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This chapter considers how Arabo-Islamic scholarship operated in the centuries before the adoption of print in the early nineteenth century, when books still had to be written and copied by hand. It is tempting to divide the history of Arabo-Islamic book culture into two simple stages, manuscript and print, each stage marked by distinct, uniform characteristics. But the chapter asserts that a range of factors, including economic and institutional constraints, scholarly trends, and basic assumptions about the nature of knowledge, modulate book culture in decisive ways. To understand why printing caught on in the Arabic-speaking world precisely when it did, and why it took the forms and had the consequences that it did, the chapter takes a look at the unique features of Islamic intellectual culture before the printing revolution, in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. The first and most basic feature of this culture relates to the availability, or lack thereof, of books.

This chapter explores the representation of Arabs, Islam, and Arabo-Islamic culture in early twentieth-century black uplift discourses. These representations are hardly consistent and often speak directly to differences in theories on self-representation, as well as to the aesthetic divides that these differences engender. The most prominent figure of black engagement with Arab and Islamic culture is the Moor. Indeed, the figure of the Moor was mobilized for both spiritual and secular discourses on black identity. Tracking its uses in the first decades of the twentieth century reveals how intraethnic class and religious reconciliation were often sacrificed in black uplift discourses to intraethnic racial reconciliation. The chapter also discusses the term barbaresque, which describes black intellectuals' aesthetic engagement with North Africa, as well as with the narratives of African American empowerment these engagements produced.

This chapter examines the translation of the image of the Arab into a “unique” expression of American romanticism, particularly in Edgar Allan Poe's oeuvre. In Poe, the figure of the Arab facilitates the experience of difference as sameness, the foreign as familiar, and the alien as domestic. In a sense, Poe cultivates the anxieties that are latent in the contact narrative's use of the image of the Arab to establish American national, cultural, and racial difference. Indeed, tracking the arabesque's movement from Arab cultural reference to uniquely American aesthetic demonstrates the role of translation in Poe's romanticism. Retranslating Poe's arabesque back into Arabo-Islamic cultural discourse, in turn, reveals resonance between Arab and American romanticism.

This afterword describes the main house of the Longwood Plantation, where the owner's wife planned on holding balls and social events. Described by its owner as an “oriental remembrance of times past,” the octagonal structure stands six stories high and is capped by a large onion dome. By translating the exotic into the familiar geography of the antebellum American South, the owner co-opted an Arabo-Islamic cultural referent as a sign of his wealth, power, and influence. However, although the architect and his men had erected the exterior structure of Longwood by 1861, the interior was never completed. Ultimately, the house is an odd Oriental ruin of antebellum America's obsession with Arabo-Islamic forms, as well as a reminder of the role those forms played in conjuring transcendental and transhistorical fantasies of American identity.