From "heathen Turks" to "cruel Turks" Religious and political roots of the changing American perception towards the Middle East (original) (raw)

2018, US Foreign Policy in the Middle East: From American Missionaries to the Islamic State (Routledge Studies in US Foreign Policy)

A closer look at the nineteenth century, however, suggests that the issue is more complex, that the century does not have a seamless, homogeneous, uninterrupted, and linear history with regards to the American perception of the Middle East. First of all, there were several individual exceptions who viewed the Turks, the Muslims, and Islam in positive lights, neutral at best. Second, a good number of Americans moderated their views about the Turks and Muslims after encountering them as merchants, diplomats, and missionaries in person. As a result, the American image of "heathen" and "tyrannical" Turks was transformed into "pluralistic" and "tolerant" Turks by the mid-nineteenth century and then into "cruel" and "bloodthirsty" Turks by the turn of the twentieth century. While the former image had been shaped by European (largely British) religious and political (read Orientalist) discourse, the latter image had been shaped by the increasing Protestant missionary activities in the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. For example, 88 percent of the books on Islam in American libraries were written by missionaries in the nineteenth century (McCarthy, 2010). As a result of their intensified educational activities and increasing involvement in the Ottoman-Armenian conflict in the second half of the nineteenth century, American missionaries began to have some serious problems with the Ottoman authorities. As shown by other scholars, long before oil interests, the American missionary experience had been one of the most important agents that set the tone of American foreign policy towards the Middle East until World War II. This chapter is an attempt to demonstrate the complexities of this picture and adumbrate the stages through which the American perception evolved over the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century.