Artillery of Heaven

Artillery of Heaven
Author: Ussama Makdisi
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2011-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0801457742

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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.

American Missionaries and the Middle East

American Missionaries and the Middle East
Author: Middle East Studies Association of North America. Annual Meeting
Publisher: Utah Turkish and Islamic Stud
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781607810384

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

Nearest East

Nearest East
Author: Hans-Lukas Kieser
Publisher: Temple University Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2010-03-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1439902240

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How missionaries and evangelical politics influenced American government policy in the Middle East.

US Foreign Policy in the Middle East

US Foreign Policy in the Middle East
Author: Geoffrey F. Gresh
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2018-04-17
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1351169629

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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.

I Am a Pilgrim, a Traveler, a Stranger

I Am a Pilgrim, a Traveler, a Stranger
Author: John Hubers
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2016-09-29
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1498282989

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In this book--part biography, part critical analysis--John Hubers introduces us to a man whose pioneering ministry in the Ottoman Empire has gone largely unnoticed since his memoir was penned in 1828, three years after his death in Beirut, by a seminary colleague. His name was Pliny Fisk, and he belonged to a cadre of New England seminary students whose evangelical Calvinism led them to believe that God was opening up a new chapter in the life of the Church that included an aggressive evangelism outside the borders of Christendom. Fisk and his friend Levi Parsons joined that effort in 1819 when they became the first American missionaries sent to the Ottoman Empire by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Hubers's intent is to show the complexity of Fisk's character while examining the impact his move to the Middle East made on his perceptions of the religious other. As such, this volume joins a growing body of literature aimed at providing critical, historical, and religious context to the often checkered history of relations between American Christians and Western Asian peoples.

Pioneers East

Pioneers East
Author: David H. Finnie
Publisher:
Total Pages: 374
Release: 1967
Genre: History
ISBN:

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No detailed description available for "Pioneers East".

The Orphan Scandal

The Orphan Scandal
Author: Beth Baron
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2014-07-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0804792224

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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.

Altruism and Imperialism

Altruism and Imperialism
Author: Reeva S. Simon
Publisher: Middle East Institute Columbia University
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2002
Genre: Christianity and culture
ISBN:

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American Apostles

American Apostles
Author: Christine Leigh Heyrman
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2015-09
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0809023989

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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.