Th pl f n nd rn vnl n Lt ttn Brt Marwa Elshakry Past & Present, Number 196, August 2007, pp. 173-214 (Article) Pblhd b xfrd nvrt Pr For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ptp/summary/v196/196.1elshakry.html Access provided by Harvard University (24 Jan 2015 23:39 GMT) THE GOSPEL OF SCIENCE AND AMERICAN EVANGELISM IN LATE OTTOMAN BEIRUT* In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Protestant revivalist and millenarian movements swept the shores of the Atlantic. Wesleyan Methodism captured the imagination of English en- thusiasts, while their overseas brethren witnessed two ‘Great Awakenings’. Numerous prophecies foretold the triumph of Christ’s spiritual rule over the earth and the conversion of all the world’s peoples, particularly the Jews, who were expected to return to the Holy Land and there embrace a reformed faith on the path to salvation. With the coming of the Saviour and the destruction of all the Men of Sin a ‘thousand years of peace, brotherhood and justice’ were expected.1 Inspired by the spirit of ‘disinterested benevolence’ of Jonathan Edwards and Samuel Hopkins — and by visions of America’s ‘manifest destiny’ in the world — American Protestant disciples set out to prepare the road for Christ’s return and to sow the seeds of peace, justice and brotherhood among the heathen and unre- formed.2 In 1810 a fraternity known as the ‘Brethren’ at the * The research for this article was made possible through the support of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and the British Academy. For their critical suggestions and discussions, I am grateful to Nadia Abou El Haj, Peter Buck, Alice Carter, Omnia El Shakry, Ellen Fleischmann, Tamara Griggs, Shafiq Juha, Mark Mazower, James Moore, Aida Nawar, Steven Shapin and the participants of Columbia University’s Middle East Studies working group. Special thanks are also due to the librarians and archivists at the American University of Beirut. 1 Oliver Wendell Elsbree, ‘The Rise of the Missionary Spirit in New England, 1790–1815’, New England Quart., iii (1928), 295–9. On the first Great Awakening (c.1720–40), see Frank Lambert, Inventing the ‘Great Awakening’ (Princeton, 2001); on the second (c.1795–1835), see Barry Hankins, The Second Great Awakening and the Transcendentalists (Westport, 2004). See also Mark A. Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys (Leicester, 2004). 2 See Jonathan Edwards on Evangelism, ed. Carl J. C. Wolf (Westport, 1958); Samuel Hopkins, A Treatise on the Millennium, repr. of 1793 edn (New York, 1972). On mani- fest destiny, see Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (New York, 1995). American mission work began in the mid to late eighteenth century with efforts to convert — and civilize — native Americans through local mission societies set up in the 1790s; in 1802 congressional appropriations, known as the ‘Civilization Fund’, also made money available to religious groups ‘to (cont. on p. 174) Past and Present,no.196(August2007) ß The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2007 doi:10.1093/pastj/gtm006 174 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 196 Calvinist Divinity College (later the Andover Theological Sem- inary) founded what would quickly become one of the largest interdenominational missionary societies in the north-eastern United States: the American Board of Commissioners for For- eign Missions (ABCFM).3 From the start, theirs was a project with global ambitions: ‘Prophesy, history and the present state of the world’, announced the Board in 1811, ‘seem to unite in declaring that the great pillars of the Papal and Mahommedan impostures are now tottering to their fall . Now is the time for the followers of Christ to come forward boldly and engage ear- nestly in the great work of enlightening and reforming mankind’.4 By mid century the ABCFM had established numerous mis- sionary outposts across the Mediterranean, Asia, Africa and the Americas. ‘Through various channels of influence’, wrote the Reverend James Dennis, an early member of the station at Beirut, ‘missions are pouring vitalizing forces into the social, na- tional, commercial and religious life of foreign peoples’. The aim was to create ‘new men’ abroad or, as Dennis wrote, ‘the embry- onic norms of a new society and a new life’.5 Hoping to mould ‘new national lives and characters’, American evangelists pro- moted spiritual and worldly reform in foreign lands through an ambitious amalgam of pedagogy, philanthropy and politics that critics have since referred to as ‘colonial evangelism’.6 Commentators and scholars have long debated the relationship between Christian missions and imperialism in the Middle East. (n. 2 cont.) provide civilization among the aborigines’. Americanizing the American Indian: Writings by the ‘Friends of the Indian’, 1880–1900, ed. Francis Paul Prucha (Lincoln, Nebr., 1978), 19. 3 Although Congregational in origin the ABCFM quickly grew to include Presbyterian, Dutch-Reformed and other denominational members. See Clifton Jackson Phillips, Protestant America and the Pagan World: The First Half Century of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 1810–1860 (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), 20; James A. Field Jr, America and the Mediterranean World, 1776–1882 (Princeton, 1969), 89. 4 ‘Address to the Christian Public’, Nov. 1811, from First Ten Annual Reports of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (Boston, 1834), 28. 5 James S. Dennis, Christian Missions and Social Progress: A Sociological Study of Foreign Missions, 3 vols. (New York, 1897–1906), iii, 3–4. 6 See, for instance, T. O. Beidelman, Colonial Evangelism: A Socio-Historical Study of an East African Mission at Grassroots (Bloomington, 1982). Cf. John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, i, Christianity, Colonialism and Conscious- ness in South Africa (Chicago, 1991), 7–11; Andrew Porter, Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester, 2004). AMERICAN EVANGELISM IN LATE OTTOMAN BEIRUT 175 From the start, there were those who suspected that a colonial agenda lurked behind the missionaries’ religious aspirations. As early as the 1890s, contemporary writers and journalists linked the evangelists with foreign occupiers such as the British in Egypt and the Sudan, or the French in Algeria and North-West Africa.7 Some twentieth-century Arab nationalist historians followed suit and described them as the shock troops of imperialism.8 Others, however, especially in the Anglophone world, have portrayed Christian, and particularly Protestant, missionaries in a more favourable light, not as collaborators with foreign imperialists but as mentors of Arab nationalism itself — both the carriers of new ideas from Europe and the agents in the revival and mod- ernization of the Middle East.9 Missionaries to the Middle East are thus hailed as playing a role in a surprisingly diverse number of rather worldly endeavours, whether as sponsors of the late nineteenth-century revival of the Arabic language and belles- lettres known as the nahda (Arab Renaissance) or as promoters of a new spirit of Arab secularism and nationalism.10 Historians 7 See, for example, al-mu8ayyid, i (1890), 50–4; al-manar, i (1898), 898–9; ibid., ii (1899), 141–2. See also Mahmud Samrah, ‘Christian Missions and Western Ideas in Syrian Muslim Writers, 1860–1918’ (Univ. of London Ph.D. thesis, 1958), 33–42; Robert Truett Gilliam, ‘A Muslim Response to Protestant Missionaries: The Case of al-Manar’ (American Univ. of Beirut MA dissertation, 2000), 12–16; Mahmoud Haddad, ‘Syrian Muslim Attitudes toward Foreign Missionaries in the Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, in Eleanor H. Tejirian and Reeva Spector Simon (eds.), Altruism and Imperialism: Western Cultural and Religious Missions in the Middle East (New York, 2002). 8 Mustafa Khalidi and 6Umar Farrukh, al-tabshir wa’l-isti 6mar fi’l-bilad al-6arabiyya [Missions and Imperialism in the Arab World](Beirut, 1953); Ibrahim Khalil Ahmad, al-mustashriqun wa’l-mubashirun fi’l-6alam al-6arabi wa’l-islami [Orientalists and Mis- sionaries in the Arab and Muslim World] (Cairo, 1964); Emad Sharaf, haqa8iq 6an al- tabshir [The Truth about Missions] (Cairo, 1975); 6Abdul Rahman Hasan al-Midani, ajnihat al-makr al thalatha wa khawafiha: al-tabshir, al-istishraq, al-isti 6mar [The Three Wings of Duplicity: Missions, Orientalism and Imperialism] (Damascus, 1975). For a review of some of these works, see Gilliam, ‘Muslim Response to Protestant Mission- aries’, 92–5; Heather Sharkey, ‘Arabic Antimissionary Treatises: Muslim Responses’, Internat. Bull. Missionary Research (July 2004). 9 Philip K. Hitti, Lebanon in History from the Earliest Times to the Present (London, 1957), ch. 31; Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (Oxford, 1962), 55; Kamal S. Salibi, The Modern History of Lebanon (London, 1965), ch. 7; George Antonius, The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement (Beirut, 1969), 35–43; Elie Kedourie, The Chatham House Version and Other Middle Eastern Studies (London, 1970), 289; Elie Kedourie, ‘The American University of Beirut’, in his Arabic Political Memoirs and Other Studies (London, 1974), 70. 10 On the former, see citations at n. 9 above; on the latter, see, for example, Adnan Abu-Ghazaleh, American Missions in Syria: A Study of American Missionary (cont. on p. 176) 176 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 196 have since tempered such broad claims while nevertheless giving the missionaries a key role in the transformation of Syrian society and identity.11 Even though missionaries failed ultimately in their mission to save souls — their success in terms of numbers of actual converts to the Protestant Church was never very impres- sive — they were nevertheless said to have helped win the battle for the ‘conversion to modernities’ in the Middle East.12 What is at stake in this long-standing argument, of course, is the very concept of ‘conversion’ itself — a question that bedevilled mis- sionaries, their patrons and subjects alike, and one which this article ultimately addresses.