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Protestant Missionaries in the Service of an Islamic Empire

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Protestant Missionaries in the Service of an Islamic Empire American Ottomans: Protestant Missionaries in the Service of an Islamic Empire by Henry Gorman Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in History August 31, 2019 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Professor Paul Kramer, PhD Professor Sarah Igo, PhD Professor Leor Halevi, PhD Professor Heather Sharkey, PhD Acknowledgements: I completed this dissertation with the help and support of a great many people and institutions. The Vanderbilt Department of History, the Vanderbilt College of Arts and Sciences, and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations helped to financially support my research and writing with monetary grants. Throughout the process, my dissertation committee, including Sarah Igo, Leor Halevi, Heather Sharkey have provided helpful advice about research, conceptualization, and writing. Throughout the process, my adviser Paul Kramer was both an intellectual exemplar and a considerate mentor; his earlier work and his guidance did a great deal to make this dissertation possible. I brought out many of this work’s virtues by following their suggestions, and, I suspect, set up some of its shortcomings by not following those suggestions carefully enough. Colleagues at Vanderbilt, including but not limited to Samira Sheikh, David Blackbourn, Thomas Schwartz, William Caferro, Catherine Molineux, Laura Stark, James Hudnut- Beumler, Gary Gerstle, Richard MacGregor, Juliet Larkin-Gilmore, Mary Bridges, Kyle Romero, Sarah Nelson, Anthony Siracusa, Sveinn Johanneson, Katie McKenna, Fernanda Bretones Lane, Enrique Rivera, William Murrell, Taryn Marashi, Mohammed Allehbi, Danielle Picard, Carolyn Taratko, Mario Rewers, and Justin Hubbard read my work and contributed helpful commentary throughout my time here. At my undergraduate alma mater, Rice University, Ussama Makdisi inspired my interest in the history of America’s relationship with the Middle East and introduced me to its historiography. At conferences, scholars including Emily Conroy-Krutz, Kristen Hoganson, Christine Heyerman, Karine Walther, Cara Burnidge, Derek Chang, Oliver Charbonneau, Josh Gedacht, Randa Tawil, and Christine Lindener provided guidance, commentary, and support. The archivists at the Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia, the National Archives of the United ii Kingdom, the Near East School of Theology, and the American University of Beirut all provided invaluable assistance to my research, and fellow researchers like Ziad Abu-Rish, Catherine Batruni, Nathan George, and Susanna Ferguson provided both tips and companionship in the field. In Beirut, friends like Fares Abbas, Jamal Dilman-Hasso, Amr Elgehiny, Munir Safi, and Muhammad Al-Habash brightened my time at the archive; in Nashville, others including Lauren Mitchell, Stephanie Straub, Martin Brown, Chelsea Land, and Shelby Johnson did likewise. I owe my deepest thanks to my wife Amanda Lehr, who loved and supported me throughout the past six years, and my cats Beatrice and Baldwin, who have kept me grounded throughout the writing process. iii Preface: I hope that this text will be of some use to other scholars whose work will build and improve on my own; before I begin in earnest, I will make note of a few matters which might make its arguments clearer and provide clear directions for further investigation. First, a note on terminology: the modern states of Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Jordan did not come into existence with anything like their present boundaries until the partition of the Ottoman Empire which followed the First World War, which only occurred at the very end of the period which American Ottomans covers. Throughout most of the text, I use the term “Syria,” as the 19th century’s Europeans, Americans, and Ottomans did, to refer to the region bounded in the north by the Tarsus Mountains, to the south by the Sinai Peninsula, to the east by the Syrian Desert, and to the west by the Mediterranean Sea; a region which roughly corresponds to the present-day states I mentioned above plus the small portion of Turkey surrounding the cities of Iskanderun and Antakya. In sections discussing the region after the First World War, I will use the term “Greater Syria” to distinguish it from the French Mandate created at that time. I will also follow period practice by using the term “Syrian” to refer to that region’s settled Arabic-speaking inhabitants of all faiths. Before the Ottoman Empire’s fall, “Lebanon” was used to refer to a region which became part of the modern nation-state of that name; it roughly corresponds to modern-day Lebanon’s Mount Lebanon governorate. To avoid confusion, I’ll use the term “Mount Lebanon” throughout the text to refer to the region. I will also follow period practice by using the term “Palestine” to refer to the region now occupied by Israel and the Palestinian territories. Second, a note on this study’s limitations. I am all too aware of my own biases, limitations, and failings as a scholar, and I suspect that they will create many opportunities for the historians, iv religious scholars, and anthropologists of the future to improve upon my work. My most painful deficit is linguistic. The Ottoman state plays an important role in my analysis, but by the time that my research revealed its enormous salience in the story that I am trying to tell, it was too late for me to learn Ottoman Turkish and still finish this dissertation in anything like a timely manner. Consequently, I’ve had to reconstruct Turkish-speaking Ottoman officials’ motives by examining their actions as recounted by Arabic-speaking Syrians and English and French-speaking expatriates, reading their French and Arabic-language correspondence with various foreigners, and drawing upon a flourishing and expanding body on the late Ottoman period, whose many excellent authors have my deepest gratitude. A better Ottomanist than I will doubtless be able to tell a smarter and more sophisticated version of the story I am writing here. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………………………….. ii PREFACE………………………………………………………………………………………. iv Introduction……………………………………………………………………………................ 1 Chapter I. Strange Idioms………………………………………………………………………………. 19 II. Two Civil Wars……………………………………………………………………………… 57 III. Missionary School, Military Academy, Madrasa……………………………………………... 100 IV. A Mission’s Material and Moral Economies………………………………………………… 143 V. The Surgeon that Binds Up the Nation’s Wounds…………………………………………… 184 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………... 237 REFERENCES………………………………………………………………………………… 253 vi Introduction: Histories of American power in the Middle East used begin on February 14, 1945, the day that Franklin Roosevelt, returning from the Yalta Conference, hosted King 'Abd al-Aziz Ibn Saud aboard the USS Quincy, laying the groundwork for ARAMCO and the US-Saudi Alliance. William Eddy, an OSS agent and future father of the CIA who served as the US “Special Envoy and Minister Plenipotentiary” to 'Abd al-Aziz, served as their interpreter. Bill Eddy was one of the US government's first Middle East specialists, and, like many others in that group (including his cousin, Harold Hoskins), he came out of a much longer American engagement with the region. Born in Beirut in what was then the Ottoman Empire, he was the son and grandson of American Protestant missionaries.1 His father and grandfather, both also named William Eddy, served a mission which had sought to evangelize and educate the western part of region then known as greater Syria since the 1820s.2 The Syria Mission, which was affiliated first with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (a cooperative organization which operated missions for the US’s Congregationalists and Northern Presbyterians) and later with the Presbyterian Board of Missions (the missionary arm of the reunified post-Civil War Presbyterian Church), spawned a surprising number of the people and institutions which shaped the first iterations of American power in the Middle East. Its members had founded the American University of Beirut, a prestigious “sheet anchor” of American soft power in the region which both trained US intelligence agents and 1 Osamah F. Khalil, America’s Dream Palace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), chap. 2. 2 Throughout most of this dissertation, I use the term “Syria” as Americans, Europeans, and Ottomans did in the 19th and 20th centuries, to refer to the region bounded by the Taurus Mountains in the north, the Sinai Peninsula in the South, the Mediterranean on the west, and the Syrian desert on the East. It roughly corresponds to the area now occupied by Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine. 1 bolstered America’s image among the local intelligentsia.3 David Dodge, a scion of the Bliss and Dodge families which led and sponsored the American University through its early years, took up a leading role at the Arab-American Oil Company, which still holds a monopoly on exporting petroleum from Saudi Arabia to the United States.4 Its members also helped to establish and supply the fieldworkers for what became the Near East Foundation, the first major American-sponsored NGO to pursue development projects in the Middle East, whose projects inspired Truman’s Point Four plan for global development.5 The Mission’s scions, including Bayard Dodge, and its students, including Philip Hitti, helped to establish the disciplines of Near Eastern Studies and Middle
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