The Past, Present, and Future of America and the Islamic World

http://blog.yupnet.org/2016/03/24/america-and-the-islamic-world/

Tarek Osman | 30 March 2016

In 1801, the rulers of Tripoli, in today’s Libya, declared war on the US, after the republic had attacked North African corsairs who had repeatedly pirated American ships in the western Mediterranean. American politicians were not particularly worried about the impact of the Libyan threat on their republic, though Thomas Jefferson did meet a Libyan envoy to explain the American position. These historical eccentricities apart, America’s earliest real involvement in the Arab and Islamic worlds was neither militaristic nor political. In the second half of the nineteenth century, many American engineers, some veterans of the civil war, found opportunities to make their fortunes in helping Middle Eastern rulers, for example Egypt’s Khedive Ismail, modernize and industrialize their economies. By the turn of the century, American missionaries founded the region’s first modern universities: The Syrian Protestant College (which later became the American University in Beirut) and the American University in Cairo.