American Missionaries and the Middle East

American Missionaries and the Middle East PDF Author: Middle East Studies Association of North America. Annual Meeting
Publisher: Utah Turkish and Islamic Stud
ISBN: 9781607810384
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
History of the way nineteenth and early twentieth century American missionaries affected future U.S.-Middle East relations.

American Missionaries and the Middle East

American Missionaries and the Middle East PDF Author: Middle East Studies Association of North America. Annual Meeting
Publisher: Utah Turkish and Islamic Stud
ISBN: 9781607810384
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
History of the way nineteenth and early twentieth century American missionaries affected future U.S.-Middle East relations.

Artillery of Heaven

Artillery of Heaven PDF Author: Ussama Makdisi
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801457742
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
The complex relationship between America and the Arab world goes back further than most people realize. In Artillery of Heaven, Ussama Makdisi presents a foundational American encounter with the Arab world that occurred in the nineteenth century, shortly after the arrival of the first American Protestant missionaries in the Middle East. He tells the dramatic tale of the conversion and death of As'ad Shidyaq, the earliest Arab convert to American Protestantism. The struggle over this man's body and soul—and over how his story might be told—changed the actors and cultures on both sides. In the unfamiliar, multireligious landscape of the Middle East, American missionaries at first conflated Arabs with Native Americans and American culture with an uncompromising evangelical Christianity. In turn, their Christian and Muslim opponents in the Ottoman Empire condemned the missionaries as malevolent intruders. Yet during the ensuing confrontation within and across cultures an unanticipated spirit of toleration was born that cannot be credited to either Americans or Arabs alone. Makdisi provides a genuinely transnational narrative for this new, liberal awakening in the Middle East, and the challenges that beset it. By exploring missed opportunities for cultural understanding, by retrieving unused historical evidence, and by juxtaposing for the first time Arab perspectives and archives with American ones, this book counters a notion of an inevitable clash of civilizations and thus reshapes our view of the history of America in the Arab world.

US Foreign Policy in the Middle East

US Foreign Policy in the Middle East PDF Author: Geoffrey F. Gresh
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351169629
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
The dawn of the Cold War marked a new stage of complex U.S. foreign policy involvement in the Middle East. More recently, globalization and the region’s ongoing conflicts and political violence have led to the U.S. being more politically, economically, and militarily enmeshed – for better or worse—throughout the region. This book examines the emergence and development of U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East from the early 1900s to the present. With contributions from some of the world’s leading scholars, it takes a fresh, interdisciplinary, and insightful look into the many antecedents that led to current U.S. foreign policy. Exploring the historical challenges, regional alliances, rapid political change, economic interests, domestic politics, and other sources of regional instability, this volume comprises critical analysis from Iranian, Turkish, Israeli, American, and Arab perspectives to provide a comprehensive examination of the evolution and transformation of U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East. This volume is an important resource for scholars and students working in the fields of Political Science, Sociology, International Relations, Islamic, Turkish, Iranian, Arab, and Israeli Studies.

American Apostles

American Apostles PDF Author: Christine Leigh Heyrman
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0809023989
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
In "American Apostles" Christine Leigh Heyrman chronicles the first fateful collision between American missionaries and the diverse religious cultures of the Levant. Pliny Fisk, Levi Parsons, and Jonas King became the founding members of the Palestine mission and ventured to Ottoman Turkey, Egypt, and Syria, where they sought to expose the falsity of Muhammad's creed and to restore these bastions of Islam to true Christianity. Not only among the first Americans to travel throughout the Middle East, the Palestine missionaries also played a crucial role in shaping their compatriots' understanding of the Muslim world. "American Apostles "brings to life evangelicals' first encounters with the Middle East and uncovers their complicated legacy. The Palestine mission held the promise of acquainting Americans with a fuller and more accurate understanding of Islam, but ultimately it bolstered a more militant Christianity, one that became the unofficial creed of the United States over the course of the nineteenth century. The political and religious consequences of that outcome endure to this day.

The Orphan Scandal

The Orphan Scandal PDF Author: Beth Baron
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804792224
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
On a sweltering June morning in 1933 a fifteen-year-old Muslim orphan girl refused to rise in a show of respect for her elders at her Christian missionary school in Port Said. Her intransigence led to a beating—and to the end of most foreign missions in Egypt—and contributed to the rise of Islamist organizations. Turkiyya Hasan left the Swedish Salaam Mission with scratches on her legs and a suitcase of evidence of missionary misdeeds. Her story hit a nerve among Egyptians, and news of the beating quickly spread through the country. Suspicion of missionary schools, hospitals, and homes increased, and a vehement anti-missionary movement swept the country. That missionaries had won few converts was immaterial to Egyptian observers: stories such as Turkiyya's showed that the threat to Muslims and Islam was real. This is a great story of unintended consequences: Christian missionaries came to Egypt to convert and provide social services for children. Their actions ultimately inspired the development of the Muslim Brotherhood and similar Islamist groups. In The Orphan Scandal, Beth Baron provides a new lens through which to view the rise of Islamic groups in Egypt. This fresh perspective offers a starting point to uncover hidden links between Islamic activists and a broad cadre of Protestant evangelicals. Exploring the historical aims of the Christian missions and the early efforts of the Muslim Brotherhood, Baron shows how the Muslim Brotherhood and like-minded Islamist associations developed alongside and in reaction to the influx of missionaries. Patterning their organization and social welfare projects on the early success of the Christian missions, the Brotherhood launched their own efforts to "save" children and provide for the orphaned, abandoned, and poor. In battling for Egypt's children, Islamic activists created a network of social welfare institutions and a template for social action across the country—the effects of which, we now know, would only gain power and influence across the country in the decades to come.

Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present

Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present PDF Author: Michael B. Oren
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393341526
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1178

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Book Description
“Will shape our thinking about America and the Middle East for years.”—Christopher Dickey, Newsweek Power, Faith, and Fantasytells the remarkable story of America's 230-year relationship with the Middle East. Drawing on a vast range of government documents, personal correspondence, and the memoirs of merchants, missionaries, and travelers, Michael B. Oren narrates the unknown story of how the United States has interacted with this vibrant and turbulent region.

Christian Missions and Humanitarianism in the Middle East, 1850-1950

Christian Missions and Humanitarianism in the Middle East, 1850-1950 PDF Author: Inger Marie Okkenhaug
Publisher: Leiden Studies in Islam and So
ISBN: 9789004394667
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
"From the early phases of modern missions, Christian missionaries supported many humanitarian activities, mostly framed as subservient to the preaching of Christianity. This anthology contributes to a historically grounded understanding of the complex relationship between Christian missions and the roots of humanitarianism and its contemporary uses in a Middle Eastern context. Contributions focus on ideologies, rhetoric, and practices of missionaries and their apostolates towards humanitarianism, from the mid-19th century Middle East crises, examining different missionaries, their society's worldview and their network in various areas of the Middle East. In the early 20th century Christian missions increasingly paid more attention to organisation and bureaucratisation ('rationalisation'), and media became more important to their work. The volume analyses how non-missionaries took over, to a certain extent, the aims and organisations of the missionaries as to humanitarianism. It seeks to discover and retrace such 'entangled histories' for the first time in an integral perspective. Contributors include: Beth Baron, Philippe Bourmaud, Seija Jalagin, Nazan Maksudyan, Michael Marten, Heleen (L.) Murre-van den Berg, Inger Marie Okkenhaug, Idir Ouahes, Maria Chiara Rioli, Karène Sanchez Summerer, Bertrand Taithe, and Chantal Verdeil"--

American Evangelicals in Egypt

American Evangelicals in Egypt PDF Author: Heather J. Sharkey
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691168105
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
In 1854, American Presbyterian missionaries arrived in Egypt as part of a larger Anglo-American Protestant movement aiming for worldwide evangelization. Protected by British imperial power, and later by mounting American global influence, their enterprise flourished during the next century. American Evangelicals in Egypt follows the ongoing and often unexpected transformations initiated by missionary activities between the mid-nineteenth century and 1967--when the Six-Day Arab-Israeli War uprooted the Americans in Egypt. Heather Sharkey uses Arabic and English sources to shed light on the many facets of missionary encounters with Egyptians. These occurred through institutions, such as schools and hospitals, and through literacy programs and rural development projects that anticipated later efforts of NGOs. To Egyptian Muslims and Coptic Christians, missionaries presented new models for civic participation and for women's roles in collective worship and community life. At the same time, missionary efforts to convert Muslims and reform Copts stimulated new forms of Egyptian social activism and prompted nationalists to enact laws restricting missionary activities. Faced by Islamic strictures and customs regarding apostasy and conversion, and by expectations regarding the proper structure of Christian-Muslim relations, missionaries in Egypt set off debates about religious liberty that reverberate even today. Ultimately, the missionary experience in Egypt led to reconsiderations of mission policy and evangelism in ways that had long-term repercussions for the culture of American Protestantism.

Revival and Awakening

Revival and Awakening PDF Author: Adam H. Becker
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022614545X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 451

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Book Description
Most Americans have little understanding of the relationship between religion and nationalism in the Middle East. They assume that the two are rooted fundamentally in regional history, not in the history of contact with the broader world. However, as Adam H. Becker shows in this book, Americans—through their missionaries—had a strong hand in the development of a national and modern religious identity among one of the Middle East's most intriguing (and little-known) groups: the modern Assyrians. Detailing the history of the Assyrian Christian minority and the powerful influence American missionaries had on them, he unveils the underlying connection between modern global contact and the retrieval of an ancient identity. American evangelicals arrived in Iran in the 1830s. Becker examines how these missionaries, working with the “Nestorian” Church of the East—an Aramaic-speaking Christian community in the borderlands between Qajar Iran and the Ottoman Empire—catalyzed, over the span of sixty years, a new national identity. Instructed at missionary schools in both Protestant piety and Western science, this indigenous group eventually used its newfound scriptural and archaeological knowledge to link itself to the history of the ancient Assyrians, which in time led to demands for national autonomy. Exploring the unintended results of this American attempt to reform the Orient, Becker paints a larger picture of religion, nationalism, and ethnic identity in the modern era.

New Faith in Ancient Lands

New Faith in Ancient Lands PDF Author: Heleen Murre-van den Berg
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047411404
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
Over the centuries, the Middle East has held an important place in the religious consciousness of many Christians in West and East. In the nineteenth century, these interests culminated in extensive missionary work of Protestant and Roman Catholic organisations, among Eastern Christians, Muslims and Jews. The present volume, in articles written by an international group of scholars, discusses themes like the historical background of Christian geopiety among Roman Catholics and Protestants, and the internal tensions and conflicting aims of missions and missionaries, such as between nationalist and internationalist interests, between various rival organisations and between conversionalist and civilizational aims of missions in the Ottoman Empire. In a synthetic overview and a comprehensive bibliography an up-to-date introduction into this field is provided.