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To: cf_river_rat

I can't find a text of Garland on the internet, but I did find this:

http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/John_Randolph

This is the 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica, which is famed as being more accurate than the later editions. It says, at the bottom of the first page:

"The best biography is that by Henry Adams, John Randolph (Boston, 1882), in the "American Statesmen Series." There is also a biography, which, however, contains many inaccuracies, by Hugh A. Garland (2 vols., New York, 1851)."

So, I don't think I would credit either of these statements, about Muslim slaves or about John Randolph, without some further evidence.


16 posted on 01/19/2007 7:40:11 PM PST by Cicero (Marcus Tullius)
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To: Cicero

Mr. Barton is not the most reliable of sources. He is promoting an agends and appears willing to bend and twist historical evidence to make it do so.


30 posted on 01/19/2007 8:03:49 PM PST by Sherman Logan
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To: Cicero
As far as the slavery issue, the only reference provided by the author is this:

Slavery and Islam

A small but significant proportion of African slaves, some estimate 10 percent, were Muslim. You might tell the story of Omar Ibn Said (also "Sayyid," ca. 1770-1864), who was born in Western Africa in the Muslim state of Futa Toro (on the south bank of the Senegal River in present-day Senegal). He was a Muslim scholar and trader who, for reasons historians have not uncovered, found himself captive and enslaved. After a six-week voyage, Omar arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, in about 1807. About four years later, he was sold to James Owen of North Carolina's Cape Fear region. In 1819 a white Protestant North Carolinian wrote to Francis Scott Key, the composer of The Star Spangled Banner, to request an Arabic translation of the Bible for Omar, and apparently Key sent one. Historians dispute how much the African Muslim leaned toward Christianity in his final years, but Omar's notations on the Arabic bible, which offer praise to Allah, suggest that he retained much of his Muslim identity, as did some other first-generation slaves whose names have been lost to us. (Omar's Arabic bible, which has recently been restored, is housed in the library of Davidson College in North Carolina.)

from here: http://www.nhc.rtp.nc.us/tserve/twenty/tkeyinfo/islam.htm

and the "estimate" is not sourced.

31 posted on 01/19/2007 8:05:53 PM PST by cf_river_rat (Just another defender of the faith)
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To: Cicero
Salon's Bartholomew's notes on religion has a blog entry about this. He's skeptical about the claim, too (emphasis is mine):

So where did Barton dig this one up from? Let’s ride the crest of the meme, and consult Henry Adams’ 1882 biography. Adams has only one reference to the subject (p. 26):

…He read Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, Gibbon, and was as deistical in his opinions as any of them. The Christian religion was hateful to him, as it was to Tom Paine; he loved everything hostile to it. "Very early in life," he wrote thirty years afterwards, "I imbibed an absurd prejudice in favor of Mahometanism and its votaries. The crescent had a talismanic effect on my imagination, and I rejoiced in all its triumphs over the cross (which I despised), as I mourned over its defeats; and Mahomet II himself did not more exult than I did when the crescent was planted on the dome of St. Sophia, and the cathedral of the Constantines was converted into a Turkish mosque."

Adams adds some context, and some acid commentary:

This was radical enough to suit Paint or Saint Just, but it was the mere intellectual fashion of the day, as over-vehement and unhealthy as its counterpart, the religious spasms of his later life.

Perhaps Barton has some other sources at his disposal (I haven’t been able to consult Russell Kirk’s 1978 biography), but the context looks as though he is stretching things somewhat.
39 posted on 01/19/2007 8:45:57 PM PST by conservative in nyc
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