American Apostles: When Evangelicals Entered the World of Islam by Christine Leigh Heyrman (review)

In American Apostles, Christine Leigh Heyrman uncovers a history of American engagement with the Islamic world that was much more complex, curious, and even open-minded than many readers might have expected. It is a story of Protestant missions, of Enlightenment Orientalism, of print culture, of evangelical masculinity, and of the early Republic's difficult grappling with its place in the world. It is also a page-turner, gripping the reader at once with the interest of the narrative and the significance of the argument.

At the center of American Apostles is a man named Pliny Fisk, one of three missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions who traveled to the Middle East in the early decades of the nineteenth century. His story allows Heyrman to explore the diverse ways that Americans thought about Islam during that period. As an evangelical Calvinist of the New Divinity, Fisk, along with his colleagues Levi Parsons and, later, Jonas King, at first imagined proselytizing to be a glorious opportunity to do difficult work in the service of the Gospel. If they expected to see the effects of their work abroad, however, they were mistaken. Converts were hard to come by, but, as Heyrman argues, these missionaries would have "a profound impact on their vast American audience" (5). Their writings shaped American images of Islam and Muslims around the world. Missionaries, Heyrman argues, became trusted authorities on the places where they lived and worked, and they accordingly had an important role in the American production of knowledge about the Middle East and Islam. Yet Fisk's voice would ultimately be lost in those American conversations as his experiences abroad challenged his thinking in surprising ways.

We first meet Fisk as a young man, when he was preparing to join the Brethren, a missionary secret society at Andover Theological Seminary. Reading the "polemical attacks" (37) on Islam that were available to readers at the Andover library, Fisk and Parsons expected their work to bring them face-to-face with those in the grip of what Parsons called "the kingdom of Satan" (25). As we come to know him through his time living in Smyrna and exploring the Ottoman Empire, however, Fisk emerges as one whose preconceived ideas were rocked to the core. Over the years, he explored and studied the Islamic faith and the Qur'an, and his struggles to incorporate what he learned with what he thought he knew when he was in America open a window onto a complex and multilayered American engagement with Islam in the early Republic.

Heyrman begins her story with a discussion of the emergence of the foreign mission movement and the ideas about Islam that missionaries would have encountered within the United States, and she then follows the Americans to the Levant. There, they met British missionaries, began their work, and struggled to make sense of the contrasts between imagined versions of the Islamic world and their lived experiences in it. She concludes by describing the competing versions of Islam created by Fisk and King, revealing the ways that missionary narratives of Islam were constructed in the service of a mission movement that badly needed funding and stories of adventure. It is an important tale, beautifully told, that should remind all readers of the constructed nature of anyone's ideas about foreign places and peoples. For historians of early America in particular, it will provide important insights into the ways that missionaries, with all that came with their particular worldviews, shaped those ideas for countless Americans who remained at home.

Before the mission movement sent Americans to the Middle East, readers could access information about Islam in a few different types of venues: "polemical attacks" were easy to come by, but so was an English translation of the Qur'an, first published in 1734 and available in many American libraries. Enlightenment writing about Islam was also available...