Some of his soldiers called him “si Mohamed”; for others he was “captain Mohamed”; hardly anyone, however, among the Egyptian squadron he was leading in northern Sudan in 1821 knew that the commander that Mohamed Ali Pasha and his son Ibrahim Pasha had entrusted with their lives, was an American by the name of George English, a graduate of Harvard Law and Divinity Schools, who had come to Egypt few years before, in search for understanding the region, and perhaps himself. But Mohamed Ali and Ibrahim knew; Ibrahim in particular was interested in English’s experience, albeit relatively limited, in the American Navy, as well as in English’s contacts back home, for he had developed, in the decade prior, quite a close friendship with John Quincey Adams, at the time the US Secretary of State (and later President).

What was particularly interesting about English was his expansive, curious mind. Leaving aside his hardly conventional views about the American experience up until the early nineteenth century, English was drawn to the history and culture of the Middle East and wanted to live in its major urban centres at the time, primarily Istanbul and Cairo. One of his interesting, and perhaps prescient, insights from even before arriving at the Middle East, was that Islam was the fastest growing religion in the world, an observation that was extremely difficult to ascertain in the early nineteenth century, and yet still, that conviction gradually built in him an incentive to understand that religion. He wanted to experience for himself the social environment in which the religion was practiced. And so, he delved into the region head on. We know from credible reports that he had mastered Arabic and Turkish in quite a short period of time.

The accusation of being a spy were, not surprisingly, never far from him in the Middle East. But from what has come to us through serious historical sources, what he was particularly interested in was hardly the politics of the region at the time, nor the military aspects of the Egyptian or Ottoman armies, despite having served the Mohamed Ali dynasty in its attempts to take control of Sudan. English was strongly drawn to what we can today call Middle Eastern socio-cultural trends. For example, he had interesting insights into the cultural diversity that was there in early nineteenth century Istanbul and Cairo, hosting not just Turkish and Middle Eastern and Arab communities, but also different European, Jewish, and Mediterranean ones that, to English’s mind, were living harmoniously in expanding, and at the time increasingly modernising, urban centres.

What makes English’s experience and insights quite interesting, as we get to know from Michael Oren’s account of his writings in “Power, Faith, and Fantasy”, was that English had never really turned local. Despite often appearing to live like a Turk or an Egyptian, he had consistently throughout his years in the region retained an outsider’s perspective. Importantly, despite his fascination with the varied cultures of the Middle East, and with the budding cosmopolitanism of the region’s major metropolises, English did not look at the Middle East through rosy lenses. His appraisals of the behaviours, and in some cases the value systems, of different groups in the region (including in Egypt), were often scathing. Yet, at the same time, English was hardly a classic American adventurer who had roamed the Middle East merely for glory or for enjoying sensual pleasures conjured up by orientalist fantasies.

English had a religious-political insight. He thought that the budding American experiment, which was anchored on a conviction of a divine blessing to the land and the ‘pilgrims’ who had crossed the ocean and come to cultivate it, and in so doing – in the American narrative - gave rise to a new prosperous human society - had a historical link, at least an emotional connection, to the land from which monotheism emerged. English, steeped into American political thinking, was convinced, as several of the country’s founding fathers before him were, that America was destined to expand beyond its oceanic borders. The notion of an American empire – by far more powerful, and in this line of thinking, wiser – than all previous empires, was not far from his idea of what America was to become. That ‘empire to be’ had to learn from, and anchor its presence in, the land of the first empires.

Many Americans in the Middle East at the time found George English’s thinking unappealing. His genuine interest in seriously understanding the Middle East entailed a willingness to assume that several of the premises of traditional American thinking about the region, could well be wrong. Oren records how one of the most prominent American preachers in the Middle East in the early ninetieth century had once described English as having “an obstinate hostility to the truth”. “Truth” here meant much more than a purely Evangelical creed; it encompassed the reservoir of American understanding of the Arab and Ottoman and Islamic worlds which was formed from afar, reflecting what early Americans wanted to think the Middle East was like. English’s sin, in the view of his many detractors, was that he was courageous enough – and a true lover of knowledge – to challenge, primarily in his own mind, the beliefs he was raised on, and to understand that real knowledge can only be the product of hands-on experience in and serious immersion into the culture one wants to understand.

As the next article in this series will show, George English was a rarity, not only among the Americans who had come to the Middle East, but also among the Middle Easterners who had thought they understood America.