From Peshawar to Lebanon Springs

IslamicASA Articles · Print Culture · Christian–Muslim Debate

An unidentified Muslim author, an Anglican missionary, a Catholic-born physician, and the movement of an argument through the American press, 1892–1909

In September 1892, an author calling himself “Ibn Ishak” entered the pages of the Boston monthly The Arena to argue that Islam—not modern Christianity—possessed the practical religious and social legislation required by the contemporary world. His identity was withheld, but his Muslim voice was not. The Arena then gave the Reverend Thomas Patrick Hughes advance sheets and space to reply. What followed was not one article but a transatlantic print debate: Hughes’s missionary response, Peter Charles Remondino’s “Fallacies of Ibn Ishak” in the elusive December 1892 issue of The National Popular Review, its six-part preservation in Cincinnati’s American Israelite, and finally Hughes’s explanation of Ibn Ishak’s anonymity when the Muslim author reappeared in The Hibbert Journal in 1909.

Ibn Ishak speaks in The Arena

“The Future of Islam” appeared in number 34 of The Arena, pages 389–400.¹ Ibn Ishak introduced himself as a believer “educated in an Anglo-vernacular school in British India,” widely travelled, acquainted with several languages, and committed both to Islam and to an open search for truth. His opening was important. This was not a Christian writer describing Islam, nor a fictional dialogue in which a Muslim voice existed only to be defeated. The magazine presented the essay as the argument of a learned Muslim addressing Western readers directly.

Ibn Ishak did not deny the contemporary decline of Muslim political power. He acknowledged that “a thick cloud of darkness has gathered over Islam” and contrasted the nineteenth century with the civilizations of Baghdad and Córdoba. But he rejected the familiar European claim that the Ottoman Empire’s weakness proved that Islam itself had no future. The Ottoman sultan, he argued, was not the measure of Islam, and European Christian statesmen were hardly disinterested observers of Ottoman decline.

His principal argument was social rather than imperial. “Modern Christianity does not meet the wants of society in the present day,” he wrote. Muslim travelers could see that Christian profession had not prevented poverty, prostitution, drunkenness, divorce, concentrated wealth, imperial violence, or irreligion in Naples, Paris, London, New York, and Chicago. The point was deliberately comparative: Christians judged Islam by conditions in Muslim societies while exempting Christianity from responsibility for conditions in countries calling themselves Christian.

“The Oriental at his worst will stand comparison with the ‘submerged tenth’ of any Christian land.”

Ibn Ishak proposed four benefits from an Islamic revival: public recognition of one God; enforceable restraints upon drunkenness and sexual exploitation; a social system adapted to ordinary human life; and a common brotherhood in which human beings were regarded as equals. He attacked the Western reduction of Islam to polygamy and divorce, arguing that Muslim law restricted both and gave women legal rights that clandestine sexual relationships in Western cities did not provide. He also defended Islam against the “religion of the sword” charge by placing Muslim conquests beside biblical warfare, the Crusades, and European imperial rule.

Some of those claims were sweeping, apologetic, and open to challenge. Yet the essay’s historical importance lies partly in the platform itself. Near the end of the nineteenth century, a substantial American review allowed an unidentified Muslim intellectual to turn the missionary gaze around: Christian society became the object of moral examination, and Islam was presented as a possible remedy rather than merely a problem to be explained.

Why The Arena mattered

Founded in Boston by Benjamin Orange Flower in 1889, The Arena was a monthly review devoted to social, political, religious, and intellectual reform. It ran until 1909 and deliberately opened its pages to arguments that more conventional periodicals treated as radical or marginal. Questions of labor, monopoly, poverty, women’s rights, religion, race, social science, and competing programs for modernity appeared together in its volumes.

That editorial culture helps explain how “The Future of Islam” reached print. Ibn Ishak’s essay was not travel writing or an ethnographic sketch. It was an intervention in debates about the failures of industrial and Christian society—the kind of controversy for which Flower had designed the magazine. The Arena did more than publish the Muslim case. Its editor sent advance sheets to Thomas Patrick Hughes, allowing a knowledgeable Christian respondent to answer in the same volume. The journal thus staged a recognizable controversy while giving each writer enough space to develop an argument.²

Before Alexander Russell Webb

The timing gives the exchange particular importance in the history of Islam in the United States. Ibn Ishak’s article appeared in September 1892; Hughes’s reply followed in the same Arena volume; and Remondino’s response was advertised for the December 1892 National Popular Review. All three preceded Mohammed Alexander Russell Webb’s public Islamic mission and publishing campaign in the United States.

Webb had already embraced Islam while serving as the American consul in Manila and was traveling through India and the wider Muslim world during 1892. His Three Lectures was published in Madras that year, but it was not an American publication. Webb returned to New York in February 1893, while The American Israelite was still serializing Remondino’s article. He subsequently established the Oriental Publishing Company, and the first issue of his Moslem World appeared on May 12, 1893. Later that year he represented Islam at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago.³

The Ibn Ishak controversy therefore belongs immediately before the Webb-centered beginning usually given to organized Islamic publishing in the United States. It should not yet be described categorically as the first Muslim–Christian debate ever printed in America. Earlier missionary periodicals, newspaper correspondence, translated Muslim statements, and reprinted foreign controversies require more systematic examination. A narrower conclusion is better supported: this may be the earliest identified extended debate in a major American periodical in which a self-identified Muslim author presented Islam as an answer to the failures of Christian society and received a direct response from an experienced Christian missionary.

The distinction between Ibn Ishak and Webb is equally important. Ibn Ishak represents a Muslim voice admitted into a mainstream American editorial forum. Webb represents an American Muslim beginning to create and control an Islamic publishing forum of his own. The two developments occurred within months of one another, placing “The Future of Islam” at the threshold of an organized Muslim presence in American print.

Hughes answers—but not entirely

Hughes began “Has Islam a Future?” with an unusually explicit limitation: “It is not my intention to reply to the learned Muslim writer’s strictures on European and American society.” He admitted that much in modern life was unsatisfactory and that “very much” in Ibn Ishak’s criticism could reasonably be taken to heart. His defense was that these conditions resulted from departure from Christ’s principles, not from Christianity properly understood.

He nevertheless rejected Ibn Ishak’s hope that Islam might regenerate the Western world. Hughes cited Bukhara, Khiva, and Yarkand as Muslim-ruled societies which, in his judgment, did not demonstrate the superiority of Islamic government. Islam had a future, he concluded, but not one marked by “domes and minarets in Liverpool and in Boston.” Its future lay chiefly in Africa and Asia, where it might even serve as a “schoolmaster” preparing peoples for Christianity.

The bulk of Hughes’s response, however, turned criticism back upon Christian missions. Missionaries had carried English manners, colonial authority, denominational quarrels, and poorly informed attacks on Muhammad into Muslim societies. Hughes recalled preaching in a mosque on the Afghan frontier when he was young and comparing Jesus with Muhammad. An elderly Muslim scholar heard him, recited from the Qur’an, and replied: “You do not know what you are talking about. Leave the mosque.” Hughes later judged his own performance foolish.

That encounter altered his missionary method. An attack upon Muhammad, he wrote, was as offensive to Muslims as anti-Christian blasphemy was to him. Missionaries could not expect Muslim audiences to separate Christianity from the British conqueror, nor could committees in Boston or London easily understand Muslim intellectual life. Hughes still sought conversion, but he argued that Christian engagement with Islam required knowledge, humility, and reform. He even conceded that Western Christians might learn from Islamic rules concerning concentrated wealth, monopoly, care for the aged, and provision for the poor.

Missionary, scholar, and author of A Dictionary of Islam

Thomas Patrick Hughes was not a casual magazine controversialist. He had spent approximately twenty years with the Church Missionary Society in Peshawar, from 1864 to 1884, working on the northwestern frontier of British India. He studied languages, interacted with Muslim scholars and religious leaders, preached in mosques, and helped establish All Saints’ Memorial Church. His scholarship was inseparable from the evangelical project, but his experience also made him unusually critical of missionary ignorance.

In 1885—the year the American edition of his major reference work appeared—Hughes moved to Lebanon Springs, New York. By 1889 he had begun a longer ministry in Manhattan. His A Dictionary of Islam, published in New York by Scribner, Welford and Company, presented doctrines, rites, ceremonies, customs, legal terms, and theological vocabulary to English-speaking readers. The work became an enduring reference, although it must be read within the colonial and missionary setting that produced it.⁵

Hughes’s background explains both sides of his Arena essay. He believed Christianity to be the ultimate religious destination, and he described Islam as preparatory to Christian conversion. At the same time, years of direct contact had taught him that missionary caricature was counterproductive and intellectually indefensible. The exchange therefore was not simply Muslim apologist versus hostile missionary. Hughes disputed Ibn Ishak’s conclusion while validating part of his complaint about Christian conduct and Christian knowledge of Islam.

Remondino enters the argument

Dr. Peter Charles Remondino encountered the two Arena essays and wrote a further response: “The Fallacies of Ibn Ishak; or, Why Christianity Does Not Christianize Gentile Nations.” A notice in the Chicago Tribune on November 20, 1892, advertised the article for the December issue of The National Popular Review. A bibliographic reference places it at page 19.⁶

Remondino was the editor of The National Popular Review: An Illustrated Journal of Preventive Medicine and Applied Sociology; he was not its publisher. J. Harrison White published the monthly jointly from Chicago and San Diego. The distinction matters because surviving references often attach Remondino’s name closely to the journal, but editorial control and publication were different functions.

Why did Remondino write “Fallacies”? He believed Ibn Ishak had made a powerful case against the conduct of Christian nations and that Hughes had failed to meet it. In fact, Remondino conceded much of the Muslim author’s indictment. He praised Islam’s “democratic simplicity,” rejected one-sided comparisons between Muslim warfare and Christian history, invoked British protection of the opium trade, and catalogued prostitution, trafficking, rape, drunkenness, divorce, illegitimacy, prisons, and poorhouses in Christian societies.

“His views of the social difficulties under which our people are unfortunately laboring are in the main too true.”

Remondino’s disagreement concerned explanation and remedy. He argued that Western evils showed the failure of professed Christians to practice Christianity, not the failure of Christ’s teaching. He then asked whether Islam could do more for “Gentile” nations. His answer rested increasingly upon the racial anthropology, environmental determinism, climatic theory, and evolutionary assumptions of his period. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were treated as products of “Semitic” origins, racial inheritance, geography, diet, climate, and social adaptation. What he called science is now recognizable as racial pseudoscience.

The December 1892 issue containing page 19 has not been located in the digitized holdings examined, including the available HathiTrust runs. That does not prove that no copy survives in any repository. It means the original printing has not yet been found. The Tribune notice independently confirms that the article was advertised for the December issue, while a later newspaper serialization preserves its text.

Preserved by The American Israelite

Cincinnati’s American Israelite reprinted “The Fallacies of Ibn Ishak” in six front-page installments on January 26, February 2, February 9, February 16, February 23, and March 2, 1893. The first installment named Remondino and carried the source line “[In National Popular Review.],” making clear that the Jewish newspaper had not commissioned the work.⁷

Why did a Jewish newspaper reproduce a Catholic-born physician’s response to a Muslim writer and an Anglican missionary? No editorial announcement explaining the decision has yet been located, so motive must remain an interpretation rather than a documented fact. The selection nevertheless served recognizable interests. Remondino exposed the discrepancy between Christian preaching and the conduct of Christian nations; criticized missionary arguments also directed against Jews; and grouped Hebrew religion, Roman Catholicism, and Islam together as traditions in which social and moral law remained part of religion.

That usefulness becomes especially visible in the second installment. Remondino wrote that most Reformed creeds had neglected “the same view of man that the Hebrew, Roman Catholic and Mohammedan religions have taken of him—that the social and moral laws must be made a part of the religion.” On the same page, The American Israelite printed material praising Jewish family life and moral discipline. Republishing a non-Jewish writer’s criticism of Protestant fragmentation allowed the paper to defend Jewish ethical life without making the entire argument in its own editorial voice.

The paper need not have endorsed Remondino’s racial theories to find those passages valuable. Newspaper reprinting was selective and strategic. The six-week serialization placed the argument before a Jewish readership and, unintentionally or otherwise, may have preserved the only presently accessible complete copy of an article whose original issue remains missing. That conclusion should be phrased carefully: the American Israelite text is possibly the only surviving witness presently known, not demonstrably the only copy in existence.

“A Turk—or simply a Yankee humorist?”

Ibn Ishak’s pseudonym created a problem from the moment his essay appeared. On August 31, 1892, the Rochester Daily Post of Rochester, Minnesota, printed an unsigned comment headed “Are We to Be Mohammedans?” It opened by asking whether the author was “A Turk—or is he simply a Yankee humorist?” The newspaper transformed his proposals into comedy, dwelling upon polygamy and reducing the program of moral restraint, economic reform, and universal brotherhood to an exotic religious boast.

The clipping shows the cost of anonymity. The Arena had given a Muslim author a platform, but readers had no public biography by which to authenticate him. His command of English, familiarity with American cities, and pseudonym made it possible to imagine that the essay was satire by an American. The question remained unresolved in public for seventeen years.

Hughes reveals the reason in 1909

In 1909 Ibn Ishak returned in volume 7 of The Hibbert Journal, pages 522–540, under the new title “Islam, the Religion of Common Sense.”⁹ This was not a reprint of Remondino’s article and not simply the 1892 essay under another heading. Hughes explained that he had solicited a new contribution after reading David Starr Jordan’s “The Religion of the Sensible American.” Ibn Ishak was then in the Levant, near libraries, and Hughes asked him to address a new audience through the language of “common sense.”

Because The Hibbert Journal did not ordinarily accept assumed names, Hughes stood as sponsor for his “learned Muslim friend.” He described Ibn Ishak as a native of northern India, educated at the Anglo-Muhammadan College founded by Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, subsequently awarded a degree by an American college, and accomplished in English and Oriental scholarship.

Most importantly, Hughes explained the concealment. Mulla Ahmad of Tungi, a Muslim associate who had assisted with A Dictionary of Islam, had been assassinated. In that context Hughes had asked the reformer to assume a name that concealed his identity. The 1909 introduction therefore answers the Rochester Daily Post: “Ibn Ishak” was not a “Yankee humorist,” but the protective pseudonym of a Muslim intellectual personally known to Hughes.

Hughes also disclosed his editorial role. He omitted Ibn Ishak’s criticism of the claim that Muhammad wore the “mask” of an enthusiast and made “a few alterations,” while stating that the remainder appeared in its original form. The platform was therefore real but mediated: Hughes secured publication, authenticated the author, commissioned the subject, and lightly edited the result.

Ibn Ishak’s 1909 essay renewed and expanded the earlier argument. Islam was presented as “the creed and code of ethics for the average man,” grounded in monotheism, prayer, cleanliness, religious education, temperance, family obligations, care for the poor, restrictions upon concentrated wealth, and zakāt. The social critique remained directed toward Christian modernity, but the title and framing translated it into language suited to The Hibbert Journal and the transatlantic religious discussion of 1909.

A Muslim voice inside a missionary framework

The full sequence resists a simple story of interfaith tolerance. Hughes remained an evangelical Christian missionary who expected Islam ultimately to prepare peoples for Christ. Remondino answered Islam through racial and environmental theories. The American Israelite appears to have repurposed his criticism for Jewish apologetic use. Hughes’s 1909 sponsorship included editorial intervention. Each platform came with interests and limits.

Yet those limits should not obscure what occurred. In 1892 and again in 1909, an unknown Muslim from northern India was permitted to address English-speaking readers at length about Islam’s intellectual and social claims. He criticized Christian nations rather than merely answering questions imposed by missionaries. Hughes contested him, but also protected his identity, vouched for his scholarship, admitted Christian ignorance of Islam, and helped him reach a second major journal.

“The Future of Islam,” “Has Islam a Future?,” “The Fallacies of Ibn Ishak,” and “Islam, the Religion of Common Sense” are therefore best read as one evolving print encounter. Its route ran from British India and Peshawar through Boston, San Diego, Chicago, Cincinnati, Rochester, Lebanon Springs, New York, the Levant, and Britain. The surviving pages reveal both the asymmetry of the Christian missionary setting and the remarkable persistence of a Muslim argument that moved through it without disappearing.