“Palestine is desolate and unlovely. And why should it be otherwise? Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land? Palestine is no more of this workday world. It is sacred to poetry and tradition - it is dreamland.” With these words Mark Twain closed his pilgrimage to Palestine, and in them can be seen the complex attitude of nineteenth-century Americans toward the Orient. For many nineteenth-century Americans, Palestine was a dreamland, a region of the world to be visited through the Bible and travel literature. The intense spiritual connection felt between Americans and the Holy Land, the idea of Palestine, would lead them to the region first as missionaries and then as tourists. Yet, to Americans, such as Twain, coming to Palestine from the western American frontier, Palestine did not compare in beauty, size, or material progress to their homeland. This comparison reflects the influence of materialism on the new wave of middle-class American travelers of which Twain was a member. The experience of Twain and his pilgrims in the Orient was also influenced by social class. Twain’s fellow pilgrims quoted sentimental authors such as William Cowper Prime because they wanted to be identified with the educated East Coast elite that Prime represented. Twain’s realist style was a counter-discourse to the sentimental writings of the East Coast, and an assertion of the superiority of American middle class views.

Twain believed that his realist style offered a clearer picture of Palestine to the American people, but clarity is perhaps the one thing that is lacking in his views on Islam and the Arab people. At certain points in Innocents Abroad, Twain writes on the ways Islam inures the Arab people to a life of poverty under an oppressive Ottoman government, while at other times, he expresses a degree of tolerance toward Muslim beliefs. Similarly, in his description of the Arabs, Twain at times advances the idea that Arab poverty is due to the Ottoman Empire, while at other times he suggests that Arabs consent to their degraded state. This ambivalence toward the Arabs and Islam is a ontinuation of earlier nineteenth-century American opinions of the Orient. In other words, Americans up to and including Twain could indulge in the fantasy of the Thousand and One Nights while still denouncing Islam and the Ottoman Empire as despotic systems antithetical to republican values.

Reading Innocents Abroad provides insights into the development of an American form of Orientalism. The United States was not a Great Power in the Orient during the nineteenth century, but its spiritual, commercial, and touristic ties with the Orient helped create a complex web of ideas and symbols associated with the East. Twain knew the powerful role travelers played in the shaping of American views of foreign lands. Travelers had the power to separate fact from fiction, but as Twain observes, they often perpetuated misconceptions and mistruths about foreign lands in their attempts to impress family and friends back home. Twain himself wanted to impress others with accounts of his travels. As a newspaper correspondent, Twain reported on those aspects of Arab society and the Ottoman Empire that he believed would sell newspapers and later books.

Scholars such as Michael Meyer and Richard Fleck have written that Twain’s focus on degradation and poverty in the Ottoman Empire was due to his concern for human welfare and dignity regardless of race or nationality.167 Despite Twain’s concerns, his negativism creates the impression that the Arabs are helpless and backward, in need of Western help or even military intervention to improve their lives. Twain’s suggestion that Islam played a role in Arab poverty added another argument to the body of thought against Islam that had been developing in America since the founding of the colonies.

As one of the most read works of travel in the United States, and Twain’s most popular work during his time, Innocents Abroad played a role in shaping the perspectives on the East of many common Americans, whom Twain’s reviewers believed would appreciate the book for its matter-of-fact style and length. In Innocents Abroad the reader can recognize the influence of social class and materialism on Twain, his pilgrims, and their experience of the Holy Land, despite Twain’s claim to write in a realistic unbiased style. These forces continue to expert an influence on American encounters with the Middle East, despite the claims to realism and objectivity made by Twain’s successors in the field of journalism. Study of Innocents Abroad not only encourages thought on American perspectives of the Orient during the late nineteenth century, but it can also stimulate thought on the factors shaping American attitudes toward the modern Middle East and what Americans may need to learn or even unlearn about it. Twain at times advances the idea that Arab poverty is due to the Ottoman Empire, while at other times he suggests that Arabs consent to their degraded state. This ambivalence toward the Arabs and Islam is a continuation of earlier nineteenth-century American opinions of the Orient. In other words, Americans up to and including Twain could indulge in the fantasy of the Thousand and One Nights while still denouncing Islam and the Ottoman Empire as despotic systems antithetical to republican values.
Reading Innocents Abroad provides insights into the development of an American form of Orientalism. The United States was not a Great Power in the Orient during the nineteenth century, but its spiritual, commercial, and touristic ties with the Orient helped create a complex web of ideas and symbols associated with the East. Twain knew the powerful role travelers played in the shaping of American views of foreign lands. Travelers had the power to separate fact from fiction, but as Twain observes, they often perpetuated misconceptions and mistruths about foreign lands in their attempts to impress family and friends back home. Twain himself wanted to impress others with accounts of his travels. As a newspaper correspondent, Twain reported on those aspects of Arab society and the Ottoman Empire that he believed would sell newspapers and later books.