Scholarship on Anglo-American missionaries in al-Mashreq is abundant but often focused on ecclesiastical and educational efforts during the long nineteenth century. This paper expands scholarship on missions in al-Mashreq in terms of period and institutional focus. It considers the evolution of Anglo-American missions after 1950, concentrating on medicine as the means of mission encounter. I approach the topic with a micro-history of Al Ahali Arab Hospital (formerly Gaza Baptist Hospital) in Gaza City. The Church Missionary Society (CMS) founded the hospital in 1882 and ran it until 1949 when it became financially untenable. Unlike other CMS medical missions in al-Mashreq, this hospital was purchased by the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention (FMB) who ran the hospital from 1954 until 1981. The FMB missionaries transformed the hospital into a means for direct proselytism, which they touted over the limited proselytism of the hospital under the CMS. How did the FMB missionaries adapt and sustain the hospital despite their strong emphasis on proselytism? This paper argues that the FMB missionaries were able to maintain their medical mission in Gaza for three reasons: 1) the hospital received significant financial support from the newly formed United Nations Relief and Works Agency, 2) it specialized in obstetric and pediatric care, and 3) it maneuvered political turmoil and appealed to authority when necessary. To make this argument, I critically evaluate mission records and missionary accounts found in the archives of the FMB and CMS. These accounts include both English and Arabic language material written by the doctors, nurses, and administrators of the hospital. I will pair my critical evaluation of these accounts with a comparative analysis of other medical missions in Palestine. This paper intends to call attention to the colonial legacy of missions and medicine in al-Mashreq.

F?m Is?if?n?s wrote the first-two known Egyptian Evangelical books to defend and define his conversion and that of his community in 1867-8. Is?if?n?s was born into a Coptic Orthodox family from Q?s, Qin? (South Egypt), but later became an Evangelical. In the 1860s, he and some other villagers formed the Q?s Evangelical Church, and they encountered resistance from the Coptic Orthodox Patriarch and priests, and the local government in 1867-8. Therefore, Is?if?n?s wrote two works --al-Rafsh al-Q???, and al-’I‘tr?f b?-?urr?yat al-im?n-- to explain the beliefs and practices of his community. These writings did not only reach the Coptic Orthodox leaders, but also became popular among Evangelicals and potential converts. His writings expressed and impacted the early indigenous Evangelical identity. What are the characteristics of Is?if?n?s’ conversion and how did it enmesh with powers of the Egyptian state, the Orthodox Church, and the American Mission? This study will analyze the writings of Is?if?n?s in order to understand his conversion and that of his community, as well as its impact on the socioreligious powers in 1867-8. Is?if?n?s’ books explore what I call a “partial conversion” which would express his own apologetic, realistic, and compromising theological opinion. His writings also negotiated his community agency among different state-church powers. Is?if?n?s’ works could help us to understand the role of the South Egyptian Evangelical laity in forming their history, identity, and their own agency in the face of the Orthodox Church, the American Mission, and the Egyptian state. This research will benefit from recent scholarly developments in the historical study of the Egyptian Christian communities of the 19th and 20th centuries. Several scholars, such as Heather Sharkey, Paul Sedra, and Beth Baron have enriched the scholarship of American-European missions and Egyptian Christianity. They have highlighted the need for the re-reading of the history of Christianity and its context in distinctive ways. Moreover, they have investigated indigenous sources, marginalized groups, social-political power, and conversion processes. My analysis will build on these studies, and present a new viewpoint about the Egyptian Evangelical thoughts and the American-European impact. It will examine the writings of indigenous and marginalized groups which have not yet been studied. Although this study will mainly focus on the writings of Is?if?n?s to understand his and his community’s partial Evangelical conversion, it will also use Egyptian and American-European primary and secondary sources to comprehend the conversion process and the question of power dynamics.

American Protestant missionaries had tremendous success in the entire Ottoman domains in the 19th century (especially in the last quarter of it) and left a remarkable collection of primary sources. Despite many studies done by a multitude of scholars in different fields, there is a need for in-depth studies of the women missionaries in the Near East missions. This paper will look closely into the work of a select group of women missionaries who worked in the medical field in the Ottoman Empire towards the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Women missionaries developed an empathetic view of their host countries compared to their male counterparts and worked to empower local women: educating them in women’s colleges in the cities, and in rural places training them in vocational schools. They also deeply influenced the development of modern health care in host countries. Even though the American missionaries were particularly successful among the Orthodox and Armenian Christian communities in the empire, many born-Muslim women were matriculated in the various schools in the empire and received care in the mission hospitals. The studies on the women missionaries of the Near East Mission are still few and far between. A recent and noteworthy exception (and contribution to this field) came from Barbara Reeves-Ellington in her book Domestic Frontiers: Gender, Reform, and American Interventions in the Ottoman Balkans and the Near East (2013). The recent scholarship on ABCFM displays that American missionaries were far from a monolith particularly as far as the gender aspect is concerned. Women missionaries were working in hospitals providing care in difficult conditions. Unlike their male counterparts, they were entering easily into the female space in a society in which male and female segregation was the norm not only among the Muslim subjects of the empire but also among the Armenian and Greek subjects. This way, they were also generating unique insights into the Ottoman society and culture, which would otherwise may not possible by the male missionaries to generate. Based on ABCFM archives housed in Harvard University’s Houghton Library, Andover-Harvard Theological library, and the Mary I. Ward Papers and Grace H. Knapp Papers, housed in Mount Holyoke College Archives, this paper will investigate the role women missionaries played particularly in the medical field in the late Ottoman Empire.

The Village Welfare Service (V.W.S.), a student and faculty volunteer organization based at the American University of Beirut (A.U.B.) and the American Junior College for Women, held summer camps in rural areas in Syria and Lebanon in the nineteen thirties and forties. The camps’ “mission of the educated youth to the fellah” was to improve village life while instilling a service ethic in student volunteers. Archival evidence indicates that the summer camps emerged from a shared desire among American missionaries, faculty members, and student volunteers to formulate a program of development and education appropriate to rural life that would stem migration and deracination among students and peasants alike. The V.W.S. emphasized contact between volunteers and villagers in the belief that, by exchanging the former’s expertise and enthusiasm for the latter’s folk values and attachment to the land, both groups would lead more hygienic, ordered, and culturally authentic lives. Daily life in the V.W.S. summer camps was organized to produce patriotic attitudes among youth by uniting young people of both genders and different sects in a common project. The camps also facilitated interactions with shaykhs and peasants that seemed to confirm the notion that youth should shoulder the burden of national progress. At the same time, anxieties about the unavoidable roles of leisure and amateurism in the practice of the camps plagued the organization. Such tensions in the formulation of the V.W.S. project, along with the outbreak of the Second World War, hindered the realization of a village welfare “movement” led by educated youth as envisioned in the mid-thirties. While ostensibly apolitical, the V.W.S.’s effort to situate youth in national time and space by bringing them into rural areas appealed to patriotic sentiments among students and young professionals. The V.W.S. sought to put into practice a patriotic ideal of youth that resonated with the broader nationalist zeitgeist exemplified in Sati’ al-Husri’s 1935 pronouncement that “the coming age will be the age of youth.” Juxtaposing the V.W.S. summer camps with the contemporary emphasis on a politically transformative youth, this paper argues that nationalist youth vanguardism emerged from a confluence of multiple historical projects that each held young people to be the key to an authentic modernity in the interwar Arab Middle East.