Alexander Russell Webb: The First American Muslim Missionary
Muhammad Alexander Russell Webb
41 years old, from United States
Previous Religion: Christianity
My Life Before Islam
Alexander Russell Webb was born on 9 November 1846 in Massachusetts and raised in the Presbyterian faith of his family. As a young man he became a journalist, rising to edit newspapers in Missouri, and he grew increasingly skeptical of all organized religion. He concluded that the churches of his time were too entangled with worldly power, and for at least fifteen years before his conversion, in the words of his editor, he had "given up any concept of religion." Yet his restless mind kept searching for a faith that could satisfy both reason and conscience, and journalism led him toward worlds that schoolroom Christianity had never shown him.
The Moment of Guidance
In 1887 Webb was appointed by President Cleveland as American consul to the Philippines, serving in Manila. It was an unlikely setting for a religious awakening, yet it was there that he encountered Islam through the writings of Indian Muslim scholars and through the Muslim merchants he befriended in the city. He found in Islam answers to the questions that had driven him from the churches: a pure monotheism, a rational and practical ethic, and a vision of human brotherhood across races. He began a correspondence with educated Muslims in India and, in 1888, while still in Manila, formally declared himself a Muslim, taking the name Muhammad.
Reflections
Webb never concealed his conversion. When he returned to the United States in 1893, he opened an Islamic mission in New York City and began publishing the Moslem World, one of the first Islamic periodicals in America, and he lectured widely in defense of his faith. In the same year he stood before the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago as the sole representative of Islam, and thousands listened quietly as he set out the case for his religion. He published books and pamphlets, corresponded with Muslims in India and with the Ottoman court, and later served as honorary Ottoman consul in New York, devoting his remaining years to making Islam known to his compatriots.
Webb's mission met with limited success in its own time; the American press often ridiculed him, and he died in 1916 in relative obscurity. Yet historians now recognize him as the earliest prominent convert from the old Anglo-American stock of the United States and as the founder of its first Islamic publishing mission. His example stands at the very beginning of the American Muslim community, long before such a community bore a name. And his life remains proof that a nineteenth-century American, raised on the Bible and the flag, could find in Islam a faith of reason, justice, and universal brotherhood.