This is a different sort of history book. But that should not be surprising, given its author. Ussama Makdisi, son of memoirist Jean Said Makdisi, nephew of Edward Said, and author of The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon, is fast making a name for himself as a meticulous and well-rounded scholar who refuses to restrict himself to a single historical narrative when tackling his subject. In Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East , Makdisi makes use of material from a variety of sources to provide as full a picture as possible of a series of extraordinary 19th-century encounters in the Levant.
Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (The United States in the World)
Cornell University Press
280 pages
$19.40
Indeed, before plunging into the story of 19th-century American Protestant missionaries in what is today Lebanon, Makdisi provides extensive background information on their Puritan forebears in 17th- and 18th-century America. He also compares and contrasts the Puritans during that era with the Maronites of Lebanon. This sets the stage for the eventual conflict between American Protestant missionaries and the Maronite Catholic Church. In the main, Artillery of Heaven is about the As’ad al-Shidyaq affair (a case of conversion to Protestantism and its brutal consequences, to which we’ll return in a moment) and the ideas of Butrus al-Bustani (another convert, with a very different trajectory), two outcomes of that fateful clash, and as such the book brings to life the religious tumult and violence of 19th-century Lebanon. Though not without occasional oversights, it is a penetrating examination of a tragic and seminal episode in the history of American Protestant missionary activity in the Ottoman Empire, and of the far-reaching socio-political lessons a remarkable man drew from this and other instances of religious violence in his tormented land.
Refreshingly, Makdisi steers clear of ideological renditions of history; he does not reject the missionaries’ view in order to adopt its reflexive Arab nationalist or Islamic counterpart. Indeed, he makes clear that “[t]he answer to one form of historiographic myopia is not, or at least not only, to write from a so-called native perspective, to switch vantage points, to valorize local resistance, or to retreat into orthodoxy.” American missionaries in the Middle East, Makdisi emphasizes, cannot properly be considered cultural imperialists; unlike their predecessors in America or their British and French counterparts, they were not part of a larger imperial political project. And he adds the trenchant observation that “decolonization, rather than giving voice to natives, simply took it away from the missionaries.”
Makdisi locates American proselytism in the Levant within a long tradition of American Protestant missionary activity that initially targeted American Indians and subsequently spread to other countries. In so doing, he brings to light the ideological underpinnings of those zealous men who arrived in the Levant beginning in 1820 intending to convert the native population. Among the most important beliefs animating the early missionaries, educated at Andover Theological Seminary and sent to the Levant by the Congregationalist-dominated American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions (ABCFM), were “the flying of time” (by which was meant the imminence of the end of days), an almost complete rejection of the virtues of coexistence between Protestants and others (including other Christians), and a related insistence that converts dissociate themselves entirely from their native culture. “They came not as crude military crusaders,” Makdisi writes, articulating the missionaries’ lofty sense of self, “but as the redeemed ‘artillery of heaven,’ men who were determined to reclaim biblical lands from the god of this world who had long since enslaved the ancient Eastern Christian churches.”
Naturally, all this made the early missionaries’ work in the Levant—restricted by Ottoman imperial decree to non-Muslim subjects of the Empire, but later tightened even further following complaints by local Christian religious authorities—very difficult. The missionaries’ most formidable foe would be the Maronite Church and its patriarch Yusuf Hubaysh, especially after the latter got wind of the conversion of a native son, As’ad Shidyaq. (Aware of how loaded certain ethno-linguistic designations have become, especially in the maelstrom of competing nationalisms in the Middle East, Makdisi points out that “[a]lthough the American missionaries from the outset identified him as an ‘Arab,’ As’ad Shidyaq was not properly speaking an Arab in any nationalist or racialist sense.”)
The Maronites, an Eastern Catholic sect whose members had come to be concentrated in Mount Lebanon, had their own rigidly ideological view of their role and mission in history, much of it revolving around a “myth of perpetual fidelity to the Roman Catholic orthodoxy.” The almost inevitable clash took a turn for the worse when, in 1826, the patriarch decided to imprison and torture Shidyaq, who refused to renounce his new Protestant faith. Shidyaq, born in 1798, would die in captivity circa 1830.
There are a couple of troubling aspects to Makdisi’s analysis of the missionary enterprise. Unfortunately, missionary attitudes occupy him unduly—so much so, that he undermines his own criticism of those missionaries ignorant of Islam and the culture of Levantine Arabs. For example, Jonas King, who by Makdisi’s own admission mastered Arabic and became “immersed in local customs and manners, in dress, and in habit,” nevertheless draws the author’s ire for his supercilious attitude to local culture. This raises the disturbing possibility that, however important Makdisi considers hard knowledge of Levantine Arab culture and Islam, he attaches even greater importance to affinity for them.
Separately, Makdisi seems to think that because pre-19th-century conflict in Mount Lebanon—by his own account violent and incessant—was not sectarian in nature, the subsequent coalescence of a Druze-Maronite rivalry represents a major social deterioration. (The Druze are an offshoot of Ismaili Shiite Islam.) And yet of that Druze-Maronite conflict and anti-Christian violence in Mount Lebanon and beyond, his assessment involves a measure of prevarication. Grappling with the indiscriminate slaughter of Maronite and other Christian civilians by Druze combatants in the Druze-Maronite war of 1860, all Makdisi can come up with is a feeble reiteration of a Druze-friendly missionary couple’s question as to what the reaction of indignant Western Christians would have been had the Maronites massacred the Druze. But the point is that the Maronites did not massacre the Druze—even though they might well have done so had they had the chance—and that the Druze committed inexcusable slaughter on a wide scale. Of the subsequent but largely unrelated massacre by Muslim mobs of one-quarter of the Christian population of Damascus, the author fails to register the uncomfortable fact that Muslim resentment of non-Muslims had been simmering since the 1856 Hatt-i Hümayun (Imperial Edict)—very briefly discussed elsewhere by Makdisi—in which the Ottoman sultan proclaimed, among other things, the equality of all his subjects regardless of religious affiliation.
Yet Makdisi excels when examining the Shidyaq affair. In particular, he shows how the framing of Shidyaq’s story by American biographers changed markedly after the Druze-Maronite war of 1860. The initial narrative of Shidyaq’s travails had taken shape even before his reported death in 1830. He was touted by missionaries who knew him, as well as the ABCFM that sent them to the Levant, as a martyr at the hands of a corrupt and unchristian Maronite patriarch, who represented Roman Catholic deceit and—to a lesser extent—Oriental decadence. For all their feelings of cultural superiority, the missionaries fashioned a narrative that focused on evangelism and personal redemption through conversion, situating the Shidyaq affair “within an established hagiographic tradition that dictated formulaic roles for Catholic persecutor and Protestant martyr.”
But following the war of 1860 and the massacres in Damascus, the exemplary story of Shidyaq, which had already begun to alter in the telling, assumed an almost completely different thrust. From an evangelical tale of saving souls it became that of a mission civilisatrice—with nationalist and even racist overtones—in which enlightened American men and women delivered the Orient from ignorance, fanaticism, and violence. Makdisi attributes this sense of triumphalism to the aftermath of the war, which saw a chastened Ottoman Empire shrink before robust Western intervention, even as it tried to allay its critics by punishing Druze in Mount Lebanon and Muslims in Damascus
The author instructively contrasts the missionaries during this period with their predecessors. For one thing, millennialism no longer colored their outlook. But also, they had come to view Islam differently. In his Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), one of the works inspiring the early crop of missionaries, the Puritan historian Cotton Mather boasted of John Eliot, who had conducted missionary work among American Indians in the 17th century: “Our Eliot was no Mahometan.” The reference was to the Islamic societal ideal, wherein those non-Muslim communities classified as “people of the book” are tolerated in exchange for their recognition of Muslim supremacy and their acceptance of various social disadvantages. The earliest American missionaries to the Levant, who arrived in 1820, shared Mather’s disdain for “mingled” societies. A few decades later, however, American missionaries—appalled at Druze massacres of Maronites in Mount Lebanon and Muslim massacres of Christians in Damascus—were lamenting the intolerance of Islam and Muslims, whom they claimed could not peacefully coexist with others.
Fascinatingly, Makdisi shows how the missionaries during this period also began to idealize America. Their predecessors were pained by certain of the many still-fresh excesses whites had committed against Indians back home, but this newer crop of missionaries rarely recalled those events. More shockingly, they seemed oblivious to the contemporary ills of America, including continued discrimination against Indians, enslavement of blacks, and—from 1861 until 1865—an exceptionally violent civil war. For them, violence and oppression were the exclusive preserve of the Islamic Orient. The story of As’ad Shidyaq became less about Christian evangelism than about a civilizing mission, and less about Maronite Catholic than Muslim fanaticism.
Yet there is an ironic twist to this transformation, one which Makdisi fails to note, probably due to his ever-present concern with offensive missionary attitudes. He shows how, following the war of 1860, increased Western interest in Beirut and Mount Lebanon, together with a renewed sense of purpose among American missionaries, led to the establishment of American cultural and educational institutions (the Syrian Protestant College—renamed the American University of Beirut in 1920—opened in 1866). But he remains so focused on the missionaries’ ethno-nationalist biases—which spawned the creation of a two-tiered Protestant community of Americans and locals, a system institutionalized in the Syrian Protestant College—that he misses the salient fact that these later missionaries, in contrast to their less bigoted predecessors, contributed tangible benefits to the community in which they lived. Unlike the early missionaries, who endeavored only to win souls, these newer missionaries opened schools that taught secular subjects and foreign languages, even if the emphasis remained on religion, and scientific theories—such as those of Darwin—were shunned. Significantly, their belief in the backwardness of the region and its people found a ready echo among many Christians and Muslims in Lebanon and beyond, who felt spurred to establish their own schools and educate members of their sects in modern subjects.
The final part of the book, in which Makdisi turns to a man who gained much from American missions in the Levant but also transcended them, is the finest. While Makdisi’s earlier juxtaposition of very different American Protestant and Lebanese Maronite accounts of history, and his conception of American missionary activity in the Levant as a continuation of the effort to convert American Indians, contribute greatly to his study’s historicity and at times prove ingenious, arguably the most lasting impression left on readers will be the author’s insightful treatment of Butrus Bustani (1819-1883), like Shidyaq a Maronite who converted to Protestantism under the auspices of the missionaries. In Makdisi’s hands, Bustani emerges as a bona-fide intellectual with a discriminating eye, a quality which led him to cull from both his American missionary tutors and his Ottoman environment those cultural and educational features he considered worth preserving, and synthesize them into a new conception of state and citizen superseding the sectarianism that caused the bloodshed of 1860. Makdisi’s account is all the more significant because, in the highly politicized realm of Arabic-language historiography, Bustani is often portrayed as a proto-Arab or Syrian nationalist and subsumed within a larger ideological discourse.
Makdisi demonstrates how Bustani “first vindicated As’ad Shidyaq and advocated a liberal vision of coexistence as a modern way of life—akin to what is called ‘multiculturalism’ in America today.” From the missionaries, Bustani adopted the idea of freedom of conscience as well as important aspects of modern education and technology. And from his Ottoman Arab environment, he embraced an uneasy history of sectarian coexistence and a more recent imperial recognition of the equality of all subjects. Crucially, Bustani felt that he was taking his cue from Shidyaq, and in his short biography of the man, he departed from American missionary themes. “The true significance of Bustani’s [biography of Shidyaq],” explains Makdisi, “was therefore not its idealization of the Protestant martyr but the deliberate manner in which Bustani used the story of As’ad to evoke an unprecedented ecumenism, and later a new liberal pluralism as intolerable to American missionaries as it was to the Maronite Church.”
Indeed, Bustani’s ideas put him at loggerheads with most American missionaries, his erstwhile teachers. Not only did he criticize them in writing both for their condescending attitudes toward natives and their narrowly focused schools, but he established his own school, which turned out to be entirely unique, and which the missionaries attempted to undermine. In 1863, Bustani inaugurated the “National School,” which taught secular subjects and offered separate religious courses for students of different religions, but which also focused on inculcating in its charges a sense of secular (Ottoman) patriotism and playing down religious differences through an emphasis on moderation. This, explains Makdisi, in a time when “[s]elf-consciously Muslim reformers and the Maronite, Greek Catholic, and Orthodox churches could only propose modern projects that affirmed religious difference, and hence opened parochial schools to rival those of the missionaries but not, in any secular sense, to supersede them.”
Aside from a gentle but repeated implication that melding American and Arab views is admirable by mere virtue of being a bridge-building enterprise, a rather idealistic notion to which Makdisi apparently adheres over and above the sometimes fruitful intellectual outcome of such a venture, his treatment of Bustani suffers from only one partial oversight. Makdisi does not quite give Western imperial pressure on the Ottoman Empire its due, especially when it comes to the issue of Ottoman social reform. To be sure, he acknowledges the extent to which Bustani benefited from a serendipitous confluence of historical events—principally the two broad currents of Western missionary activity and Ottoman modernization—that created new cultural spaces for Ottoman subjects. Unlike Shidyaq, Bustani did not have to worry about persecution by the Maronite Church, for in 1850 Protestants were accorded official status in the Empire. And unlike earlier converts, he was not treated with suspicion by the Ottoman authorities, who honored him for his educational work, which they saw—correctly but somewhat simplistically—as promoting Ottoman patriotism. But Ottoman modernization and reform—particularly as embodied in the Tanzimat, a series of legal and other measures beginning with a decree in 1839 paving the way for full equality between Muslims and non-Muslims, and leading up to the Empire’s (short-lived) transformation into a constitutional monarchy in 1876—were undertaken both at the behest of encroaching Western powers and in reaction to their encroachment.
Indeed, Western imperial pressure played a major role in prompting the Sublime Porte to emancipate recognized religious minorities and accord recognition to new minorities, such as Protestants, which had been created by Western missionaries. (The Hatt-i Hümayun of 1856, proclaiming the equality of Ottoman subjects irrespective of religious creed, was extracted from the sultan by the British and French in return for their having helped the Ottomans defeat the Russians in the Crimean war of 1853-1856.) This newfound emphasis on religious equality, in turn, created a space through which Bustani ensured that what would otherwise have remained a conversation between Christians—or, even more restrictively, members of the tiny Protestant community—became a much wider intellectual and even social project. Without Western pressure (which at times assumed the form of direct intervention), these developments would not have been possible, and Bustani, far from being honored by the Ottoman Empire, would have been at best marginalized and at worst persecuted.
Fortunately, unlike Bustani’s treatment of Shidyaq, which is original in many ways but which Makdisi acknowledges is hagiographic, Makdisi conjures a nuanced picture of his subject. He points out that Bustani adopted the missionaries’ designations of certain peoples as civilized and others as barbaric (situating the “Syrians” in between) but notes that, “for Bustani, such descriptions were literary devices to help clarify an Arab predicament, not discourses rooted in the experience and practice of racial discrimination and domination.” And he admits that Bustani espoused the missionaries’ somewhat patronizing view of women and their role, but reminds readers that Bustani’s ideas regarding women’s education were nevertheless pioneering, and predated the work of Egyptian (male Muslim) feminist Qasim Amin on the subject by half a century.
Yet far more important than these mild criticisms is Makdisi’s acknowledgment, alongside his praise, of the limitations of Bustani’s example. Makdisi holds aloft Bustani’s liberalism as worthy of emulation in a region characterized by ideological narratives prioritizing the collective over the individual and encouraging hostility toward other collectives. Crucially, however, he does not endorse Bustani’s deliberate forgetfulness when it comes to violent and ugly episodes in the recent or distant past, a strategy adopted by many a nationalist historian in the Arab world. This is arguably the most powerful message of Artillery of Heaven. A political outlook, however noble, must not be allowed to justify ignoring or distorting history.
Rayyan Al-Shawaf is a writer and book critic in Beirut, Lebanon.
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