American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire (review)

Heather J. Sharkey has produced an important and lucid account of the long history of American Presbyterian missionaries to Egypt. Charting four distinct periods beginning in 1854 and ending in 1967, Sharkey recounts why Americans first set off to convert Egyptians, and how they focused initially on the Coptic Church and thus laid the basis for a small Egyptian Protestant community. Then, she shows how the Americans flourished under the British military occupation of Egypt and how they aggressively turned to convert Muslims. With the rise of Egyptian nationalism in the post-World War I period, however, the Americans were beset with what Sharkey describes as an “age of chronic anxiety” (p. 216). They were uncertain of the place of mission following the heyday of empire. The final act of the mission was to bow to the reality of Egyptian sovereignty and revolution. Sharkey’s account ends with the advent of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, and the withdrawal of American missionaries from Egypt amidst acrimonious US-Arab relations.

The originality of the book lies in Sharkey’s determination to tell the missionary story as one of mutual, if uneven, American and Egyptian transformation. She neither celebrates the mission in the manner of the 19^th century and even 20^th century apologists, nor does she dismiss it as a front for Western hegemony as Egyptian nationalists have done. For the most part, she stays well clear of orientalist depictions of Egypt and Islam — her unfortunate evocation of an ahistorical and highly polemical concept of “dhimmitude” (p. 52) notwithstanding. If Egypt was changed because of the impact of mission — and indeed it was, quite profoundly, according to Sharkey at a variety of levels — so too were the missionaries transformed. Even more, American society itself was affected by the rise of anti-colonial nationalism. American evangelicals struggled to adapt to a post-World War I world in which Western colonialism was edging toward obsolescence. Some of them grappled with an emerging notion of multiculturalism and even moved toward a philosophy of religious liberty — hence the significance of the so-called 1932 Hocking Report to which Sharkey pays much attention.

Sharkey’s thesis moves beyond the assumptions of both a self-regarding American literature on missions and a defensive Egyptian and Arab nationalist polemic against Western missionaries. Sharkey’s use of Arabic documents is what most clearly draws a line between her work and an earlier genre of mission writing in which Arabic sources and Egyptian Christian and Muslim perspectives were ignored or trivialized. As such, Sharkey brings to light the cases of converts and those associated with the mission such as Kamil Mansur, Amir Boktor, and Ahmed Fahmy, among others. Sharkey, however, is unable to flesh out the Egyptian characters as empathetically as she does the Americans; the Coptic Church remains opaque as do Egyptian, Arab, and Muslim nationalists; and she hesitates to fully explore the racial dimensions of the staffing and salary policies at American missionary institutions. The founder of the American University in Cairo, Charles Watson, emerges as the hero of her story. The manner in which Sharkey sympathetically traces Watson’s own conversion from zealot missionary to an apostle of ecumenism and even accommodation to a Muslim world is admirable. But it also illuminates a complexity to the American side that has no real Egyptian parallel in Sharkey’s narrative. This imbalance derives, perhaps inevitably, from the nature of American missionary correspondence that constitutes the foundation of Sharkey’s archival research, a correspondence that invariably privileges American voices, history, and perspectives over those of the native population.

The question that Sharkey leaves us with is not simply to what extent is it possible to write a balanced history of missions, but how far are historians required to go to excavate and recuperate native agency in reconstructing histories of cross-cultural encounters...