Review of Ussama Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008). Pp. 262. 35.00cloth,35.00 cloth, 35.00cloth,19.95 paper. (original) (raw)
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2008
Lucid and elegantly written, Ussama Makdisi's Artillery of Heaven accomplishes two big things. First, while examining 19th century American missionary encounters in the Arab Ottoman territories, it presents a model for a new kind of transnational history that sheds light on American engagement with the world. Second, and at a time when much of the Arab past has been "effectively demarcated ... as a forbidden no-man's land" because of fear of what "divisive narratives" of the past may dredge up (p. 219), it scrutinizes the raw history of the "multi-religious world" in the Ottoman region that is now Lebanon. Disciplines Near and Middle Eastern Studies Comments Heather J. Sharkey's review of Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East by Ussama Makdisi.
Artillery of Fire: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East
2008
Lucid and elegantly written, Ussama Makdisi's Artillery of Heaven accomplishes two big things. First, while examining 19th century American missionary encounters in the Arab Ottoman territories, it presents a model for a new kind of transnational history that sheds light on American engagement with the world. Second, and at a time when much of the Arab past has been "effectively demarcated ... as a forbidden noman's land" because of fear of what "divisive narratives" of the past may dredge up (p. 219), it scrutinizes the raw history of the "multi-religious world" in the Ottoman region that is now Lebanon. Disciplines Disciplines Near and Middle Eastern Studies Comments Comments Heather J. Sharkey's review of Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East by Ussama Makdisi.
Review of Middle East Studies , Winter 2012, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Winter 2012), pp. 248-250, 2012
American missions to, and American missionaries in, the Middle East have been a marginal topic in Middle Eastern studies and Global History during the twentieth century. Recently, though, they have become a major topic, though research on them is still in its infancy, as Heather Sharkey writes in her introduction to this volume of nine collected essays. This volume is a fine and substantial contribution to the study of American Protestant mission to the Middle East. Though unique in many ways, the American experience needs to be put in the context of multiple missions and multiple Ottoman answers, however. Based on Mormon and Ottoman sources, Karen M. Kern's study on Mormon missionaries in the late Ottoman Empire is therefore particularly enlightening. Needy of protection by Ottoman authorities against local Protestants, and complaining about Christianity as "a complicated system of falsehood," they nevertheless shared the strong tenets of modern American millennialism. They believed in their key role in the return of the Jews to Palestine and in the "true restoration of Man."
2015
This doctoral dissertation is a historiographical examination of the missionary encounter in Ottoman Syria (modern Syria and Lebanon) during the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Nahda, or Arab renaissance. It begins in 1870, when the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions transferred its Syria Mission to the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. It ends in 1915 with the escalating effects of World War I in the Ottoman Arab provinces. Building upon Middle East mission historiographies, studies in world Christianity, and postcolonial critiques of missions, this study approaches the story of Syrian Protestantism as an enmeshed history in which Syrian and American lives became inextricably entwined. Moving beyond the traditional narrative, which presents American missionary men as the primary actors, this research points to the complex relationship of Syrians with American, British, and other missionaries in Ottoman Syria. It uses rare Arabic publications from the late Ottoman period and archival sources from the US, UK, and Lebanon to underline the agency of Syrian Protestant women and men who built the Syrian Evangelical Church and contributed to the socio-cultural currents of the Nahda alongside other Syrian Christians and Muslims. This dissertation demonstrates that Syrian Protestants challenged missionary authority in subtle and overt ways, while at the same time employing the resources of mission schools and the American Mission Press in Beirut to engage in the Arabic production of the Nahda. It argues that Syrian Protestant women played a significant, yet largely unrecognized, role in church and society as journalists, novelists, public speakers, and evangelistic preachers. Chapter 1 compares Syrian Protestant conversion narratives to missionary accounts of evangelical conversion. Chapter 2 investigates the American-Syrian Protestant relationship in light of a major schism within the Beirut Protestant community in the 1890s. Chapters 3 and 4 use Arabic books, periodicals, and pamphlets published at the American Mission Press to demonstrate the depth of Syrian Protestant participation in the cultural and religious discussions of the Nahda. Chapter 5 pieces together the stories of Syrian Biblewomen who worked as evangelists for American missionaries and for the female-led British Syrian Mission.
Conflict, Conquest, and Conversion: Two Thousand Years of Christian Missions in the Middle East
Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, 2014
Compared to their counterparts in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia, Christian missionaries in the modern Middle East affected relatively few formal conversions. Nevertheless, in the past 15 years, scholars have begin to appreciate how missionaries in the Middle East exerted far-reaching cultural, political, and economic influences on the region, through schools, hospitals, and other institutions. Scholars have also begin to appreciate how missionaries variously strengthened, mediated, and deflected forms of European and American imperialism, while forging long-distance connections between the Middle East and their home countries.
Images of Islam: American Missionary and Arab Perspectives
This article examines the story of Protestant missions in nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Ottoman Syria, a region of the Ottoman Empire that included present day Syria and Lebanon. It moves the study of the American Syria Mission away from Euro-centric modes of historiography, first, by adding to the small body of recent scholarship on Arab Protestantism and mission schools in Syria. Second, it focuses on Islam and Christian–Muslim relations in Syrian missionary history, a topic that has received little scholarly attention. Arguing that Muslims played an active part in this history even when they resisted missionary overtures, the article considers the perspectives of Syrian Muslims alongside images of Islam in American and Syrian Protestant publications. By pointing to the interreligious collaboration between Syrian Christian and Muslim intellectuals and the respect many Syrian Protestant writers exhibited for the Islamic tradition, this article questions assumptions of innate conflict between Muslims and Christians in the Middle East.
Theses and Dissertations on the American Missionary Activities in the Middle East
Several theses and dissertations have been written about the religious, political and cultural effects of the American missionary enterprise in the Middle East. This study lists the theses and dissertations which examine the missionary activities of the several American denominations and organizations including Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Pentecostals, Mormons, Quakers and Methodists in the Middle East throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.