Alexander Webb and Our Viral Culture
Some of you may be familiar with the story of Alexander Webb, one of the first American converts to Islam, and surely the most well known convert in the 19th century.
In case you’re not, and in brief, Alexander Webb converted to Islam in or before 1888 while working as an American Consul in the Philippines. He eventually returned to New York, his home state and began the mission of propogating Islam.
Knowing President Cleveland Personally, and having the distinction of being the official spokesperson for Islam at the Chicago World’s Fair, Webb published dozens of papers and books about the religion geared toward the intellectuals and common Americans of his time, and was generally well recieved in many circles.
This, of course, is why most of New York State and environs quickly adopted Islam, and why the North East of the United States is predominantly Muslim.
Wait, that’s not how it happened.
Virality in the Industrial Age
When Alexander Webb spoke of something ‘going viral,’ he would have been talking about something like smallpox, and the prospect would have been terrifying. To speak of Islam, or any of his papers ‘going viral’ would have been a grave insult, if it were even understood at all. Interestingly enough, however, Webb’s time did have something similar to our modern obsession with fame, and that was the American Dream.
The idea that you can work hard at something and therefore deserve unrestricted bounties and fame is the essence of the American ideal. It has not changed in these 140 years, and even today we dream of posting just the right image or video on the internet and instantly reaching the stratosphere of popularity, but Alexander Webb’s later life shows us something much different from the American Dream, and much more similar to the Muslim Reality.
Alexander Webb died in 1916, at the age of only 69. He died in a house packed with dawa materials, with no electricity or telephone, and he was buried in a cemetery in Lyndhurst, New Jersey, having never achieved the goal of creating a proper Muslim cemetery in New York. He had left his prestigious work as an American diplomat, he was the only American to ever be granted a knighthood by the Ottoman Empire, he devoted his life to dawa, and God willing he will receive his reward.
But his reward was not that his garden should bloom in the American North East.
Integrity and Elbow Grease
Had Alexander Webb’s goal been to convert the masses, or to reach the highest echelons of society with his message he would have surely fallen into despair. But despite decades of empty promises from the Muslim world abroad, and decades of teaching Americans about Islam with no returns, Webb died giving dawa to his last breath.
Sometimes our obstacles are bigger than we are, but so too should our goals be. It’s important to support your community consistently and resolutely, to maintain the bonds of your community and keep true to your word. Following is often more effective than leading, and a community is much better equipped to act when it is well covered by committed support. These are all things we can see in our communities around us, but one of the things we can most easily see in Webb’s life, a life without that community, is that the integrity and rewards of the steadfast are only attained by those whose goal is only the pleasure of Allah, and not worldly gains or Facebook likes.
I have learned a lot about Dawa since I converted to Islam, and as a modern writer I have learned a lot about marketing in general. I could look up winning lottery numbers, or important historical events, but if I could send one message back in time to Alexander Russel Webb it would be the same one that I would like every one working for a good cause to take away from this:
Keep working, you’re doing something great.
