Images of Islam: American Missionary and Arab Perspectives

Transcription

1 D EANNA F ERREE W OMACK Images of Islam: American Missionary and Arab Perspectives ABSTRACT 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. Keywords: Islam, Protestant missions, Arab Christians, Syria, Lebanon, Ottoman Empire, Arabic literary renaissance INTRODUCTION Mission history is a story of contact, encounter and interaction not simply between a sending and a receiving society, but between multiple actors whose aims, struggles and achievements play out Studies in World Christianity 22.1 (2016): DOI: /swc # Edinburgh University Press

2 Images of Islam 23 together on the same stage. Euro-centric patterns of historiography and the prolific writings of European and American missionaries often obscure this dynamic reality. Until recently, missionary voices dominated the story of the first American Protestant mission in the Middle East, established in the 1820s in Ottoman Syria (a region including modern Syria and Lebanon). In studies highlighting the history of Syrian Protestants and mission school graduates, Ussama Makdisi, Ellen Fleischmann and Christine Lindner have problematised this traditional historiographical reliance upon annual reports and publications that missionaries produced for supporters in the United States. 1 Despite this shift toward questioning missionary discourses, few studies take into account the plurality of voices in the American Syrian missionary encounter by giving attention to Islam and Christian Muslim relations. 2 In the Ottoman Empire, where conversion from Islam to Christianity was legally banned, the majority of new Protestant church members in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came from Christian backgrounds, including Greek Orthodox, Maronite, Greek Catholic, Coptic and Armenian Orthodox traditions. So few Muslims converted to Protestantism in Syria that scholars have referred to the American missionaries failed conquest of the Middle East. 3 This view is one reason why the missionary encounter with Syrian Muslims has received so little attention. A narrow focus on public conversions and church membership statistics, however, discounts the possibility that Muslims experienced more ambiguous forms of religious change through cultural transformation or selective adaptation of Christian beliefs. 4 Further, as Beth Baron demonstrated in her study of missionary orphanages in Egypt, Muslims were an active part of the missionary encounter even when they opposed the advances of Christian missionaries. 5 In this article, I apply Baron s approach to the American missionary enterprise in Ottoman Syria as I consider images of Islam and Muslim Christian relations in the writings of Muslim intellectuals, Syrian Protestants and American missionaries of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the USA. 6 This research demonstrates that American missionary and Syrian Protestant perspectives varied significantly when it came to missionary work among Muslims. By using primary sources in Arabic, this article highlights the importance of studying mission history in the Middle East from the standpoint of local Muslims and Christians. 7 It also incorporates an overlooked genre of Syrian Protestant writing on Islam that challenges missionary

3 24 S TUDIES IN W ORLD C HRISTIANITY discourses of the past and also current assumptions of a primordial tension between Christians and Muslims in the Middle East. Syrians, as the Arabic- and Armenian-speaking residents of Lebanon and Syria were called in the nineteenth century, resided in the multi-ethnic and multi-religious Ottoman Empire that spanned three continents. For Ottoman Arabs, Turks, Armenians, Bulgarians and other subjects of the Sultan in Istanbul, the nineteenth century was a period of rapid socio-cultural change. Imperial reforms, developments in education and advances in printing led to an Arabic literary renaissance (or Nahda) that transformed intellectual life in the Ottoman Arab provinces. Such changes were apparent in Beirut by 1870, when Protestant press owners were among the Syrian intellectuals who published prominent literaryscientific journals in the city. 8 The American Syria Mission, which established one of the earliest printing presses in Beirut, was part of the Nahda, but contrary to their own claims, the missionaries were not the pioneers of this renaissance. Rather, the flourishing of the Arabic press and the outpouring of newspapers, journals, novels and scholarship was the collective accomplishment of Syrians from all religious backgrounds. The writings of these Syrian intellectuals of the Nahda provide a needed supplement and corrective to the information that American missionaries transmitted to their readers at home. As I address Syrian Christian and Muslim perspectives alongside those of missionaries, I will consider two types of writing on Islam that emerged in Beirut in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first category is religious polemic. Like their missionary colleagues, Syrian Protestants wrote apologetic and evangelistic literature and carried out theological debates with Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim writers in the pages of the Arabic press. Local Syrian evangelists, however, took a more nuanced approach to religious disputation than their American Protestant missionary partners. As I will demonstrate in my exploration of Nahda literature the second category of Arabic publication many Syrian Protestant intellectuals went further to embrace Arab-Islamic culture as essential to their personal identity and to their vision for modern Syrian society. Their voices offer a powerful counterpoint to missionary images of Islam. IMAGES OF ISLAM: RELIGIOUS POLEMICS In his reports, public addresses and books published during five decades of missionary service, Henry Harris Jessup ( ) did more than any other member of the American Syria Mission to shape mission

4 Images of Islam 25 supporters conceptions of Islam and the Ottoman state. 9 While this Presbyterian missionary did not gain the international prominence of the so-called apostle to Islam, Samuel Zwemer, 10 Jessup contributed to the growing Protestant enthusiasm for missions to Muslims by the late nineteenth century. Ussama Makdisi, Samir Khalaf and Thomas Kidd have critiqued Jessup for transmitting a narrow view of Islam as a religion that advances by the sword, oppresses women and rejects rational thought. 11 It is important to note that despite publishing such harsh generalisations, Jessup exhibited sensitivity in his interactions with individual Muslims in Syria, such as the young convert named Kamil Abdul Masih, for whom the veteran missionary became a father figure. 12 In his writings, Jessup also acknowledged the scholarly attainment of reform-minded Muslim intellectuals and listed the favourable aspects of Islam which he felt paralleled the teachings of Christianity, including the belief in the unity of God, reverence for the bible and the rejection of idolatry. 13 Despite such examples, however, the missionary continued to view Islam as a religion destitute of any provision for human redemption. 14 Jessup was also unrelenting in his depiction of the Turkish despotism of the Ottoman administration as the primary hindrance to Muslim conversions. 15 These views remained unchanged throughout Jessup s long career. Decades after his first major publication on Islam, The Mohammedan Missionary Problem (1879), Jessup contended at a 1906 missionary conference, Much may be said in approval of Islamic doctrines which are borrowed from Christianity, but vital doctrinal errors, and corrupting social and moral teachings, especially in the degradation of woman, are too great to allow any thoughtful Christian to be satisfied with Islam. 16 Such judgements also appeared consistently in Jessup s personal correspondence. In private letters to the British mission supporter and Orientalist scholar William Muir, for example, Jessup spoke highly of enlightened Muslims who read and appreciated Christian literature, but he also referenced the fanaticism of the Moslem populace and the terrible temper of the government. 17 As a leading member of the American Syria Mission from 1856 until his death in 1910, as the head of the central Beirut station, and as the mission s corresponding secretary, Jessup represented and influenced the views of other American missionaries in Syria. By the early twentieth century, missionaries such as W. H. Temple Gairdner (of the Church Missionary Society in Egypt) would take a more appreciative view of Islam as a religion of truth fulfilled by Christianity. In Syria, however, Jessup dominated the missionary conversation on

5 26 S TUDIES IN W ORLD C HRISTIANITY Islam, and those of his colleagues who expressed interest in Islam typically upheld Jessup s views. 18 Missionaries, however, were not the only voices in this encounter. Syrian Protestants offered alternative approaches to Islam that went beyond missionary essentialising of a rival religious tradition. This was the case even for evangelists such as Yusif Atiya, a convert from Greek Orthodoxy and employee of the Syria Mission whose writings gained great acclaim among missionaries throughout the Islamic world by the early twentieth century. Atiya s first, and most famous, publication was an evangelistic novel entitled Sweet First-Fruits (al-bakura al-shahiyya), printed in Henry Jessup sent the Arabic manuscript to William Muir, who translated it into English and secured funding from the Religious Tract Society in London to have the text published anonymously in Arabic at a printing establishment in Leipzig. The novel was soon translated into Turkish, Persian, Urdu and Chinese, making Atiya one of the most widely read Arab apologists of that period, although his name remained unknown to readers. 20 Sweet First-Fruits was a fictional account of Muslim conversions to Christianity in Damascus. The advocate through whom Atiya s characters encountered Christianity was a Syrian Christian who sent an evangelistic letter to the central Muslim figure, Shaykh Ali, but otherwise did not enter the story. Western missionaries were also conspicuously absent from the novel. Thus Atiya conveyed that the primary agent in the evangelism of Muslims was not an American or an Arab Christian, but the word of God itself. Reflecting the Nahda spirit of open intellectual discourse, Shaykh Ali and eleven of his companions studied the bible and Qur an together, raised questions and debated with one another until all but one accepted the truth of the gospel. 21 With his emphasis on the freedom of conscience and rational debate throughout the novel, Atiya disclosed his ideal audience for his message: scholarly, truth-seeking Muslims with a sincere faith who were troubled by questions that the Islamic tradition could not explain. Shaykh Ali and his friends were meant as models for Atiya s Muslim readers to emulate. These were, however, fictional accounts of Muslim interlocutors, and it is important to consider how true to life such characterisations actually were. According to Henry Jessup, Yusif Atiya was a close acquaintance of Husayn al-jisr ( ), a scholar and educator in the Syrian city of Tripoli, where Atiya worked as a pastor and evangelist. 22 Jisr studied at Cairo s al-azhar University and then returned to Tripoli to found a national Islamic school. He also edited the city s first newspaper, Jaridat

6 Images of Islam 27 Tarabulus al-sham (Tripoli Newspaper, established in 1893), in which he urged Syrians of all religious sects to seek unity in the face of Western influence. 23 As an intellectual of the Nahda who acknowledged the value of modern education and rational thought, it is conceivable that Jisr discussed matters of religion with Atiya or other Christians in Tripoli. One of Jisr s pupils, the prominent Islamic reformist Muhammad Rashid Rida, was known for such engagements with Protestant evangelists. 24 While most of Rida s published exchanges with Christian writers took place after he emigrated to Cairo and founded his journal, al-manar (The Lighthouse), when he lived in Tripoli Rida visited the American mission s bookstores and read Protestant literature. 25 Rida, Jisr and other Muslim intellectuals in Tripoli might have been the prototypes for characters in Atiya s book, like the Qadi (judge) of Damascus, who invited Shaykh Ali and his friends to testify to their faith freely in his court and found himself unable to respond to their arguments. 26 Unlike the Qadi, however, Islamic reformists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used their studies of the bible, Christian literature and Western scholarship to refute Christian apologists like Atiya. Rashid Rida s responses to missionaries and Arab Christian evangelists in the early twentieth century were modelled after the work of his Egyptian mentor, Muhammad Abduh ( ), who wrote Islam and Christianity between Science and Civilization (al-islam wa-l-nasraniyya ma a al- Ilm wa-l-madaniyya). 27 Abduh and Rida built on earlier Muslim treatises that had become popular in the Ottoman Empire, like Izhar al-haqq (Demonstration of Truth), written by Indian scholar Rahmatullah al-qairanawi after his debate with the German Pietist missionary Karl Gottlieb Pfander. 28 Adding to the growing body of such controversial literature around the turn of the century in Syria and Egypt, Muhammad bin Tahir al-tannir published The Idolatrous Doctrines in the Christian Religion (al- Aqa id al-wathaniyya fi al-diyana al-nasraniyya) in Beirut in Tannir, who was a graduate of Syrian Protestant College in Beirut, dedicated the text to the missionaries, the Crusaders of the Twentieth Century, and he mentioned Sweet First-Fruits and Yusif Atiya s later treatise The Torch of Guidance (Misbah al-huda ila Sir al-fida) among the missionary publications he sought to refute. 30 In response to the argument made by Atiya and other Protestant evangelists that the Qur an upheld all the teachings of the bible, 31 Tannir used English-language publications on Christian history and polytheistic religions to assert that the Christian scriptures had been corrupted by pagan beliefs in gods and goddesses producing children. Thus, while

7 28 S TUDIES IN W ORLD C HRISTIANITY the historical Jesus brought the pure revelation of God in the injil (gospel), as the Qur an indicated, human error led to the wrongful Christian belief in Jesus as the son of God. 32 Tannir s work became a favourite of Muslim scholars, including Rashid Rida, who supported its arguments in al-manar. 33 The book s popular usage among a new group of Muslim reformers gained the attention of American missionaries in Syria, and Samuel Zwemer s journal, The Moslem World, published a review of the book and a longer article by William St. Clair Tisdall, a British missionary-scholar in Persia and translator of evangelistic literature for Muslims. 34 While Tisdall aimed to guide Protestant missionaries in their response to Tannir s work, it was Luwis Shaykhu ( ), the Syrian Jesuit Father, who published a substantive critique of the Muslim scholar s book in Arabic. 35 Shaykhu s involvement in this matter revealed that although Western Protestant missionaries placed particular emphasis on their own production of religious materials for Muslims, Syrian Christians of all denominations participated in the ongoing exchange of controversial books and tracts with Muslim scholars in the late Ottoman period. 36 IMAGES OF ISLAM: NAHDA WRITERS Religious controversy was not the only means by which Syrian Christians engaged with Islam during the Nahda. Outside the realm of theological debate, the pioneering intellectuals of this Arabic renaissance many of whom were Protestants published discourses on modernisation and reform, while also drawing inspiration from the Arab-Islamic past. One such intellectual was a Maronite convert to Protestantism, Butrus al-bustani, who worked with the American missionaries. Bustani argued that European political and economic success was built upon the science and technology that the West adopted from Islamic civilisation, and he also called for Syrians of all religious communities to embrace each other as one people who shared the same land, language and common cultural heritage. 37 In the books and journal articles that Bustani and other Syrians wrote and in the literary salons of Beirut, Arabic-speaking Christian, Muslim and Jewish intellectuals envisioned their lives together in a modern Syrian homeland. Moreover, they worked together to promote education and social development within the wider Syrian community. Women were among the pioneers and activists of this modern literary and educational renaissance, and a significant number of them were members of the Arab Protestant churches that American missionaries and

8 Images of Islam 29 Syrian converts founded together. Although Orientalist perceptions of the treatment of women in the Middle East might suggest otherwise, the writings that Syrian Protestant women published at the American Mission Press in the late nineteenth century often expressed appreciation for the Islamic tradition. These Christian women claimed the golden age of Islamic science and philosophy in medieval Baghdad as part of their heritage and as the impetus for their own literary work. Rujina Shukri, a Protestant schoolteacher and journalist, made this point in a commencement speech she delivered in 1888 to Christian, Muslim and Jewish families in Beirut at the American mission s seminary for women. Emphasising the importance of reading books for the attainment of knowledge, Shukri praised the great libraries of the Abbasid Caliph Harun Rashid and the fifteenth-century Sultan Mehmed the Second, the Ottoman Turkish conqueror who ended Byzantine rule in Constantinople. The text of Shukri s speech, which appeared in the American mission s Arabic periodical, al-nashra al-usbu iyya (The Weekly Bulletin), also included a poem extolling the Syrians ancient roots of knowledge and civilisation in the early Islamic period. 38 Published at the American Mission Press in Beirut, al-nashra al-usbu iyya was managed by missionary men but written and edited almost entirely by Syrian Protestants. In contrast to American missionaries frequent allusions to Turkish despotism in their English publications, Rujina Shukri and many Syrian Protestants used the Arabic press to encourage loyalty to the Ottoman Sultan as the leader of a religiously diverse empire in which Arab Christians could thrive. Shukri ended the commencement speech by urging her listeners to raise their palms in prayer and supplication to the merciful God to sustain... the great (Sultan) Abdülhamid. 39 In an article published in the same Arabic journal, entitled Diligence and Perseverance, the schoolteacher Maryam Zakka closed her work with similar words of praise for the Ottoman ruler. 40 Another famous Protestant woman of the Nahda, Hannah Kurani ( ), wrote a treatise on good manners and social habits in 1891, dedicated it to Abdülhamid, and received an Ottoman imperial medal for her work. She concluded her treatise by describing the Sultan as a blessing from the creator and by praying that the ruler s days of success and reform would last as long as the earth continues spinning on its axis. 41 While it is likely that such words of praise aided Syrian Protestants in gaining permission to publish at a time of rigid Ottoman press censorship, the language of these Nahda women is also consistent with the fervent Ottomanism of earlier Protestant intellectuals

9 30 S TUDIES IN W ORLD C HRISTIANITY like Butrus al-bustani. 42 These women s writings in the late-nineteenth century thus reflected the mutually beneficial two-way relationship between the Sultan and the press during that period. 43 Beyond Ottoman loyalty and pride in the advances of Islamic civilisation, Syrian Protestants also made appreciative use of Islamic texts in their religious writings. In an article that bore perfect resemblance to the sermons that Syrian men published in al-nashra al-usbu iyya, the author and novelist Farida Atiya (daughter of evangelist Yusif Atiya) highlighted the wisdom of the Abbasid leader Tahir bin Husayn, as conveyed in the work of the famed Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun: Refrain from lies and falsehoods. Despise liars and keep away from slanderers. Your affairs will begin to fail, so far as their effects both in this world and the other world are concerned, as soon as you give access to a liar. 44 In her message, Atiya used this Abbasid text to support her interpretation of Jeremiah 4: 9, which reads, Beware of your neighbors, and put no trust in any of your kin; for all your kin are supplanters, and every neighbor goes around like a slanderer (NRSV). This Syrian Protestant writer thus acknowledged the usefulness of Islamic wisdom, even when offering spiritual direction to Christian readers. In order to convey the dynamic nature of interreligious engagement during the Arabic renaissance in Syria, I will end my treatment of Nahda intellectuals by considering the writings of these Syrian Protestant women alongside the works of their contemporaries in other religious communities. Esther Muyal ( ), a Nahda writer from a Jewish family in Beirut, frequently interacted with Syrian Christian women in her work as a journalist and magazine editor. Esther attended British and American mission schools and became president of the first Syrian women s association, Bakurat Suriyya (Syrian Dawn), which Syrian Protestant women founded in Beirut. 45 Another member of this women s society was Hannah Kurani, the Protestant author who dedicated her 1891 book to the Sultan. 46 Together Hannah and Esther were among the delegation of Syrian women who attended the Chicago World s Fair in Like her Christian contemporaries, Esther was well versed in the idioms of Arab-Islamic culture. In a speech she delivered at the American seminary for women in Beirut, Esther argued that the young women graduates should take the initiative to create a new Arab society in which men and women were equal partners. She then upheld this charge not with a quotation from the Torah or from the New Testament, which she

10 Images of Islam 31 had studied in mission schools, but with a Qur anic verse that reads, God does not change a people s status until they change their own disposition. 48 Esther s words and activities thus revealed the permeability of religious boundaries for the educated elite in late nineteenth-century Syria. Syrian Muslim women also joined in the Arab literary and intellectual renaissance. Zaynab Fawwaz ( ), for example, was a Shia feminist who reportedly sent a copy of her book, Scattered Pearls (al-durr al-manthur fi tabaqat rabbat al-khudur), to the 1893 World s Fair, explaining that as a Muslim woman she could not attend the mixed (gender) gathering. 49 By that time, Zaynab had emigrated from Syria to Egypt, but her connection with the community of Syrian Nahda women in Beirut continued as she invited the Jewish writer Esther Muyal and the Protestant Hannah Kurani to contribute to Scattered Pearls, which was a biographical dictionary of Arab women. 50 These women thereby engaged in interreligious collaboration in order to advance the causes of women s rights and education. Despite her conservative stance with regard to attending the World s Fair, Zaynab was among the most outspoken feminists of her day. She engaged in a lively press debate over gender roles with the aforementioned Hannah, and was far more progressive in her stance on women s equality than her Protestant contemporary. 51 This was a fact that the American missionaries in Syria failed to note in their reports to American supporters on the status of women in the Ottoman Islamic context. The stories of these Syrian intellectuals in late Ottoman Beirut provide a glimpse of the vibrant interreligious exchanges of the modern Arab renaissance. By attending to their voices, we can begin to dispel the myth of inherent conflict between Muslims and religious minorities in the Arab Islamic world. For Arab Christians, particularly in Syria today, it is essential to preserve and build upon such histories of collaboration and coexistence. In proposing a fresh narrative on historical Christian Muslim relations, I do not intend to dismiss instances of sectarian strife. By considering this history from a new angle, however, we can turn away from the enemy motif that dominated Christian missionary articulations about Islam in the late Ottoman period and still prevails in much Western Christian discourse today. CONCLUSION This article has focused primary attention on Syrian perspectives in order to shed light on individuals whom traditional histories of the American

11 32 S TUDIES IN W ORLD C HRISTIANITY Syria Mission have overlooked. The writers of the early Syrian Protestant community and the Syrian intellectuals of the Nahda broaden our perception of Christian Muslim relations and remind us that mission history is a multi-layered story of encounter, and not a simple narrative of Western actors upon a foreign stage. The images of Islam that Henry Harris Jessup and his colleagues in Syria transmitted home are part of this story, but missionary writings do not encompass its totality. I made Jessup s work the focal point in my assessment of missionary writings on Islam because today his books are still among the most easily accessible and widely used sources on Protestant missions in Syria. As such, Jessup s publications continue to influence readers views of Islam in the Ottoman Empire. Along with his other works, Jessup s autobiography, Fifty-Three Years in Syria (1910), is freely available online, and reprinted copies may be ordered from Amazon. In one of these recent reprints, the man pictured on the cover in a kefiyyeh and flowing robes was not Henry Jessup, but a young Bedouin man. 52 This photograph appeared among the internal illustrations in the original edition of Jessup s autobiography. 53 Its movement to the front cover was a savvy marketing decision on the part of the publishers. With his rugged tribal dress, the Bedouin stands out from the austere missionaries in their suits and ties and from the Syrian Protestants pictured in the volume, most of whom sported Western attire, even in the late nineteenth century. The man s name was Gideon Aoud, and missionaries in Syria put his photograph to good use, marketing him to readers at home as a prized Muslim convert. Outside of Jessup s books, Aoud appeared countless times in the magazines of the British Syrian Mission that shared the field with the Americans. 54 Not only did these missionaries profit from Aoud s image, but both the British and the Americans also told and retold the story of the Bedouin man s conversion, highlighting each mission s role in bringing about his religious transformation. 55 If Aoud wrote his own account of his interactions with Protestant missionaries, it has yet to be found. For now, therefore, the missionaries have the last word on the man who may well become the face of nineteenth-century Syria. Gideon Aoud was more than a face, however. Like the Syrians whose writings were featured in this article, this Syrian Muslim had a history and a voice that missionary reports did not fully capture. For the larger story of Christian Muslim relations in the Syrian missionary encounter, we must continue to look beyond missionary discourses to the writings of Syrian Christians and Muslims themselves.

12 Images of Islam 33 Deanna Ferree Womack is Assistant Professor in the Practice of History of Religions and Multifaith Relations at Emory University s Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, Georgia. She also directs the Leadership and Multifaith Program that Candler established with Georgia Institute of Technology. deanna.f.womack@emory.edu NOTES 1 Ussama Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); Ellen L. Fleischmann, Lost in Translation: Home Economics and the Sidon Girls School of Lebanon, c , Social Sciences and Mission 23 (2010): 32 62; Fleischmann, Living in an Isle of Safety : The Sidon Female Seminary in World War I, Jerusalem Quarterly 56 and 57 (2013/2014): 40 51; Christine B. Lindner, Rahil Ata al-bustani: Wife and Mother of the Nahda, in Butrus al-bustani: Spirit of the Age, ed. Adel Beshara (Melbourne: IPhoenix, 2014), 49 67; Lindner Making a way in to the heart of the people : Women in the Early Protestant Church in Beirut, NEST Theological Review 32: 2 (2011): For one exception addressing early missionary images of Islam in Syria, see Christine Leigh Heyrman, American Apostles: When Evangelicals Entered the World of Islam (New York: Hill and Wang, 2015), Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven, Heather J. Sharkey, Introduction: The Unexpected Consequences of Christian Missionary Encounters, in Cultural Conversions: Unexpected Consequences of Christian Missionary Encounters in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, ed. Heather J. Sharkey (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2013), 2; Sharkey, Ambiguous Conversions: The Selective Adaptation of Religious Cultures in Colonial North Africa, in Religious Conversions in the Mediterranean World, ed. Nadia Marzouki and Olivier Roy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), Beth Baron, The Orphan Scandal: Christian Missionaries and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), xi. 6 In 1870, the Presbyterian Board took oversight of the American Syria Mission from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. On this history see Deanna Ferree Womack, Conversion, Controversy, and Cultural Production: Syrian Protestants, American Missionaries, and the Arabic Press, ca (PhD diss., Princeton Theological Seminary, 2015), 1 4, Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Arabic texts are my own, with assistance from Yvonne Roman. 8 Womack, Conversion, Controversy, and Cultural Production, Thomas Kidd, American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), 48 53; Samir Khalaf, Protestant Missionaries in the Levant: Ungodly Puritans, (London/New York: Routledge, 2012), J. Christy Wilson, Apostle to Islam: A Biography of Samuel M. Zwemer (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1952); Kidd, American Christians and Islam, Ussama Makdisi, Faith Misplaced: The Broken Promise of U.S. Arab Relations: (New York: Public Affairs, 2010), 48 50; Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven, , 215; Khalaf, Protestant Missionaries, 86 93; Kidd, American Christians and Islam, 48 9.

13 34 S TUDIES IN W ORLD C HRISTIANITY 12 Henry Harris Jessup, The Setting of the Crescent and the Rising of the Cross or Kamil Abdul Messiah: A Syrian Convert from Islam to Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1898). 13 Henry Harris Jessup, The Mohammedan Missionary Problem (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1879), Ibid., Henry Harris Jessup, Fifty-Three Years in Syria, vol. 1 (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1910), 4, Henry Harris Jessup, Introductory Paper, in The Mohammedan World of To-day, Being papers read at the First Missionary Conference on behalf of the Mohammedan World held at Cairo April 4 th 9 th, 1906, ed. S. M. Zwemer, E. M. Wherry and James L. Barton (New York/London: Fleming H. Revel, 1906), Henry H. Jessup to Sir William Muir, 4 February 1891: Henry Harris Jessup Papers, Record Group , Day Missions Library Special Collections, Yale Divinity School, New Haven, Connecticut [hereafter YDS]. 18 Abdul Latif Tibawi, American Interests in Syria, : A Study of Educational, Literary and Religious Work (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 256 7, [Yusif Atiya], al-bakura al-shahiyya fi al-riwayat al-diniyya (Leipzig, 1893). The English version is William Muir, trans., Sweet First-Fruits: A Tale of the Nineteenth Century on the Truth and Virtue of the Christian Religion (London: Religious Tract Society, 1893). 20 Samuel M. Zwemer, Arabic Controversial Literature for Moslems, The Missionary Review of the World 24: 10 (October 1901): 735; Isaac Mason, Christian Literature Chinese Moslems, The Moslem World 10: 2 (April 1920): Muir (trans.), Sweet First-Fruits, Henry H. Jessup to Sir William Muir, 4 February 1891: YDS ; Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), Dorothe Sommer, Freemasonry in the Ottoman Empire: A History of the Fraternity and Its Influence in Syria and the Levant (London: I.B. Tauris/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 50, 167. On Jisr s writings and educational work see Martin Strohmeier, Muslim Education in the Vilayet of Beirut, , in Decision Making and Change in the Ottoman Empire, ed. Caesar E. Farah (Kirksville, MO/Lanham, MD: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1993), 215; Marwa Elshakry, Reading Darwin in Arabic, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), ; Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, Simon A. Wood, Researching The Scripture of the Other : Niqula Ghabriyal s Researches of the Mujtahids and Rashid Rida s Rejoinder, Comparative Islamic Studies 6: 1 2 (2010): ; Umar Ryad, Islamic Reformism and Christianity: A Critical Reading of the Works of Muhammad Rashid Rida and His Associates ( ) (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2009). 25 Dyala Hamzah, From ilm to Sihafa or the Politics of the Public Interest (maslaha): Muhammad Rashid Rida and His Journal al-manar ( ), in The Making of the Arab Intellectual: Empire, Public Sphere and the Colonial Coordinates of Selfhood, ed. Dyala Hamzah (New York: Routledge, 2013), Muir (trans.), Sweet First-Fruits, Simon Wood, Christian Criticisms, Islamic Proofs: Rashid Rida s Modernist Defense of Islam (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2008),

14 Images of Islam Avril A. Powell, Maulana Rahmat Allah Kairanawi and Muslim Christian Controversy in India in the Mid-19th Century, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 1 (1976): After his famous debate with Pfander, which by all accounts the Muslim scholar won, Qairanawi travelled to Mecca and then to Constantinople, where he published the first volume of Izhar al-haqq in See also Powell, Muslims and Missionaries in Pre-mutiny India (Richmond: Curzon, 1993), ; Ryad, Islamic Reformism, 214, Muhammad Tahir al-tannir, Al- Aqa id al-wathaniyya fi al-diyana al-nasraniyya [The Idolatrous Doctrines in the Christian Religion], ed. Muhammad Sharqawi (Beirut: 1912/Cairo: 1993). 30 Ibid., 7, See William Muir (trans.), The Torch of Guidance to the Mystery of Redemption (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1900). 31 Muir (trans.), Sweet First-Fruits, 31 45, Tannir, Al- Aqa id, 14 19, 53, 105 8, Ryad, Islamic Reformism, 57 61, W. St. Clair Tisdall, The Latest Muhammadan Mare s Nest, The Moslem World 3: 1 (October 1913): Ryad, Islamic Reformism, On Shaykhu s involvement in other such exchanges, see Ryad, Islamic Reformism, Butrus Abu-Manneh, The Christians between Ottomanism and Syrian Nationalism: The Ideas of Butrus al-bustani, International Journal of Middle East Studies 2 (1980): 292 3; Stephen Paul Sheehi, Inscribing the Arab Self: Butrus al-bustani and Paradigms of Subjective Reform, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 27: 1 (2000): On Bustani, see also Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven, ; Beshara (ed.), Butrus al-bustani: Spirit of the Age. 38 Rujina Shukri, al-makatib wa-luzumaha [The Necessity of Libraries], al-nashra al-usbu iyya 16 (20 April 1888): Ibid., Maryam Zakka, al-jidd wa-l-ijtihad [Diligence and Perseverance], al-nashra al-usbu iyya 35 (27 August 1887): Hanna Kurani, al-akhlaq wa-l- Awa id [Manners and Customs] (Beirut: American Mission Press, 1891), 47. Courtesy of Near East School of Theology Special Collections. On the imperial medal, see Joseph T. Zeidan, Arab Women Novelists: The Formative Years and Beyond (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), Abdul Latif Tibawi, The American Missionaries in Beirut and Butrus al-bustani, in Middle Eastern Affairs 3, St. Anthony s Papers 16, ed. Albert Hourani (London: Chatto & Windus, 1963), 181; Abu-Manneh, Between Ottomanism and Syrian Nationalism, Ebru Boyar, The Press and the Palace: The Two-Way Relationship between Abdülhamid II and the Press, , Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 69: 3 (2006): Farida Atiya, al-hidhr wa-l-intibah [Caution and Warning], al-nashra al-usbu iyya 6 (1 February 1888): 42. This English translation is taken from Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. Franz Rosenthal, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), Lital Levy, Partitioned Pasts: Arab Jewish Intellectuals and the Case of Esther Azhari Moyal ( ), in The Making of the Arab Intellectual, ed. Hamzah, ;

15 36 S TUDIES IN W ORLD C HRISTIANITY Marilène Karam, Esther Azhari Muyal ( ): Aspects of a Modern Education in Bilad al-sham, inentangled Education: Foreign and Local Schools in Ottoman Syria and Mandate Lebanon (19 20th centuries), ed. Julia Hauser, Christine B. Lindner and Esther Möller (Wuerzburg: Ergon, 2016), Kurani, al-akhlaq wa-l- Awa id, Baron, Women s Awakening, 20 1; Levy, Partitioned Pasts, Levy, Partitioned Pasts, 143; The Quran, al-ra d Baron, Women s Awakening, 21. See also Marilyn Booth s comprehensive study of Fawwaz in Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces: Writing Feminist History through Biography in Fin-de-siecle Egypt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). 50 Levy, Partitioned Pasts, Zeidan, Arab Women Novelists, Henry Harris Jessup, Fifty-Three Years in Syria, vol. 1 (Sabine Press, 2007). 53 For the original photo of Jedaan the Bedawy, see Jessup, Fifty-Three Years in Syria, vol. 2 (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1910): M. Walker, Gideon the Bedouin: An Interview, Daughters of Syria (January 1906): 20 4; Among the Tents of Kedar: Gideon at Work, Daughters of Syria (October 1908): M. L. J, Gideon: An Interview, Daughters of Syria (October 1908): 16 18; Gideon s Story, Daughters of Syria (October 1901): 16 17; Jessup, Fifty-Three Years in Syria, vol. 1, 360; Jessup Fifty-Three Years in Syria, vol. 2, 541; Jessup, Setting of the Crescent,