Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (review)

In this powerful and complex book Ussama Makdisi tells the story of As'ad Shidyaq, a Maronite from Mount Lebanon who was the first Arab convert to American Protestantism.

The first part of the book establishes the context of the story in North America and in the Levant. The men who employed As'ad and who became his spiritual mentors were sent out by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, founded in 1810. Whereas one might have expected to find the roots of American Christian missions in the Middle East in centuries-old European anti-Islamic prejudice, Makdisi convincingly shows that the ABCFM, the first American foreign missions organization, developed its missiology in the utterly American encounter with the North American Indians. And while it is true that Ottoman authorities did not permit proselytizing among Muslim populations, this did not necessitate any revision of missionary priorities, since for them pope and prophet were equally imposters and the "nominal" Christians of the Middle East their targets every bit as much as were Muslims. This was especially so of the Maronites, Eastern Christians in communion with Rome. Indeed the main threat the missionaries posed to Maronite church authority lay in exposing its myth of perpetual orthodoxy. Meanwhile the Maronite church found allies in the Ottoman authorities, who shared its commitment to traditional social hierarchies.

The conversion narrative takes up the second part of the book. Makdisi's sympathetic account presents As'ad Shidyaq as neither the greedy traitor to his native community of the patriarch's accusations nor the martyr for evangelical individualism of the hagiographical missionary newsletters. Rather, As'ad emerges as a man whose life was transformed through a close devotional study of the New Testament. As'ad's own description of his physical suffering and inner spiritual struggle during his imprisonment and torture at the hands of the patriarch's thugs opens the door for Makdisi to find a human being who is not reducible to simplistic narratives.

Makdisi's real hero appears in the third part of the book. He is Butrus al-Bustani, a major figure in Arab intellectual and cultural life in the second half of the nineteenth century. Bustani, himself a Maronite convert to Protestantism, published a biography of As'ad Shidyaq through which he advocated a freedom of conscience "from above, granted to humanity after it had been purchased and solidly sealed by the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ" (201). For Bustani, "the unwanted apostle for an ecumenical humanism which the American mission had never intended," (211) religious coexistence was not a strategy of empire as it was for the Ottomans, nor was it a disingenuous tactic of Christian evangelism as it was for missionaries. It was a "way of life," a means for humans to "overcome their temporary differences and unite around their essential sameness" (213). Thus locating the origins of modern religious tolerance as much in faith itself as in loss of faith, Makdisi's book demands attention well beyond a scholarly audience and deserves to be widely read.