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This article examines the historical roots of American missions in the Middle East.
Several theses and dissertations have been written about the religious, political and cultural effects of the American missionary enterprise in the Middle East. This study lists the theses and dissertations which examine the missionary activities of the several American denominations and organizations including Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Pentecostals, Mormons, Quakers and Methodists in the Middle East throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Review of Middle East Studies , Winter 2012, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Winter 2012), pp. 248-250
Review of American Missionaries and the Middle East: Foundational Encounters by Mehmet Ali Doğan and Heather J. Sharkey2012 •
American missions to, and American missionaries in, the Middle East have been a marginal topic in Middle Eastern studies and Global History during the twentieth century. Recently, though, they have become a major topic, though research on them is still in its infancy, as Heather Sharkey writes in her introduction to this volume of nine collected essays. This volume is a fine and substantial contribution to the study of American Protestant mission to the Middle East. Though unique in many ways, the American experience needs to be put in the context of multiple missions and multiple Ottoman answers, however. Based on Mormon and Ottoman sources, Karen M. Kern's study on Mormon missionaries in the late Ottoman Empire is therefore particularly enlightening. Needy of protection by Ottoman authorities against local Protestants, and complaining about Christianity as "a complicated system of falsehood," they nevertheless shared the strong tenets of modern American millennialism. They believed in their key role in the return of the Jews to Palestine and in the "true restoration of Man."
Here is one of the most important Research articles about the History of the American Protestant Missionaries in the Holy Land and the Middle East.
2022 •
Some Christian historians describe the 19th century as one of the greatest eras of Christian religious expansion. For many Western Christians during this period, the Middle East appeared to be a ripe field for evangelistic harvest. However, the changes initiated by the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution produced a Western imperial impulse, which affected missionary methodology in the Middle East. Protestant missionaries attempted to convert Arab and Kurdish Muslims by proxy. Investing financially and missiologically in the local orthodox communities was believed to be the most effective means for bringing Christianity to Muslim communities. Missionaries attempted to evangelize Muslims by addressing social needs such as failing educational systems and needed medical facilities. However, the “Great Experiment” of reviving Middle Eastern Christian communities ultimately failed. In this paper, I argue that five factors led to this missionary failure: Western ethnocentrism, lack of contextualization, impertinence toward Muslims, and Christian liberal theology.
2011 •
Forum for World Literature Studies
TEXTURED UNDERSTANDING OF THE XIX CENTURY US MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE IN THE EASTThis paper aims to articulate the historical background of the US missionary policy in the East and its outreach through literary and publicist texts. I argue that the theories and concepts motivating the Americans for the mission in the East in the XIX century were inspired by centennial attractiveness of the region to both Europeans and Americans. Additionally, in the US political and literary imagination, the eastern land was associated with the border of "the land of promise" "gifted" them by the Heavens. Linking the idea of the Old and New Canaan, the Americans determined the Middle East as a "new frontier" of their country. My basic claim is that the missionary, as a strategic tool of the 'soft power' managed the US colonial policy in the East and justified it with noble tales. What encouraged the pragmatic Americans to launch "soft power" technologies there? The reason lays not so deep: in a direct interrelation between the widening of New England missionary to the Middle East and the development of financial and exploration points there. In the paper, I propose the diversity of the American missionary narratives, most of which are intertwined into political texts. The travel diaries, essays, and particularly, the colonialmissionary novels have been structured around a plot describing the missionaries as courageous and legitimate defenders of the eastern lands and culture, and the aborigines, who were seeking their protection. This policy of the Americans have been pursued until present: without changing its essence, it has acquired new forms, and uses modern technologies to intervene in the politics of the eastern countries. In examining the roots of the US colonial policy, I explore the Joshua Strong's concept of the Anglo-Saxons' priority, Frederic Turner's "Frontier thesis", and other American myths and stereotypes.
2008 •
Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations
Conflict, Conquest, and Conversion: Two Thousand Years of Christian Missions in the Middle East2014 •
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