Politics of Education and Conversion: American Protestant Missions in the Near East (1856-1932)
Panel 048, 2009 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, November 22 at 11:00 am
Panel Description
From the late Ottoman Empire to the first decade of the Turkish Republic, American Protestant missionaries made their presence deeply felt in the lives of Muslim subjects and Christian minorities. In the 19th and early 20th centuries these missionaries engaged in various forms of proselytizing and founded many religious and educational institutions. The responses of the indigenous Muslim and Christians peoples, and of the Ottoman officials, to those missionary programs remain neglected chapters in current historical research on the Near East. Similarly understudied are the transformations that the American missions/missionaries underwent vis-à-vis politico-cultural changes occurring at home and in these lands.
By the advent of the new Turkish state, the nature of American missions had become transformed. As organizations like the ABCFM increasingly emphasized "civilization" and "modernization" over traditional evangelization in conformity to the Republic's new policies, what began as responses to Western social gospel ideologies and non-denominationalism in the United States became a reinforcing process of secularization in Near East missions. In other words, leaders of the American missionary movement had been changed by their experiences in the Ottoman Empire and new Republic: they were reacting to local/Muslim/nationalist prerogatives and power, instead of the other way around.
Our panel explores how these processes and actors interacted with one another by crisscrossing discursive boundaries drawn along continents, civilizations, religions, and empires/nation-states. It illustrates the phenomena described above on three levels: the agency that Muslim subjects exercised with regard to American missionaries; the actions and reactions of both the Porte and the Republic to the Protestants' presence; and the
transformation of individual missionaries and their enterprise as a result. This panel thus transcends two hegemonic and interrelated discourses. The first, a state-centered narrative, reduces the missions to an imperialist scheme that eventually disintegrated the empire. The second discourse prioritizes Eastern Christians’ relations with the missionaries and negates the zones of encounter, interaction, and negotiation between the missionaries, the Ottomans state, and/or Muslims. The result is that non-Muslims are singled out for their complicit connections with the imperialists while several nationalist paradigms are reified in an impoverished historical account. In contrast, each paper in this panel, by relying on archival research, emphasizes new aspects of the plurality of the actors, and the mutual, interactive but unequal nature of the politico-cultural transformations that shook both sides of the ocean through the missionary encounters at the crossroads of social gospel, imperialism, and modernizing state(s).
Non-denominationalism, the credo of the 19th century Congregationalist colleges established in the Ottoman Empire, is a little understood concept particularly when interpreted within a generic paradigm of conversion into Christianity or only against the background of the Ottoman religious categorizations regarding non-Muslims. In the absence of historical references to the debates of the time over the denominational nature of college education in New England, most of the extant literature on American missions in the Ottoman Empire reads this concept either as an early precursor of secularism or a
belated sign of ecumenical Christian brotherhood. Pursuing another track, this paper explores the mechanisms through which the crystallization of the denominational identities in New England in the 19th century informed the debates surrounding the establishment of American colleges in the Ottoman Empire and the self-presentation of these institutions to the local populations as ‘non-denominational’.
The paper first focuses on the internal debates of ABCFM, the American missionary institution which facilitated the global spread of a particularistic Congregationalist view on the relationship between education and religion in cooperation with the Presbyterians. And then, it examines to what degree
the missionaries stationed in the Ottoman Empire thought Bostonian views regarding denominationalism resonated with the problems they encountered in the field particularly when deployed within the context of the millet system. The wounds of the trauma surrounding the carving out of the Unitarian colleges out of the Congregationalist collegial map of Massachusetts, which was exacerbated by the subsequent struggle between the Presbyterians and Congregationalists over the control of the religious and educational field of New England are traced in the personal papers of both the missionaries who were involved in the debate in Boston and in charge of the foreign missions, and the missionaries who were instrumental in establishing American colleges in Constantinople and Beirut. The central argument derived from this contrapuntal reading of archival sources from both sides of the Atlantic is that the institutional stories of the colleges in the Middle East cannot be adequately written
unless we engage in an analysis of the involved actors’ actions in a manner that articulates the various cultural spaces they inhabited simultaneously although they may be oceans apart: their referential cultural spaces, their local, everyday cultural landscapes and the global field within which these geographically and culturally separate spheres relate to one another.
Since 1820’s the restriction of religious liberties in the Ottoman Empire has been a major concern for the American and British missionaries who were the most widely organized proselytizing group in the empire. On the one hand, the missionaries had been enduring difficulties and harassment at the hands of local Eastern churches; on the other, the major religious group was out of their reach due to strict prohibition of proselytization among Muslims. This prohibition was based on Islamic irtidad (apostasy) principle, according to which blasphemy and renouncing the faith of Islam were crimes condemned to capital punishment. Witnessing the consequences of interpretational slipperiness when an ex-Christian convert was executed under the charges of apostasy in 1844, the legendary British ambassador to Constantinople, Stratford Canning who saved the Ottoman armies an inevitable disgraceful loss to Russia, took charge in drafting another reform edict. Islahat Fermani of 1856 clearly sanctioned the freedom of conscience for all Ottoman subjects, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, annulled legal consequences of the Apostasy principle- i.e. executions, and opened the possibility of Protestant missionary work among Muslims which produced a number of converts throughout 19th century.
Utilizing the archival materials from Ottoman, British and several missionary collections, I intent to unravel cases of Muslim conversion into Protestantism in the post-1856 period. Arguing against the nationalist narratives that deny any peaceful interaction between missionaries and Muslim communities, first, I will demonstrate how orthodox Sunni Muslims also opted out of Islam in their intellectual search for the “Truth.” Second, in detailing their encounter with the missionaries, attempts for registration of the apostasy and the crack down in 1865 by the state officials; I shall argue that the Muslim apostasy stood at the intersection of the local and international politics and became a litmus test for the discrepancy between the Ottoman/Islamic praxis and the new civilizational standards imposed by Western powers. Going beyond their quantitative significance, every case of apostasy received enormous attention from the diplomatic circles and missionaries alike, which triggered an official anxiety, and turned apostates into a gaze and a threat to the raison d’état in the eyes of the Ottoman officials. Third, by illustrating the changes in policies over time from official indifference to the disappearances of the converts, I will also demonstrate how the Ottoman statecraft re-defined and revealed its power through inventing and carrying out extra-judicial measures in the absence of legal sanctions against apostates.
In 1932, the American Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry published a multi-volume report entitled Re-Thinking Missions, which called into question the purpose, quality, and methods of a century of predominantly Protestant Christian evangelization to the eastern and southern hemispheres of the world. James L. Barton, one of the leaders of that global evangelical effort, had already retired from his thirty-five years of service with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) three years earlier. What did this former Foreign Secretary think of the controversial report that criticized the work of denominational missions to which he had dedicated the better part of his life? The answer to that questions illuminates several common themes already raised in the proposed MESA 2009 panel, “Wars, Apostates, and Schools: Protestant Missions in the Ottoman Empire”: the relationship of international foreign policy and foreign missions, the relationship between the United States and the Near East in particular, and the secularization of American foreign missions over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
This paper argues that Barton’s career epitomizes the gradual secularization of American foreign missions advocated by Re-Thinking Missions as Protestantism increasingly fulfilled the mandates of reigning Social Gospel ideology through deeper cooperation with national and international agendas. Barton entered the foreign field at the age of thirty in the eastern Anatolian plains of the Ottoman Empire in 1885 as a conservative-leaning Quaker convert to Congregationalism. As a young recruit, he authored editorials against progressive theological doctrines and emphasized gospel priorities over civilizing projects. Nine years later he began his tenure as ABCFM Foreign Secretary, a position that provided him both access to successive American presidential administrations and the opportunity to influence their diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire (later, the Turkish Republic). As a result, Barton provided counsel on the United States’ neutrality toward the Ottoman Empire in World War 1, on the negotiations of the Versailles and Lausanne peace conferences, and on America’s eventual alliance with Turkey in the late 1920s. By the end of his career, and in a seeming about-face, Barton was writing books criticizing conservative denominational politics abroad and dedicating himself to economic development in war-ravaged Near East. In other words, the personal evolution in missionary philosophy and implementation that Barton experienced – an evolution that predated and even predicted the Hocking report – resulted from his witnessing the transformation of Ottoman imperial politics into Republican statecraft.
