Above all, neither Melville nor Twain could ever assimilate Islam to their world. The nineteenth-century American writer Washington Irving differed in this regard, as he studied the religion and the history of Islamic Spain and wrote books on these topics employing Arabic and Spanish sources. His rendering of Islam to the American public thus offered both a more scholarly take and a more sympathetic one. But for Melville and Twain, Islam was always other and only enemy, useful for literary and rhetorical purposes, but not worthy of serious or nuanced engagement. For example, the existence of
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