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The most influential treatment of Islam from which Anglo-Americans borrowed, however, was Humphrey Prideaux's biography The True Nature of Imposture Displayed in the Life of Mahomet, published in London in 1697. In the American colonies the habit of applying the epithet "impostor" to "Mahomet" became nearly ubiquitous, following Prideaux and other European writers. Prideaux argued that Muhammad hatched the scheme of Islam as a way to gain power over Arabia.
Early Americans also dreamed of Muslim conversions, as demonstrated in the tract The Conversion of a Mehometan, published originally in London in 1757, but then printed several times in America. This tract contained a letter, ostensibly written by a Turk, "Gaifer," to his friend Aly-Ben-Hayton. Gaifer told how he came to England to learn more about Christianity, which he had first heard about from an English slave. It recorded the story of Gaifer's conversion to evangelical Christianity. The letter is so formulaic and polemical that it seems almost certain that Gaifer is only a fictional vehicle for a theological attack. The primary target of the polemic is not Islam, however, but ministers of the established Church of England.
The 19th century saw the advent of the first large-scale American foreign missions, and an increasing awareness of adherents of other world religions, including Muslims. In an era of increasing domestic and international evangelical activism, many hoped that the church could Christianize America and the world. Many saw apocalyptic significance in the advent of foreign missions; large numbers of conservative Protestants believed that before the return of Christ, the Jews would be converted to Christianity, and Roman Catholicism and Islam would be destroyed. For example, pastor Isaac Knapp of Westfield, Massachusetts, speaking before an 1812 meeting of the Hampshire Missionary Society, anticipated the pouring out of the sixth and seventh vials of wrath (Revelation 16), "when the tremendous fall of Mahomedism, and the still more awful overthrow of Antichrist will shake all nations."4
As American Christians became increasingly conscious of the evangelistic challenge posed by non-Christian faiths, Muslims began to develop a reputation for being the hardest non-Christians to "reach." Herman Melville—certainly no evangelical—traveled to the Middle East and despairingly wrote that one "might as well attempt to convert bricks into brick-cakes as the Orientals into Christians. It is against the will of God that the East should be Christianized."5 By the late 19th century it had become conventional to note the difficulty of missions to Muslims.
Observers offered complex reasons for Muslims' resistance to missionary appeals—including the most obvious, the harsh reprisals that Muslim apostates were likely to suffer. James Barton of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions pointed to the perceived connection between Christian nations, imperialism, and conquest. In The Christian Approach to Islam (1918) he argued that missions to Muslims had been hampered by a lack of knowledge, coordination, and funds. Ultimately, the "Oriental" mindset of the Muslim, and Western missionaries' lack of understanding of that non-scientific outlook, was at the heart of the difficulties with Muslim evangelization. Missionaries "must not expect to find in the thinking of the Oriental ability to see life steadily as a whole and to grasp firmly the principles and system of our Christian theology." Thus, the missionary to Muslims must "orientalize himself" to succeed.6
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