Imperial Formations

2 Bringing America Back into the Middle East A History of the First American Missionary Encounter with the Ottoman Arab World

Neither Ottoman nor American history is normally considered an integral part of colonial studies. This omission reflects not only the tendency of colonial studies to focus on Europe’s colonies as the exclusive center of inquiry but also the hegemonic self-representation of US and Ottoman historiographies in which colonialism is at best seen as a marginal or late chapter in the unfolding story of the nation-state.1 In what follows, I bring together Ottoman and US history to understand how the first American missionary assault on the Ottoman empire represented a collision of manifestly different and complex imperial formations , racially articulated in an expansionist American republic and religiously elaborated in the Ottoman domains. Specifically eschewing the language of a clash between an undifferentiated Islam and a monolithic West, I outline how American missionaries, shaped by their ambivalent embrace of certain white triumph over American Indians, responded to the difficult realities of a new Ottoman frontier that they had opened but could not dominate. In the face of an unanticipated defeat by natives who refused to conform to their millennial fantasy or their location in a missionary worldview that regarded the Ottoman 45 2 Bringing America Back into the Middle East A History of the First American Missionary Encounter with the Ottoman Arab World Ussama Makdisi “heathen” in a substantially similar way to the American Indian “heathen ,” the missionaries sought to transform actual defeat into moral victory. They first fabricated a story of martyrdom of the first Arab convert to American Protestantism and then, later, integrated this story into a broader narrative of Anglo-American ascendancy. These stories presupposed not only an orientalized reading of the East but an idealized reading of America as well. To appreciate the complexity of this initial clash of cultures is first and foremost to appreciate the richness of a missionary encounter in which the historical and historiographical cards are not, as is so often the case with missionaries operating in European colonies, overwhelmingly in Western hands.2 Put more boldly, to understand American missionaries in the Orient, indeed to understand this early American mission history overseas, one has to acknowledge the intersection of a settler/colonial American logic defined by the opposition of white to American Indian with an intricate imperial Ottoman logic defined by the opposition of high to low as well as Muslim to non-Muslim. Furthermore , making sense of American missionary documents, their representations and silences, requires a plunge into unfamiliar, in this case Ottoman, waters. Ottoman Arab history, contrary to the assumptions of American missionaries and indeed much of US diplomatic history in the Middle East, was not the setting for the triumphal unfolding of “American” liberal and democratic values, but an active stage upon which American history, with its passions and prejudices, was dialectically played out. Ottoman society, after all, was not formally colonized by European powers, although it was subject to pressures similar if not identical to those in colonial India and Africa. Moreover, the Ottoman empire embodied a mature non-Western imperial tradition that viably, if defensively, competed across the nineteenth century with ever more dominant Western imperial powers. How this non-Western imperial tradition was “read” by American missionaries in the 1820s, who were themselves emerging out of the crucible of US colonialism against the Native Americans, offers a fascinating study of the dynamic of a premodern , non-Western imperial tradition that came into unexpected confrontation with American missionaries. In this encounter, the American missionaries could not depend on any of the certainties that Ussama Makdisi 46 defined outright European colonialism or on their own American colonial background with the Native Americans. That is, they could neither tacitly nor openly count on the coercive mechanism of a colonial state to pressure natives into conversion; nor could they avoid the fact that they stood face to face with a literate, if in their eyes false, multireligious culture that, in the 1820s, was still fully confident of its abilities to withstand, and even repel, Western encroachment. Simply put, the Ottomans were not Tzvetan Todorov’s Aztecs.3 Nowhere was this encounter more vividly and tragically illustrated than in the exemplary story of a Maronite Christian subject of the Ottoman empire, As‘ad Shidyaq, who became the first Arab convert to Protestantism in the Ottoman empire and who died for his beliefs in the late 1820s. Shidyaq’s conversion...