At five in the afternoon on May 13, 1865, Americans living in Ottoman Syria met at their consulate in Beirut to mourn Abraham Lincoln. Cornelius Van Dyck, who had helped bring the Arabic Bible to completion that spring, opened with prayer. The residents voted to wear mourning badges for forty days. They instructed the consul to send their resolutions to Washington and to Lincoln’s family.

Eighteen years later in New York, the Shriners assembled to mourn the Algerian emir Abdelkader. They draped an altar and set out a Quran. Their Imperial Council ordered the temples into mourning for three lunar months. The ceremony gave the emir a place in the Shrine’s own history, with offices in Mecca and Damascus.

By the time the Americans gathered in Beirut, Lincoln’s government had spent four years dealing with the Ottoman court. That relationship had produced a treaty and letters written by people who could be named. The New York memorial drew its authority from a different set of papers, which claimed that an Eastern order had recognized the Americans as brethren.

Lincoln’s legation at Constantinople

John Porter Brown had worked at the American legation since the 1830s. In June 1861 he was acting chargé d’affaires when Abdülaziz succeeded his brother as sultan. The Ottoman foreign minister, Mehmet Emin Âli Pasha, spoke with Brown about the war in the United States. Brown wrote to William Seward on July 17 that Âli hoped the Union would survive intact. He said the minister considered secession a principle that could ruin any government.

Lincoln’s new minister, Edward Joy Morris, signed a treaty of commerce and navigation with Âli on February 25, 1862. Lincoln sent it to the Senate on March 31, calling attention to the time needed to get the ratification back to Constantinople. On July 2 he proclaimed the treaty. Morris also had business concerning Confederate raiders. At his request the Porte directed maritime governors to prevent vessels from fitting out to prey on American commerce. Its instructions restricted entry by privateers and their prizes, with an exception for emergency repairs. Morris had the Sumter in mind. Other governments had treated the ship as a warship, and he wanted the instructions to cover its prizes even if the Ottomans did the same.

On April 29, 1865, Americans in Constantinople met to mourn Lincoln at the legation. Morris took the chair and Brown served as secretary. Two days later Âli conveyed the sultan’s grief at Lincoln’s murder and at the attack on Seward. On June 7, the Germania of the Golden Horn lodge sent a condolence of its own. Its members hailed the fall of slavery and called Lincoln a martyr to liberty and humanity.

Brown was a Mason and had served as master of the Bulwer Lodge in Constantinople. A Masonic journal reported in 1868 that he had helped arrange the initiation of a dervish there. In The Dervishes; or, Oriental Spiritualism, published that year, Brown described Bektashis who regarded themselves as akin to Masons and were willing to fraternize with them. He had investigated stories of an older Freemasonry hidden under the name of a dervish order. The men he could identify as Masons had joined recognizable lodges in Europe or in Ottoman cities.

The book’s subtitle brought dervishes into a vocabulary Americans already used. The Boston Spiritualist paper Banner of Light had carried Paschal Beverly Randolph’s advertisements for hashish in 1860. When Adalbert Volck drew a Confederate satire of the North’s objects of worship, he put spirit rapping on the altar. An American who knew the vocabulary of mediums and séances could encounter Ottoman dervishes under that name on Brown’s title page.

That same year the American Mason Robert Morris traveled through the region. He printed a translation of a firman, an imperial order that he said Brown helped him obtain from Abdülaziz. It identifies Morris as an American traveler and directs officials to assist him along a route through Beirut, Damascus, Jerusalem, and Jaffa. It tells the reader who asked the sultan for help, whom the sultan addressed, and what the document permitted.

The Scottish-chartered Palestine Lodge in Beirut had members with standing in the city. Hasib Bey Jumblatt, of the Druze family from Mount Lebanon, belonged to it. So did dragomans who worked for the Americans in Beirut and Damascus. There was also a French-chartered lodge, Le Liban, founded in 1869. Morris found that a membership list spread over a wide territory could leave a lodge short of people to attend a meeting. The ordinary work of finding rooms, officers, and a quorum still had to be done.

The Bektashis and the fez

The Shrine’s history said the Bektashis had protected the Nobles in a time of “great peril.” The Bektashis had a history that went well beyond the martial reputation the Americans borrowed. Their communities gave particular devotion to Ali, the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, and to the Twelve Imams. Bektashi lodges and writers also became important custodians of Hurufi texts after the movement’s founder, Fazlallah Astarabadi, was executed in 1394.

For the Hurufis, the letters in which God’s speech was written disclosed something of the divine in the visible world. They read the human face for those letters. They counted the hairline, two eyebrows, and four rows of lashes as seven lines. A Bektashi poet such as Virani Baba could read those features alongside the seven verses of the Fatiha, the opening chapter of the Quran. The face bore a text the initiate was taught to see.

Abraham Abulafia had set out exercises for combining and voicing Hebrew letters. The Hurufi reading of the face gave the body a place in another practice centered on letters. A nineteenth-century American could encounter a very different use of the face in Volck’s drawing of Lincoln as Mokanna. The veiled prophet’s followers were told his face concealed a light they could scarcely bear. In the poem Volck drew on, the lifting of the veil exposed the man who had made that claim.

In 1826 Sultan Mahmud II destroyed the Janissary corps and suppressed the Bektashi order associated with it. Lodges closed or passed to other hands. Bektashi communities survived and gradually reestablished themselves under his successors. Mahmud’s new army took up the fez, and his 1829 dress regulations prescribed it for civil officials in place of the turban. In New York in 1872, the Shrine adopted the fez and later named the Bektashis as protectors. Its members wore a cap from the reform program of the sultan who had closed the lodges of the order they invoked.

Rawson’s Arabic

In New York, the physician Walter Millard Fleming and the actor William J. Conlin, known as Billy Florence, formed the nucleus of the Shrine. They met with other Masons at Knickerbocker Cottage. The fraternity dates Mecca Temple to September 26, 1872. Florence brought the reputation of a traveling actor. Fleming organized a ceremony that American lodges could repeat. The founders’ printed account credited Florence with having obtained authority in the East.

Albert Leighton Rawson supplied the language in which that claim could be heard. Mecca Temple’s history said he translated loose sheets in Arabic and French, some bearing Florence’s own notes. Later correspondence was added. Rawson helped establish the calendar and wrote as a man who could explain how temples in Cairo and Damascus recognized Americans. In 1899 he sought a paid appointment as historian and argued that accounts of prominent Eastern members drew newspaper coverage and recruits.

Some of the Arabic was straightforward. The motto printed as “Kuwat wa Ghadab” is quwwa wa-ghaḍab, قوة وغضب, meaning strength and anger. The history gave the same motto in Latin as Robur et Furor. Its “Es Salamu Aleikum” is the familiar greeting of peace. The printed answer, “Aleikum es Salaam,” is intelligible and leaves out the customary wa, or and, at the beginning. The name it spelled “Bektasheeyeh” renders al-Bektāshiyya, البكتاشية. In the same book, Chief Rabban uses an honorific of Hebrew and Aramaic learning.

The chronology of the origin story was another matter. Fleming and William S. Paterson attributed the founding of the Shrine to Caliph Ali in Mecca in AH 25, which they printed as 644. AH 25 began in late 645. Uthman was caliph then. Ali took office in 656, in AH 35. Ali’s standing among the Bektashis explains the choice of ancestor more readily than the date in the book does. The history also placed a Noble at the head of an alleged Bektashi representation in Mecca. Access to the city was reserved to Muslims. The history required the chief to live in Mecca or Medina and to be represented at Mecca during the pilgrimage. The office it described came with obligations that could be tested against a named person.

In 1877 Rawson’s wife Emma sent a swatch of cloth with a letter. Emma was the daughter of Laura Keene, who starred in Our American Cousin on the night Lincoln was shot. She had inherited the gown she called the “Lincoln” dress in her will. Accounts of what Keene did in the presidential box differ. Emma’s letter and will establish how the family identified and passed on the dress.

Omar ibn Said’s first page

In 1831 Omar ibn Said wrote an account of his life in Arabic in North Carolina. He had studied in West Africa before he was captured, carried across the Atlantic, and sold. He began the account with the Quran’s chapter on dominion. Its opening verse, تبارك الذي بيده الملك, places sovereignty in God’s hands. Only after the Quranic passage did Omar begin to give the details of his own life.

Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation named North Carolina among the states in rebellion. It declared free the people enslaved there. Omar died during the Civil War, still held in slavery by the Owen household in Bladen County. His Arabic manuscript survived. The words he used for dominion had been written in America four decades before the Shriners adopted an Arabic motto.

The emir the Shrine mourned

Abdelkader had led resistance to the French conquest of Algeria, spent years in captivity in France, and settled in Damascus. In 1860 he and his followers sheltered Christians during the violence there. His standing in the Muslim world also rested on years of study and teaching. In Damascus he explained the work of Ibn Arabi. His Kitab al-Mawaqif grew out of those teachings and meditations.

During his pilgrimage in 1863, the emir placed himself under Muhammad al-Fasi in Mecca. Al-Fasi taught in the Darqawi branch of the Shadhili Sufi order. People in Abdelkader’s circle were surprised that a man already famous as a teacher would seek instruction from a shaykh they scarcely knew. The emir had his own reasons to recognize a spiritual authority whose standing could be difficult for outsiders to measure.

On June 18, 1864, Les Pyramides lodge in Alexandria initiated him on behalf of the Henri IV lodge in Paris. The French lodge published his answers to questions about God and the soul, including his belief in its immortality. In 1877 the Grand Orient of France removed the requirement that members profess belief in God and the immortality of the soul. The 1864 proceedings record the convictions the emir brought to his initiation.

Abdelkader’s name also reached Lincoln’s desk. In April 1864 H. L. Williams wrote to the president seeking support for a work on Black soldiers. Among the precedents he offered was Abdelkader’s Black bodyguard. A man Americans had heard of as a protector of Christians in Syria now appeared in an argument for recognizing the service of Black men in the Union war.

Abdelkader died on May 26, 1883. He was buried beside Ibn Arabi in Damascus. Five days later, according to Mecca Temple’s history, New York Shriners set a black velvet coffin in their chamber with a skeleton inside. On the coffin lay a letter on parchment attributed to the emir. Crossed scimitars lay across the Quran on the altar. Rawson was among those present.

The Shrine’s decree assigned Abdelkader an office at an Alee Temple in Mecca and a place among the Bektashis of Temple Saladin in Damascus. Its published correspondence also placed Druze leaders within that Eastern hierarchy. Saladin had ended the Fatimid caliphate in 1171. The caliph al-Hakim, whom Druze teaching regards as a manifestation of the divine, belonged to the dynasty he brought down. Those names could be set beside one another in a New York history and made to describe branches of the same order.

The first days of 1301

Mecca Temple’s history records a second observance in New York on November 1, 1883, at the turn of the fourteenth Islamic century. Walter Fleming described a ritual performed between the new and full moon. In his account the Nobles were to imagine the appearance of the Mahdi and the approach of the end of the world. Incense and music accompanied the men who played the part of dervishes.

The turning of an Islamic century had a religious meaning beyond the calendar. A hadith collected by Abu Dawud says that God will send someone to renew the faith at the head of each century. In Sudan, Muhammad Ahmad had proclaimed himself the Mahdi in 1881. On November 5, 1883, four days after the date in Mecca Temple’s history, his forces destroyed an Egyptian army under William Hicks at Shaykan, near El Obeid. The New York account spoke of the expected figure. In Sudan a living man had taken the title and assembled a movement around it.

The Egyptian army had been reorganized with the help of veterans of Lincoln’s war. They served a khedive who governed with wide autonomy under Ottoman sovereignty. Charles Pomeroy Stone, who had helped secure Washington for Lincoln’s first inauguration, became chief of staff to the khedive’s army. By 1883 he had taken another assignment in New York as chief engineer for the Statue of Liberty. Egypt’s new military establishment had been one place an American officer could take his experience of the Civil War. The Ottoman legation gave another officer a different kind of work.

Wallace and Abdülhamid

Lincoln put Lew Wallace in command at Baltimore in March 1864. On July 9 Wallace delayed Jubal Early’s advance at Monocacy, giving Union reinforcements time to reach Washington. On July 12 Lincoln stood under Confederate fire on the parapet at Fort Stevens. After the assassination, Wallace sat on the military commission that tried the conspirators.

While Wallace was making his postwar career, Masons in Constantinople had admitted a member of the Ottoman ruling house. The prince Murad was initiated in private on October 20, 1872, twenty-four days after the date New York’s Shriners give for the founding of Mecca Temple. Cleanthi Scalieri of the Proodos lodge had carried Murad’s request to the French Grand Orient. The ceremony took place in the home of a French lawyer, Louis Amiable.

Murad came to the throne on May 30, 1876, after Abdülaziz was deposed. Murad was deposed on August 31 and his younger brother Abdülhamid II succeeded him. In 1881 Wallace came to Constantinople to represent the United States before Abdülhamid. By then he had governed New Mexico Territory and published Ben-Hur. He had been a Mason before the Civil War.

Wallace’s standing with the sultan mattered to his later reputation. The dispatches show what access meant on an ordinary day. In a letter dated March 28, 1885, at Constantinople, Wallace explained that he had sent the legation’s dragoman to ask about a permit for an American college at Harpoot. The case turned on a telegram to a provincial governor and a fine for using a printing press without permission.

Murat Shrine’s history puts Wallace and Thomas Taggart in its March 27, 1885 class in Indianapolis. Wallace’s letter from Constantinople, dated the following day, leaves that ceremony date in doubt. The connection that can be dated securely is his years representing Washington at the court of the sultan.

The Indianapolis temple took its name from Joachim Murat, Napoleon’s cavalry commander on the Egyptian expedition and later king of Naples. John T. Brush and other Indianapolis Masons received their charter in 1884 with help from Syrian Temple in Cincinnati. By 1910 they had a theater in a building with the appearance of a mosque. The name of a Bonapartist king now marked a place in Indianapolis where the public could buy a ticket.

The name in court

In 1893 John G. Jones and other Prince Hall Masons organized a Shrine in Chicago. Their founding account attributed Jones’s authority to Ali Rofelt Pasha, a supposed delegate from Arabia whom the story placed at the World’s Columbian Exposition. The Black order held parades, established temples, and carried on charitable work. In 1914 a white Shrine lodge in Georgia brought suit to stop a Black temple from using its name and regalia. Other suits followed.

Abdul Hamid Suleiman approached the Black Shriners in 1922 with a proposal to recognize them under the Islamic Masonic authority he claimed. He asked that members live by the Quran and send him a share of their dues for Mecca. When a New York World reporter asked for his credentials, Suleiman produced a fez that he said he had worn in Mecca for fifteen years. The city’s name was embroidered in English above the same emblems used by New York’s Mecca Temple. Imperial Potentate Caesar Blake Jr. answered that his members were Christians and intended to govern their own fraternity. Patrick D. Bowen has traced possible connections between Suleiman’s activity and the emergence of Moorish Science. The Temple’s origin tradition places its beginnings in Newark in 1913. Drew Ali’s role in those early years remains disputed. By the mid-1920s Noble Drew Ali’s movement was taking shape publicly in Chicago, where members wore the fez and claimed Moorish nationality on identification cards.

Lawrence Weldon remembered Lincoln telling an Illinois jury in the 1850s that his client William Dungey “may be a Moor.” A neighbor’s accusation that Dungey was Black had set the slander case in motion. By the 1920s members of the Moorish Science Temple put the name Moor on papers they carried themselves. They claimed a nationality in place of the racial names Americans had been assigning them.

In Ancient Egyptian Arabic Order v. Michaux, the Supreme Court called the claim of ancient Eastern descent fanciful. The justices found that the white order had known for decades that the Black Shrine was organizing in public under similar names and symbols. The earlier local suits came too late to overcome that acquiescence. On June 3, 1929, the Court reversed the Texas injunction. It had reached its decision by following the public life of both fraternities in America over the course of a generation.