itself by challenging civil authority. He decided to employ a peaceful form of what military men call tactical surprise, the civil equivalent of the Battle of Trenton. He made a unannounced visit to the officers’ meeting in Newburgh on March 15, 1782, reading what one historian has called “the most impressive speech he ever wrote.” Taking himself as his example, he cited “the great duty I owe to my country” to obey civilian authority, a duty deriving from the principle of government by the consent of the governed, itself derived from the equal natural rights of all human beings. Appealing to honor, the military virtue par excellence, he exhorted the officers to “express your utmost horror and detestation of the Man who wishes, under any specious pretences, to overturn the liberties of our Country, and who wickedly attempts to open the flood Gates of Civil discord, and deluge our rising Empire in Blood.” Who will rule this rising empire? Military men? If so, was Washington himself not the highest-ranking and most-honored such man in America? And had he not fought with them as comrades throughout the early defeats and hardships, sharing with them the final triumph? Instead of calling them to lay down their arms, could he not have led them on a march to the capital, taking over the government by force? He had done the opposite of that. The officers backed down.

“As word of the encounter first reached Congress and then spread across the land in newspaper accounts, Washington gained yet another laurel. Already first in war, he was now first in peace and clearly first in the hearts of his countrymen. He had no rivals.” Washington “use[d] his platform as America’s leading citizen to call for quickly and fairly compensating the troops, and ultimately for building a strong national union that could support those payments and some form of permanent military establishment”—an establishment which, going on 250 years, has yet to attempt a coup d’état against the people it is charged to protect or the civilian government those people have consented to be governed by. Working against any foolish potential backlash against the military as such, Washington advocated the maintenance of a small standing army, with a well-organized militia to supplement it, on the grounds that it could defend America’s northern border with British Canada and its northwest territories against Indian tribes and nations allied with the British.

Washington’s call for national union went well beyond national defense. In his 1783 Circular Letter to the states, he associated a stronger central government with the “happiness” of those states as parts of that union. “It is only in our united Character as an Empire, that our Independence is acknowledged” by foreign powers, and it is only by thinking of ourselves as “citizens of America,” by establishing our “National Character” that we can become “a happy Nation,” one so situated as to secure our natural rights of life, liberty, and self-government. By resigning his military commission at the national Assembly Chamber in Annapolis near the end of the year, and by declaring his intention to retire to private life, he astonished the world (and most particularly George III). As the “second Cincinnatus,” he “became the first American,” no longer merely a Virginian of great distinction but “a world-renowned personification of republican virtue.” In one of his many well-chosen quotations, Larson cites Thomas Jefferson: “The moderation and virtue of a single character probably prevented this revolution from being closed, as most others have been by a subversion of that liberty it was intended to establish.”

Returning to Mount Vernon, Washington put his long-neglected household in order then turned his attention to his properties along rivers in southeastern Pennsylvania and today’s West Virginia. He discovered that a grist mill he owned had been mismanaged and that a Calvinist sect called the Seceders had claimed squatters’ right on another of his tracts since 1773. For his pains, a group of Indians attempted to capture him at Great Kanawha, along the Ohio River. These unpleasant surprises galvanized his ambition to empower the federal government to permit orderly settlement of the West. “If Congress could open, sell, and settle these lands and thereby gain authority and revenue, it could bolster the union. If not, it risked losing them to a foreign power, and with them, much of the reason for a national government.” As a result, why would the settlers in the West not turn to Spain, which ruled the West’s geo-economic linchpin, New Orleans, and to Great Britain, which ruled the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River, for both security and trade? “The touch of a feather, would turn [the Westerners] either way,” he wrote. To secure this portion of the Union, not only a well-funded military force but east-west transportation routes would be indispensable—the latter to be secured by linking the North Branch of the Potomac River to the headwaters of the Ohio River. To this end, he lobbied the Virginia and Maryland legislatures to establish a private toll route on the Potomac, while lining up investors. He played the role of what we would now call a ‘rainmaker’ with his usual skill, and by January 1785 “Washington had his company and soon would be elected its first president.” He proved a less successful entrepreneur, however, not because he lacked business acumen but because the Erie Canal soon became the main east-west corridor, due to its better positioning, closer to the commercial entrepots of New England.

Nonetheless, the project earned a substantial political profit. In obtaining the Mount Vernon Compact between Virginia and Maryland to cooperate on Potomac River commerce, he had partnered with the young Virginia state legislator James Madison, whom he enlisted in his broader intention to strengthen the Union. “We are either a United people, or we are not”; “if the former, let us, in all matters of general concern act as a nation,” with “national objects to promote, and a national character to support.” Madison concurred, proposing that the Virginia legislature “call a general meeting on interstate commercial regulations to be attended by delegates from all thirteen states.” Representatives of five states did attend the meeting, held in Annapolis in September 1786. This became the first step toward calling a national convention to revise the failing Articles of Confederation. But such a convention would need not only Washington’s support but his attendance, if it were to attract delegates from all the states. Madison and Washington’s former military aide Alexander Hamilton went to work on the general—who, in the end, needed little persuasion. Not only was the general well aware of the geopolitical dangers to Americans, he also worried about internecine conflicts, especially over borders and commerce, and, “perhaps most important,” the failure of states “to protect individual liberty and private property.” So were many of his fellow Virginians, who chose him to lead its delegation at Philadelphia. For his part, Washington worried that the convention wouldn’t be serious—that is, genuinely constitutional.

As he had done with his officers during the war, Washington consulted his most trusted advisers before going into battle. Madison, Knox, and Jay all advocated “a truly national government” with “separate legislative, judicial, and executive branches” and a bicameral legislature. Madison also argued for a fully articulated federal judicial system, which would “avoid local bias in expounding national laws and deciding cases involving citizens of different states.” All agreed that “in areas under its domain the national government must have the power to act directly on the people, not just through the states.” Washington “embraced their proposals and made them his own,” while wondering if, as he said to Jay, “the public mind [was] matured for such an important change.” He called the convention as “the last peaceable mode” of “saving the republic.” Virginia delegate John Randolph was designated to present what was immediately labeled “The Virginia Plan,” which in most aspects carried the day, with some compromises at the insistence of the smaller states.  Respecting the office which everyone expected Washington to occupy, the new constitution broke with parliamentarism, electing the president not by legislative vote but through the novel Electoral College, which, tellingly, would dissolve at the end of each presidential election cycle, making the chief executive entirely independent of any standing set of officeholders in the national or states’ governments. Governmental powers would thus be not only separated but balanced.

At times bitter and hard-fought, the ratification contests in the several states saw determined opposition to the new constitution from advocates of the Articles of Confederation system. “Federalists would rely on the public’s trust in Washington to carry the day,” and it did. Further, once ratification was assured, it was crucial to ensure that anti-federalists didn’t control the first Congress. To this end, Washington set down three “main goals for the United States under the Constitution: respect abroad, prosperity at home, and development westward”—goals obtainable by policies of “effective tariffs, sound money, secure property rights, and a nonaligned foreign policy.” As Washington put it, “America under an efficient government, will be the most favorable Country of any in the world for persons of industry and frugality,” a country not “less advantageous to the happiness of the lowest class of people,” thanks to the vast tracts of land available in the West. “He saw it as a model for individual liberty and republican rule everywhere,” and candidates for the first Congress under the Constitution would see in that model what amounted to an exceptionally attractive political platform.

After his election, Washington journeyed to New York, stopping in Philadelphia and Trenton. At a City Tavern banquet in his honor, the diners raised their glasses to the toast, “To Liberty without licentiousness,” a republican slogan if ever there was one.  At Assunpink Creek, near Trenton, where Washington’s troops had rounded on British forces in January 1777, a banner unfurled to read “The Defender of the Mothers, will be the Protector of the Daughters.”

This resembled a king’s progress across his realm, with one critical exception. The crowds who greeted the new president didn’t bow to him; he bowed to them. George Washington had become “the master of the correct gesture.” (Adams called him “the finest political actor he had ever seen.) The regime he had been instrumental in founding lodged sovereignty in the people, not in the government, and not in some elected monarch.

And the regime worked, far better than the Articles regime had done. Treasury Secretary Hamilton worked out a financial system capable of paying the war debt. Secretary of War Knox organized for war against the Western Confederacy, an alliance of Indians which had blocked American settlement in the rich lands of the Ohio Valley. John Jay negotiated a treaty with Britain that got them out of its forts in the Northwest Territory. North Carolina and Rhode Island finally ratified the Constitution; Tennessee and Kentucky also joined the Union. Congressman Madison floor-managed the Bill of Rights through Congress, “with Washington’s support.” Secretary of State Jefferson “devis[ed] a broad regime of federally protected intellectual property rights,” which would secure the innovations on which manufacturing and commerce depend.

Controversies over the national bank and Jay’s treaty caused tensions between Washington and his fellow Virginians Jefferson and Madison, who eventually began “a formal national political party with a states’-rights bent.” Thus what began as a controversy between big states and small states during the ratification contest morphed into a controversy between finance and agriculture by the turn of the century, a controversy that would eventually morph into the controversy between slavery abolition and slaveholding which nearly destroyed the Union. Far-seeing George Washington manumitted his slaves in his Last Will and Testament; had enough of his fellow slaveholders done that, there might have been no Civil War.

Shamim A. Siddiqi: Methodology of Dawah in American Perspective. Brooklyn: The Forum for Islamic Work, 1989.

Mohamed Akram al-Adouni: “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America.” April 1991.

 

The late Shamim A. Siddiqi (1928-2018) served for many years as the moving spirit of the Islamic Circle of North America—a New-York-City-area organization not to be confused with the Islamic Society of North America, which was founded by the Muslim Brotherhood and controls the Islamic Learning Foundation. A Muslim born in what is now India, he fled to Pakistan with his family after the Partition in 1947. He admired and met with the most prominent Pak Islamist, Mawlanda Mawdudi, eventually carrying the Islamist message to the United States, where he lived for most of his life.

He states the core of that message, its purpose, in the opening sentence: “The book in hand is an effort towards the achievement of our cherished goal, i.e., how to make Allah’s Deen dominant on this earth.” Such dominance will lead to the Falah or deliverance “of the entire mankind” [sic], and the “methodology” outlined will cause the call [dawah] to all the peoples of North America to join the Islamic ummah or body of believers to be “properly projected and penetrated deep into the society.” Those peoples, but especially the people of the United States, “are in need of a superb ideology to counteract the menace of their social evils, economic upheavals, racial/color discrimination, political corruption and socialist/communist hegemonies on a global level.” Once converted, Western peoples generally will rise to the top of the worldwide Islamic movement, given their technological superiority to the rest of the world. The task is to show “how to make the message of Islam acceptable to the West,” thereby freeing “the Muslim world” from Western interference and intervention, “pav[ing] the way for the emergence of a global Islamic order.” He assures his readers that “it is Allah who guided my thoughts, my thinking process and its development in its entirety. Nothing in this book is mine. Everything is from Allah.”

With all Muslims, Siddiqi holds up the Qu’ran as God’s “last and final Guidance” for a humanity that is otherwise “weak, ineffective and in a pitiful state,” with each individual “fearful of his own species” and nations “skeptical of each other.” He finds one hopeful sign in Afghanistan, where, as of 1989, the Taliban sought to establish “an ideal Islamic state, to serve as a model for the rest of mankind.” In a post-9/11 “Updating Note,” he praises the Taliban for having “tactfully disarmed the people” of the country and “establish[ing] the rule of Sharia within their domain.” The subsequent invasion of Afghanistan by “the anti-Islam Western hegemony” and its regional allies under the pretext of counteracting Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. The “very tragic drama of September 11 was staged”; it was blamed on Bin Laden and the Taliban “without the least ascertaining the facts and looking elsewhere who were and are the greatest beneficiaries of this tragedy”—whom Siddiqi carefully leaves unnamed. Any attempted regime change in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the defeat of the Taliban will fail because “Stooges cannot fill the gap.”

Be all of this as it may, Siddiqi returns to the project at hand—changing the regime of the United States and giving it “an alternative way of life.” This “is the responsibility of Muslims who fortunately migrated to Western countries after the Second World War, when there was a dearth of labor in Europe and America and the immigration restrictions were eased.” This must be done because “the sheiks and kings of the Middle East are all in the pockets of the Western powers, especially the U.S,” which aids those rulers in their attempts “to crush the Islamic forces ruthlessly wherever they raise their voice for establishing Allah’s Deen.” “This dirty game has been goin on throughout the Muslim world unabated for the last two hundred years” and true Muslims must not tolerate it. “This will be possible only by building Islamic Movements in the Western countries in the homelands of those who have caused and are causing incalculable loss to the Muslim world and casting baseless aspersions against Islam day in and day out.” Muslims must “remove the prejudices of the West against Islam.” To do this, they must play “a game of strategy” whereby they “find out and create new friends for Islam and its cause on the side of the enemy, inside and at the rear of the forces fighting against Islam.”

This is right because “sovereignty belongs to Allah alone and denies all authorities besides Him…. Only Allah-given laws are to be accepted, practiced and implemented in an individual’s life and established in the society where the Muslims live”—the United States now being one such society. “A Muslim has to put all that he has either to change the society into an Islamic society or state or be perished for it [sic]. A Muslim has no other choice.”

Siddiqi lays down the basics of dawah as presented in Muslim Scripture. Man has free will, but he must choose rightly, according to God’s commands: “The achievement of both heaven and hell depends on the treatment which one accords to the guidance from the Creator.” Free will exists because God intends to “test him and ascertain who among the human beings accepts Allah and His Guidance by his freewill which will qualify him to be the citizen of the next world.” Choosing the right way of life or regime on earth will entitle you to citizenship in the best regime, hereafter. The Prophet Muhammad struggled to “rout out” the wrong way of life and found Allah’s Deen in “the body politic of the Arabian Peninsula”; “this was to serve as a prelude to make Al-Deen-Al-Islam dominant in the rest of the world.” Or, as Muhammad himself said, his disciples must act to “bring Arabs under your control and bring the non-Arab world under your domination [La Yuzharahu].”

In this “revolutionary” struggle, the idolators’ “political hegemony” was threatened. These tribal chieftains were given the chance to change their regimes, as Muhammad, using Mecca as his base, delivered a series of dawah speeches to them. “We should realize the magnitude of this Dawah effort. Continuously for ten years, every tribe was echoing with the challenge of [Muhammad’s] message.” Subsequent to this, after establishing a new base at Medina, he fought battles against those who resisted. He also undertook “a letter-writing campaign” to “all the Kings and rulers around him,” displaying “the political sagacity and statesmanship of the greatest order, ” warning them that “Arabia was not weak” and “was now dominated by a revolutionary Movement” which non-Arabs were welcome to join—or else.

The Prophet’s way of life exemplifies the way in which all Muslims should live. “He took advantage of every opportunity to expose and project [his vision] to the people around him,” making the objective “supreme” in his life; “everything was subservient to it.” “Dawah work, whether in America, Europe or elsewhere in the world must have this clear objective in the mind of the Da’ee [proselytizers] that they are out to establish Allah’s Deen in the land or the society in which they are living.”

For this task, “Allah Himself poured upon [Muhammad] through startling revelations of Al-Qur’an in bits and pieces at the time of every need, every difficult situation, every turning point and every calamity in the shape of short and long, forceful, and eloquent verses to meet the situation.” He command Muhammad to “develop and build up [a devoted and dedicated] character in each individual who responded to his call in the affirmative.” His message “most attracted the youth.” Opposition came not only from tribal chiefs but tribal elders and parents, who “realized the revolutionary aspect” of the message. But convinced that their choice was between an eternity in Paradise or Hell, “no amount of torture, oppression or hardship could move the believers even an inch from their position.” Persecution strengthened them, as it winnowed out the weak and enabled Muhammad to “pick up the best souls from the society of Mecca for the cause of Allah”; bribery and other inducements did not tempt such souls. To them, Allah “was the dearest of all, dearer than their parents.”

Muhammad’s Meccan converts numbered in the dozens. Threatened with death at the hands of his enemies, he listened to Allah’s command to migrate to Medina. The Hejira “sets a model to Muslims all over the world to migrate to a place where there are better prospects to practice, preach and establish the Deen of Allah. The migration of Muslims to America today presents a parallel situation provided the Muslims reorient the objective of their stay in this country and live by the commitment which they have with their Creator, Allah” to “spread His Deen.” At Medina, Muhammad took three steps to establish his base: building a mosque “to serve as a place of worship, a meeting ground, a guest house, a parliament, a conference hall, a court room, a training camp; establishing a covenant with local Jews “through which the power and the mischief-mongering habit of the Jews was neutralized” and “transferred the political and judicial authority” of the  city into the hands of Muhammad; and founding “The Brotherhood,” whereby all Muslims “share[d] the economic burden” of their newly-founded political community. This enabled Muhammad to organize Medina into “a military camp and the Muslims into a very active mobile military force,” aided by “a very effective system of gathering information” (as we would say, ‘intelligence) about surrounding tribes. Muhammad’s “political maneuvering and many preemptive military actions were thus always timely and befitting to the development of events.” “The stage of Peaceful Resistance was over,” and Medina became “a real Islamic State.”

“Through well-planned diplomatic activities,” Muslims “dismantled the enemy’s trust among themselves,” dividing them and preparing them for the kill. At the same time, “determined to carry out his mission to logical conclusion,” Muhammad never ceased revealing “Qur’anic injunctions revealed to him” by Allah, guiding “the transformation of society from ignorance into Islam.” In this way he “was constantly busy in building, developing and consolidating the team of his devoted and dedicated workers into a dynamic force of the Islamic Movement.” “Only such a team of workers would be capable of establishing Allah’s Deen in today’s world.” Thus Siddiqi presents himself as modeling Muhammad in contemporary America.

By the eight year of the Hejira, Muhammad had 10,000 followers under his command. Fortified by a peace treaty with his enemies and with God’s protection, Muhammad accelerated his dawah efforts, re-entered Mecca and converted “the entire population of Mecca.” Now, “the Deen was only for Allah.” “The Islamic state of Medina which had the authority all over the Arabia, was now a power to be reckoned with,” and Rome’s Caesar “was alarmed” at “this growing power at the Eastern frontier of his empire.” Soon, “the frontiers of the Islamic State [came into]… open confrontation with one of the superpowers of the time.” Although remaining “hypocrites in Medina” hoped to exploit this confrontation to “administer a fatal blow to the Movement in case [Muhammad] could be defeated by the Roman Empire,” they “were finally warned to accept Islam or be ready to fight,” “either to accept Islam or pay Jizyah [a tax on non-Muslims] and live a life of second class citizen [dhimmitude] under the bounds and bounties of [the] Islamic State.” That settled the matter, and Muhammad took the opportunity to practice dawah, universally. “This directive is binding on all Muslims until doomsday. It is now incumbent upon all Muslims to deliver the message of Islam to mankind and struggle their best to make His Deen dominant, irrespective of where they are and what they are doing.” In the late twentieth century, “this is now the only way left for Muslims to regain the leadership of this world.”

Accordingly, Siddiqi devotes his central chapters to the United States. Dawah “is the primary job,” there. In order to accomplish it, Muslims must organize themselves, and educate themselves for that job. American Muslims find themselves in the stage of jihad called “peaceful resistance.” They should wage “a relentless war against immoral practices, drugs, pornography, alcoholism racial discrimination, homosexuality, and other[s] like these.” Not only will this struggle bring the Da’ee into “direct contact with the people of the land at a grass-roots level,” it “may also offset the prejudices of Judeo-Christians against Islam,” leading them to “cooperate with the Muslims with better understanding and a with a soft corner in their hearts.” By so “creat[ing] the necessary goodwill among the people,” the Da’ee “will pave the way for the spread of Dawah deep in the society which otherwise would not be possible.”

Although this “initial stage” may prove “smooth sailing,” that won’t last. “Alarming signals will be raised by the so-called ‘free press,'” and “the Judeo-Christian anti-Islam propaganda machinery will then let loose its game of hate against Islam and the mission of the Prophet Muhammad,” filling the air with “baseless allegations” against them. Fanatics, reactionaries, conservatives, fundamentalist, and terrorists: the name-calling will begin, to be faced “with patience, cool-minded temperament, good behavior and exemplary character.” As “the Movement” begins to “penetrate deep into the hearts of the common folk,” a “counter-offensive campaign against the false propaganda,” coupled with a quest for “legal protection from court for fundamental human rights to propagate what its adherents believe to be correct and to profess the  same through democratic, peaceful and constitutional means,” can begin. Nonetheless, circumstances will worsen; “a period of trial is a must and is inevitable for Muslims wherever and whenever they rise and try to build the Islamic Movement for the establishment of Allah’s Deen”: “this is the logical consequence or the reaction of the society whose values and fundamentals of life are different from those of Islam.” Fortunately, the very character of the American regime, mere human artifacts though its laws may be, “provid[es] the opportunity to individuals or to a group of people to profess, practice and propagate any ideology of their choice.” Thus “the Muslims of America will also be free to mobilize themselves and carry out the program of Dawah Illallah [calling the people to the fold of Islam] to every nook and corner of America,” there being “nothing to hold them back” in “an almost congenial environment for Muslims to work,” at least initially. In this way the Muslim task will be easier in modern America than it was in tribal Arabia, with its “society of ignorance,” its lack of recognition “for fundamental human rights.”

Opposition “will come from the vested interests in the society,” such “modern idolators” as “the secular press cum media, the agents of capitalists, the champions of atheism (Godless creeds), the missionary zealots and extremely influential Jewish lobby of America.” These interests notwithstanding, “the Peaceful Resistance will… go on winning the hearts, the minds and the imagination of the people all around. There will be no status quo.” This campaign will prepare the way for the final two stages. Eventually, Allah will provide some territory in which true Muslims establish the Deen. Muslims worldwide may then emigrate to that territory. This may be in the United States, or not. In due course, Allah will make his choice manifest. “The Islamic Movement of America, resorting to intensive Dawah work, fighting Munkar [XXXX], rendering useful services to common folk through various projects of service-to-humanity, may influence a region or a state overwhelmingly,” resulting “in getting political strength through state legislatures and gubernatorial elections.” Muslims can then “try to make it into a model Islamic society within the power available under the constitution of the U.S.A and what it does not prohibit.” In turn, “this will pave the way to get hold of other states in a like manner. Thus, without disturbing or violating the constitution of the U.S.A., they can prepare the ground for the emergence of Islam as a way of life acceptable to the electorate of this country,” sending representatives to Congress and establishing “a strong lobby in Washington for the promotion of Islam and its cause in this country as well as elsewhere in the world.” Siddiqi insists, “This is not daydreaming. This is possible as well as feasible, if the Muslims are determined to play their part as Muslims in this country,” showing the American people that “the only way to get their past sins pardoned by God” and “to enter into paradise after death” in accordance with “the American way of life” is peaceful conversion to Islam. “This process is wide open in this country. It is anybody’s game.”
“The establishment of ‘God’s Kingdom’ on earth will not be a distant dream. It can emerge in the U.S.A. within the next two to three decades,” if Muslims take care not to test the limits of American constitutional law prematurely.

Thirty years since Siddiqi published those words, this has not happened, whatever inroads political Islam may have tunneled since the 1980s. Siddiqi sees the difficulties, soberly warning Muslims against “the fallacies of their wishful thinking.” At present, “Dawah work is pretty much limited to Afro-Americans and some other ethnic minorities,” and usually to those in prison. Worse, “the revolutionary aspect of Islam is rarely brought before the new converts, as in most of the cases the Da’ee himself is not conversant with it.” And it is “really a great tragedy” that the many Afro-American Muslims themselves are “divided into hundreds of water-tight compartments with no unity, or united platform or central leadership.” Dawah work remains “haphazard, irregular and without any planning.”

The same disunity prevails among Muslim organizations generally. “There is no central leadership and no common platform.” But “this is the only process through which the Muslims of America can emerge as a united political entity in the body politic of America.” Further, this platform requires a strategy, one designed for American circumstances. And it needs money, which it will need to acquire not from poverty-stricken African-American ex-convicts but from Muslim immigrants, who “are mostly affluent and can meet the target” of $25-$30 million per year, which would finance radio and television networks, schools, media, and research centers “to attract talented Muslim youth in and outside America to compete with the secular world.” Therefore, the African-American Muslim communities, who have the population numbers, and the mostly Arabian immigrants, who have the wealth, must combine in one Muslim Community of America.

But these organizational and financial issues pale before “the main cause of Muslims’ failure to come forward and meet the obligation lying on their shoulders”: “lack of vision.” “A Muslim has no place in this world until he undertakes what he is raised for in this world as a Khairal Ummah, the Best of Nations.” So long as Muslims “cut themselves off from the Qur’an,” or “study it in an academic fashion,” they will never found the Deen. Only when professing Muslims practice Qur’anic teachings will the deeper meanings of Allah’s message be revealed to them. Siddiqi insists that to know the Qur’an the believer must know it in ‘the Biblical sense’: intimately, in his heart, as a part of his inner self. “There have always been thousands and thousands of learned scholars of the Qur’an, Hadith, and Fiqh throughout the last thirteen hundred years, but they could not establish Allah’s Deen anywhere in this world in its totality after the first four Caliphs and Umar Bin Abdul Aziz.” “As a result, the Qur’an could not present itself as a practical reality to these learned scholars as it was to the Prophet Muhammad and his companions,” who were “cavaliers of the Islamic Movement,  not academicians of the Qur’an.” Such scholars are “perhaps” more sinful in God’s eyes “than one who is ignorant,” as they have no excuse. This is why, regardless of success or failure, which depend upon God’s Will, American Muslims must formulate a plan for action, where they are, now.

What kind of person is a true Da’ee? “Islam is a way of life.” The Da’ee must understand with “the fundaments” [sic] of that regime, its basic doctrines including the sovereignty of Allah, “Islamic social justice,” “the concept of Jihad and its necessity,” and “the principle of excellence on the basis of piety.” He will find these principles stated in the Qur’an but also embodied in Muhammad’s person and way of life. He must carefully assess the existing American regime, with its expanding economy under “the goddess of capitalism,” its notion of human, popular sovereignty, and the results of those features: “Gradually, America is growing into a colony of vested interests and international Zionists’ caprices and intrigues.” Moreover, “individual liberties and personal freedom have been distorted to serve only as a means to create lust for sex in the society, promote pornography and adopt perverted attitudes and violence in human relations.” As a result of these converging forces of corruption, popular sovereignty “has been eroded to an alarming state,” “women are challenging the authority of men’s domination in every field, resulting in the emergence of a society of unisex at an accelerated pace,” and “personal freedom amounts to a free license to dismantle the moral values and ethical standards of the society both by individuals and the media.” American material, military, and political greatness remains, but it is “ideologically and morally very poor.” Only Islam can truly enrich it.

In terms of geopolitics, American dominance has bred ‘Third-World’ resentment. As a result, “an economic war is imminent.” In Europe, the European Union, along with Japan, will also challenge the United States, as will the Soviet bloc. (In a later note, Siddiqi admits that “Russia has disintegrated and has become the ‘sick man’ of Europe,” but correctly insists that “still it has the potentials [sic] to play a third-party role in world politics in collaboration with China, North Korea and Cuba.”) In the Middle East, the state of Israel “is a smoldering bomb,” currently the instrument of U.S. policy but with dreams “of dominating” the region, with American partnership “in this dirty game.” As it also seeks to please “the so-called moderate Arabs,” America has “landed in a quagmire.” As for Latin America, “the people need some superb ideology to give redress to their problems and peace to their mind”; once again, Islam is the answer. So, because “America, in the present context of the world, has the potential to remain s superpower for many decades to come,” the Da’ee must continue to study world events, seeking opportunities to advance the cause.

Still, mere knowledge will never suffice. If a Da’ee “is weak in character, if he lacks in manifesting cool temperament, palatable manners, the requisite amount of devotion and dedication to the cause, if he is short of patience and perseverance against provocations and if he is devoid of determination to carry out the mission against all odds, he will not be able to meet the challenge.” “No amount of knowledge can bridge this gap.” Such character “cannot be produced in the cozy atmosphere of the drawing room or sitting in a corner like a hermit or Sufi and keeping aloof from the world and its happenings.” An umbrella organization of American Muslims must arrange for Dawah field work, whereby the Da’ee will get out and deal with people, deepening his knowledge of Islam by his practice of it among the American people—conversing, organizing, taking care to model the character type of the man under Allah’s regime. Without such practice, it is “rather impossible to generate the sterling qualities of heart and mind and acquire the required amount of personal endurance” necessary to advance that regime politically. Social work, service to the needy, will “gain recognition” for Muslims, “generate the goodwill of the masses and muster the support of the electorate.” “The process of learning, practicing and preaching will go together.”

Siddiqi emphasizes the importance of distributing “Dawah literature” in the United States, a point made to him by Mawlanda Mawdudi himself in a conversation at the end of Mawdudi’s life, after he had emigrated to Buffalo, New York, where his son practiced medicine. “We have to produce our own literature in the American perspective,” tracts that register “the moods, the temperament, the psychology of the people and the needs of this country.” Also, the Islamic organization should not depend on immigrants (such as himself) to lead the movement here. The immigrants “should remain in the background,” training American converts to serve as the spokesmen. And of course the Da’ee must avail himself must pray to Allah, asking to avail himself of Allah’s power.

Because “America is a predominantly secular cum permissive society” in which “people are mostly dominated and dictated by their physical urges,” “slaves to their physical instincts,” and governed by “a secular, rigid constitution that guarantees unrestricted personal freedom to act, to speak, to behave, to assemble, to move around and enjoy life the way they desire”; and because the slogan “In God We Trust” “is simply a slogan coined by their forefathers,” with “no bearing on their living condition,” religion “is nowhere visible in the life pattern of the people,” in what Aristotle calls their Bios ti; and because “the Judeo-Christian God is powerless, keeps away from the people’s lives, and has nothing to do with their social, economic and political activities” (“except in very small pockets of conservative Jews and Christians”); “for all practical purposes, America is a Godless society and purely materialistic in every walk of life.” This being so, America resembles the kind of society Muhammad encountered in seventh-century Arabia, “the society of ignorance (Jajhilayah)”. It is the society of modern ignorance. Therefore, “the basic principle for the presentation of Dawah Ilallah should naturally be the same: to call upon the people to obey God and accept Muhammad as God’s messenger.

But although America is a free society by habit and by law, “when the question of Islam arises, centuries-old prejudices come in the forefront,” such as “the distorted image of so-called terrorism” in the Middle East. Why “so-called”? Siddiqi doesn’t say, but it is likely that he regards acts of violence committed by devout Muslims as legitimate acts of jihad. To correct this such ‘distortions,’ the Da’ee must “proceed patiently, cautiously and diligently with Hikmah (wisdom) in the presentation of Islam to the American people. This will be possible because both God and prophethood are familiar to Jews and Christians. The Christian understanding of God as one Godhead, three Persons, should be challenged as polytheistic or else illogical. “The concept of Trinity appears to be unreasonable and self-contradictory”; the Da’ee must argue against “the dogma of the ‘human-God’ of Christendom, innovated by the Jewish conspiracy against Prophet Jesus.” It is noteworthy that Siddiqi intends a rational argument (aimed initially at priests and pastors). Siddiqi optimistically contends that “there is no reason why positive response will not be forthcoming, at least from the moderate Christians”; as for the immoderate ones, they can be made “shaky in their beliefs” in this way. [1]

Alongside this deployment of reason (or sophistry, as the case may well be), the Da’ee should also invoke the passion of fear. This is the approach not so much to priests and pastors as to the people. Tell the people: You will be held accountable before God on the Day of Judgment. Better get this right, or else. “The fear of God and the fear of accountability in the Hereafter will keep the people on the path of righteousness.” Heed the prophets, including Jesus and Muhammad—especially the latter, since “when a new prophet came the previous code of conduct was automatically canceled” “it is essential for every man and woman on earth to follow the latest Guidance brought by the last messenger of God,” namely, Muhammad. For these reasons, the people “have no choice but to accept the Qur’an as the only Guidance now available to mankind to follow.” [2]

“The Christian community of America will need a special approach to make them understand their misguided concept about Jesus.” On this, Siddiqi logic-chops thusly: God created Adam with no father or mother, Eve without a mother. Christians don’t “ascribe the attributes of God to either one of them. How then can they profess Jesus to be the Son of God? It is illogical and quite absurd.” The syllogism, such as it is, amounts to this: Adam had no father; Adam was not God (he did of course have some of the “attributes” of God, but let that pass); therefore, Jesus cannot be the Son of God. But (obviously) if Jesus is not the same kind of being as Adam, why not? Somewhat more seriously, Siddiqi then claims that ‘making’ Jesus into a human-God “is clear idolatry,” inasmuch as “making partners with God is a sin,” and an unforgiveable one at that. But if Jesus’ godliness and humanity, if Jesus was fully God and fully man at the same time, this is self-contradictory only if He was fully God and fully man in the same way as He was in His fatherliness. The designation of the second Person of the Trinity as the Son of God indicates otherwise.

Once Christians (and presumably “shaky” Jews) have had their convictions de-centered, they will be prepared to receive the message of the Messenger as the only way out of their predicament. Verbal argumentation is one thing, but printed tracts and pamphlets are indispensable for this “important task [that] has been neglected so far by the Muslim organizations of America/Europe due to lac of vision.” Islamic publications shouldn’t be restricted to things aimed at the masses. A magazine “to serve as a vehicle to carry out the message of Islam to the intellectuals of the society presenting an alternative system of life against what is in practice today” will “prepare the ground” for “the better educated and informed segments of the society” to “accept Islam as their way of life.” Congruently, “For Dawah work in the universities and colleges, it must be pointed out that there should be more concentration on the teachers than the students, or equally on both.” The teachers are “free, they have the time and they exert a lot of influence upon the students. If they are convinced about Islam as a way of life, they can motivate their students to that effect in great numbers. Teachers will therefore be the special Dawah targets of the Islamic Movement.”

In all these efforts, “the Da’ee must know the inhabitants, to whom the message is to be delivered, well.” “Their mood and temperament, their habits and tastes, their likes and dislikes, their fields of interest, the qualities of their character”—in sum, the ethos of the regime—must be thoroughly understood. “The job of a Da’ee is like that of a doctor,” diagnosing and prescribing to his patient. Once cured of his spiritual ills, the patient may himself become a doctor, or at least a medical paraprofessional, a partner in the task of Islamification. As the cure in its initial stages will be verbal, the doctor of Dawah must be alert to “the situation and timing” of his presentation, waiting until “the contactee is in a receptive mood,” changing the subject if “an addressee is found yawning or restless or absentminded or [un]interested.” And of course “when the attitude of obstinacy comes into the dialogue or the addressee becomes adamant,” “refus[ing] even to listen to logic,” the Da’ee should retreat with the intention of “meet[ing] again at some future time.” “In no way should he hurt the feelings of his contactees.” “Neither force nor any coercive method is to be applied while presenting Dawah to non-Muslims.” In America, at least. “Pray to Allah for the opening of the heart of the contactee and beg from Him to present the message in soft but effective language and in a palatable manner.”

Proselytizing can also take the form of action. “Every worker of the Islamic Movement, through service to the people in his neighborhood and vicinity, should acquire prominence as a person to be sought after in time of need,” not for the sake of “fame or reputation” but to “earn the sympathy of the people for the sake of Allah and then go deeper into the society for Dawah work.” For this, the elderly—many of them “sick or incapacitated and confined to homes or elderly people care centers—”are a useful electorate” and a rich potential source of community outreach, if converted. On the other side of the spectrum, runaway children, foster children, abused children, and other needy youngsters will respond to “fatherly guidance” from the Da’ee. Model foster hopes and hostels in which Islam is taught will bring this opportunity to fruition, as they will amount to a parallel to the care facilities available to the elderly. Finally, “counseling service to battered husbands and battered wives will ultimately bring them nearer to Islam,” as “they will all feel obligated to the teachings of Islam that changed their lives and made their matrimonial life happier and rejuvenated.” All such services can help to effect regime change, “bring[ing] before this nation Islam as a way of life” and counteracting depraved sexual behavior by “creating hate/contempt against the existing lifestyle of the people” of America—which, as he has already contended, has sunk deep into sinfulness.

Siddiqi concludes with a personal postscript. “In 1982, I went around the world and visited many countries, with the sole objective of finding out the place where an effective Islamic Movement could be developed in the present context of the world in order to make Allah’s Deen dominant somewhere on this earth.” He found that “America is the most suitable place in the Western hemisphere for that glorious end to be started.” But it has barely begun. “A serious Islamic Movement for the establishment of Allah’s Deen is yet to emerge in the body politic of the U.S.A.” He calls for existing Muslim organizations to “take up the task of Dawah Ilallah along the lines suggested in this book,” to unite without delay in working toward that end. Among those who seem to have done so was Mohamed Akram al-Adouni, then a member of the Board of Directors of the American chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood, and at this writing the General Secretary of the Al Quds International Forum, which finances the Hamas organization in Gaza. In “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America,” published in 1991, Akram praised “the brothers in the Islamic Circle”—Siddiqi’s organization—for their “attempt to reach a unity of merger” with other like-minded organizations. In Akram’s language, the purpose of such an organization does indeed resemble Siddiqi’s stated intention, albeit expressed more tartly: workers “must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ it miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” Whereas Siddiqi emphasizes the rhetorical content and methods of Dawah, Akram focuses more on the need for organization—the beginnings of the politeia of the new regime, beginning with Islamic Centers “in every city.” “The center ought to turn into a ‘beehive’ which produces sweet honey,” a civil-social political society in itself, offering education, recreation, social activities, and headquarters for political campaigns. The role of the Islamic Center “should be the same as the ‘mosque’s’ role during the time of God’s prophet… when he marched to ‘settle’ the Dawah in its first generation in Medina.” In modern times, such organizational tasks were first begun by Hassan al-Banna, “the pioneer of the contemporary Islamic Dawah” and founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the decades before the Second World War. In America today, “the big challenge that is ahead of us is how to turn… seed or ‘scattered’ elements into comprehensive, stable, ‘settled’ organizations that are connected with our Movement and which fly in our orbit and take orders from our guidance.” Larger and better-funded than Siddiqi’s Islamic Circle of North America, the Brotherhood was indeed better situated to effect Siddiq’s program.

Controversy remains on whether the American organization heeded Akram’s memorandum. But why would it not?

 

 

Notes

1. As Christian theologians from Augustine forward have observed, the Trinitarian understanding of God involves no contradiction if the three Persons are understood as Personae of the same God or “Godhead,” to use the preferred term of these thinkers. Otherwise, it would be impossible to ‘have faith’ in the existence of such a God, since one cannot have faith in any person or any thing who or which is inconceivable. If you tell me to accept on faith that you are holding a square circle in your closed hand, at most I can believe that you are holding something you call a square circle; because I can’t conceive of such a thing, I cannot ‘have faith’ that you have a real square circle in your hand, not knowing what you could possibly be talking about.
2. In fact, Jesus tells his Jewish disciples that not one jot or tittle of the Jewish law has been suspended for them. He does not require non-Jewish converts to take up obedience to that law, but that is not a cancellation of the prophecies already heard by the Israelites insofar as they were directed exclusively to them.