The majority of controversy surrounding George Bush, who lived from 1796 to 1859 and is the great-grand uncle of George H. W. Bush, has come as the result of his first book, titled The Life of Mohammed: Founder of the Religion of Islam, and of the Empire of the Saracens. The book was the first American biography written on Muhammad. In the text, George Bush refers to Muhammad as “a remarkable man” and “irresistibly attractive.” However, for the most part, he questions everything about Muhammad’s life and the history of Islam.
The book takes a dim view of the state of Christianity during Muhammad’s age. The Life of Mohammed by George Bush has been out of print for a long time. In 2004, clerics at Egypt’s Al Azhar University obtained a copy of the book. They were appalled by the text. Riots began in Egypt, and the state department was forced to put out a notice indicating that the book had not been written by the then current U.S. President Bush, and “has nothing to do with the attitudes of President Bush, who is respectful of Islam as one of the world’s great religions.”
George Bush (12 June 1796, Norwich, Vermont – 19 September 1859, Rochester, New York) was an American biblical scholar, pastor, abolitionist and Christian Restorationist academic. He is distantly related to the Bush political family.
Bush graduated from Dartmouth College in 1818, and then studied theology at Princeton University, where he was a tutor 1823-1824. He was ordained in the Presbyterian ministry, spent four years as a Christian missionary in Indiana, and in 1831 became professor of Hebrew and oriental literature at New York University.
His first book The Life of Mohammed was the first American written biography of the religious leader. It refers to Muhammad as "this remarkable man" and “irresistibly attractive", but is largely negative toward him. It also takes a dim view of the state of Christianity of Muhammad's age. The book fell out of print, but became briefly controversial in Egypt in 2004.
In 1844 Bush published a book entitled The Valley of Vision; or, The Dry Bones of Israel Revived. In it he denounced “the thralldom and oppression which has so long ground them (the Jews) to the dust,” and called for “elevating” the Jews “to a rank of honorable repute among the nations of the earth” by restoring the Jews to the land of Israel where the bulk would be converted to Christianity. This, according to Bush, would benefit not only the Jews, but all of mankind, forming a “link of communication” between humanity and God. “It will blaze in notoriety....It will flash a splendid demonstration upon all kindreds and tongues of the truth.”
Also in 1844, he published a monthly magazine called Hierophant, devoted to the elucidation of scriptural prophecies, and he issued, in New York, a work entitled Anastasis, in which he opposed the doctrine of the literal resurrection of the body. Attacks upon this latter work, which attracted much attention, he answered in The Resurrection of Christ.
In 1845 he embraced Swedenborgianism and went on to write many defenses of his new faith. He translated and published the diary of Emanuel Swedenborg in 1845, and became editor of the New Church Repository.
