Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (The United States in the World) - Softcover

Makdisi, Ussama

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801475759 ISBN 13: 9780801475757

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2009

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Ussama Makdisi is Professor of History and first holder of the Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair of Arab Studies at Rice University. He is the author of The Culture of Sectarianism and coeditor of Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa.

From the Back Cover

"This new book is a remarkable tour de force. It establishes Ussama Makdisi's place as one of the premier historians of the modern Arab world, of the Arab-American encounter, and of Lebanon. It represents the best kind of intercultural history, weaving seamlessly a narrative of missionary actions against their American background, and of Lebanese reactions in their Ottoman context. This book does both things, masterfully and apparently effortlessly."--Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies, Middle East Institute, Columbia University

"Through a contextualized reading of the tragic story of As'ad Shidyaq, Ussama Makdisi powerfully narrates and deconstructs the encounter between American Protestant missionaries and Mar nite Christian leaders in nineteenth-century Lebanon. This nuanced study explores a pivotal moment in local cross-cultural contact, and shows how broader currents of multiculturalism emerged from the mix. Makdisi's study exemplifies the new mission history at its best, as well as provides important insights into the meaning of religio-political sectarianism in the Middle East today. This is a great book."--Dana L. Robert, Truman Collins Professor of World Christianity and History of Christian Mission, Boston University

"This is one of the most stimulating and enjoyable books I've read for years. Ussama Makdisi's rare achievement is to straddle two completely different and interesting topics: the history of U.S. missionary endeavor within the United States, and some of the results of its manifestations abroad in Lebanon. The Artillery of Heaven contains an unflattering but utterly convincing critique of the effortless racial superiority inherent in the American missionary enterprise in the nineteenth century, as well as the projection of the myth of late nineteenth-century 'Christian America' as the ideal society."--Peter Sluglett, University of Utah

"Ussama Makdisi strikes at the heart of a model of a 'clash of civilizations' that so pervades conventional, generalizing accounts of a transhistorical dissonance between America and the Arab world. His subtle and rich account of American missionaries and their failed efforts to garner Ottoman converts in the early nineteenth century resets the historical and cultural parameters for understanding this encounter as one piece of a longer history of missionary work among Native Americans. Most striking, he takes his fine-grained interpretive cues from Muslim and Christian actors who themselves were critical and creative in thinking about different notions of faith at a time when coexistence was not proclaimed but, in reflective practice, actively pursued."--Ann L. Stoler, Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, New School University

"This passionately written and engaging book presents interesting material that has not before seen the light of day. Ussama Makdisi addresses very important transnational and intercultural issues concerning the transmission of and reaction to missionary culture. Throughout, he gives a balanced account of American and Maronite/Lebanese relations, revealing details of the social structure and values of Ottoman society. Artillery of Heaven illuminates the cultural contacts and misunderstandings involved at a different time in American cultural expansion."--Ian Tyrrell, Scientia Professor of History, University of New South Wales

Edition details

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801475759
• ISBN 13: 9780801475757
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 280