Research on the encounter between Protestant missionaries and the Ottoman state has depicted it as a clash between intractable ideologies. Foreign missionaries caused domestic instability by empowering Ottoman Christians at a time when nationalist movements among non-Muslims threatened to break apart the Empire, and missionaries were the largest source of information to the Western world concerning such events as the 1896 Armenian massacres. Rather than explain the complex political realities of multi-confessional Anatolia, missionaries framed such events as the brutal Muslim persecution of Christians. Overall, they failed to make Christian converts and only succeeded in leaving behind an ideological “Cold War” between different religious groups. Yet historians' emphasis on mutual antipathy is the result of an over-reliance on Ottoman state sources that promoted “orthodox” Sunni Hanefi Islam during the Hamidian period (1876-1909). The state's rhetoric of sectarianism, which labeled Christians and other Muslim confessional groups as potentially seditious, was used to describe policies of state legitimation by fashioning Sultan Abdülhamid II as the champion of Islam, not to accurately describe alternate belief systems. Recently, historians such as Ussama Makdisi have broken away from this model to focus on Ottoman figures who culturally and religiously influenced, and in turn were influenced by, Protestant missionaries. I intend to further this line of research and examine how religious dialectics could even occur in acts of ostensible Islamic piety. For example, Muslim literati produced many anti-Christian religious polemics in the late Ottoman period, but even though the purpose of their endeavor was to defend Islam, these authors quoted freely from Western European biblical scholars. In particular they made use of developments within textual and historical criticism that questioned the doctrines of the Incarnation, the resurrection, and biblical inerrancy.To examine this counter-intuitive phenomenon, I will analyze the polemics of well-known Ottoman authors, particularly Ahmet Mithat Efendi and Fatma Aliye, and explore their appropriation of European scholarship to defend Islam. Muslim intellectuals and American missionaries engaged in a mutually intelligible debate in which both sides shared the same intellectual traditions and schema of religious truth. They both rooted their arguments in Enlightenment philosophy and modernity. The late Ottoman Muslim polemical methodology came from Enlightenment-inspired European biblical criticism, and the Protestant methodology was an Enlightenment-inspired post-millennial eschatology. This was at a time when both groups purportedly were only at loggerheads. Instead, I will show their religious ideas were also shared and discussed.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the heyday of anti-Mormon melodramas across the U.S. In the diverse body of imagery attached to the Mormons in the American mainstream culture, the depiction of the Mormons as (white) Turks has contextualized some interesting racial and religious constructs of knowledge, which has also received some scholarly attention in recent years (such as M. S. Jones, Performing American Identity, 2009). Yet, the actual Mormon presence in the realms of the Ottoman Sultan has rarely been mentioned, if ever at all, in such popular depictions or has rarely been discussed in monographs that examine the missionary work in the Ottoman Empire. While the Mormon missionary work in the Middle East was limited in scope, focusing on the conversion of the Ottoman Armenians, their efforts in proselytizing the Ottoman subjects open up a set of interesting questions concerning the interactions between the Protestant missionaries and the Mormons, between the Ottoman state and the Mormon missionaries, and between the American diplomatic missions and their attitudes towards the Mormons in the field. To add one more line of complexity to the missionary encounters in the Middle East, this paper will examine the beginnings and subsequent phases of the Mormon mission to the Ottoman Empire by utilizing the archival records from the Ottoman Archives of the Office of the Prime Ministry in Istanbul, Turkey, the local files of the American consulates from the National Archives, Washington D.C., as well as the wide-ranging collections from the Church History Library and Archives in Salt Lake City, UT, the Marriott Library of University of Utah, and the Harold B. Lee Library of Brigham Young University.

This paper explores Qajar imperial identity in conjunction with extraterritoriality during the late nineteenth century. By analyzing what it means to be a Qajar subject, I focus on the idea of “subjecthood,” the state of being a subject, and its significance in an era prior to nation-states and formalized citizenship. Through the framework of subjecthood, I challenge the weak imagery surrounding the Qajar government and show the Qajar extension of power outside its borders. During the mid-nineteenth century, the Qajar and Ottoman empires signed multiple treaties conceding legal rights over their respective subjects. By doing so, the Qajar Empire maintained sovereignty over its subjects as they traveled to or even lived within the Ottoman Empire. These treaties enabled the Qajar Empire to extend its influence beyond its borders and lobby for both Qajar subjects and native Shi’i communities in Ottoman territory. It is evident from the capitulations made between empires that the protection of the subjects had become a pertinent issue during this era. Discussion of the topic, however, remains overwhelmingly neglected in the existing scholarship. Although previous scholars have alluded to extraterritoriality in their research, the discourse on subjecthood and identity beyond an empire’s borders has been ignored in the Middle Eastern context. In this study, I argue that although Qajar subjects had always travelled to the Ottoman Empire for religious or economic reasons, the Treaties of Erzurum in 1828 and 1848 enabled the growth of these communities by legally allowing the Qajar government to exercise sovereign rights over them. By doing so, subjecthood was no longer determined by location alone, but rather dependent on imperial treaties and definitions. This paper explores the implications of the Treaties of Erzurum for imperial-subject relations during the late nineteenth century. The examination of Qajar government documents, Persian travelogues and newspapers reveals a complicated relationship between the Qajars and three different groups in the Ottoman Empire: Qajar travelers, expatriate communities, and Iraqi Shi’i communities. Because the Qajars defined themselves as the protector of Shi’is, they treated Ottoman Shi’is much like their own subjects despite lacking any formal ties to the Qajar lands. In this way, imperial identity extended beyond the designated Qajar borders and reached different regions of the Ottoman Empire. By addressing various aspects of government-subject relations, this paper stresses the importance of extraterritoriality in foreign affairs and its significance for imperial identity, propaganda, and later constructions of citizenship.