Starting with their arrival in1820’s, the restriction of religious liberties in the Ottoman Empire was the main concern for the American and British missionaries who were the most widely organized proselytizing group in the empire. On the one hand, the missionaries were 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 is based on Islamic irtidad (apostasy) principle, according to which blasphemy and renouncing the faith of Islam are 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- 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 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.

American missionaries have long been the missing link in the study of the late Ottoman era despite the fact that they left their enduring mark in American conceptions of the period. From the landing of the first American Protestant missionaries on the Ottoman Empire, as a matter of fact on the Middle East, in early 1820, until the outbreak of the First World War, American missionaries occupied the increasing attention of the Ottoman bureaucracy in domestic and foreign affairs while the mission work in the Ottoman Empire established the largest investment of the American Board globally, even above China and India, before the war. The bulk of the correspondence of the Ottoman Foreign Affairs Ministry for the time period in question was with the United States and this was chiefly concerned about the American mission schools. Therefore, this paper seeks to examine the encounter between the Ottoman officialdom and the American Protestant missionaries primarily operating under the American Board in Ottoman Turkey during the regimes of Abdulhamid II and the Unionists respectively in 1876-1914 and pursues a two-fold aim. First, it sheds light on the activities of the American Board, mainly the schools, and addresses the concerns and reactions of the Ottoman central and provincial authorities to American missionaries and their establishments. The study shows that Ottomans endeavored to counter the missionaries via a set of prohibitive and punitive legal acts and regulations and to compete with their enterprise via a new line of programs and institutions such as schools. Second, the paper demonstrates how the missionaries were instrumental in the orientation of the American foreign policy towards the Ottomans and attests that support of the American government for the mission work in Ottoman lands were explicit and forceful even to the extent of sending war vessels to the Ottoman ports six times under three different Presidents in a ten-year period. The study draws archival materials largely from the Prime Ministry’s Archives in Istanbul and from the U.S. Department of State collections, the Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary, and the Houghton Library in Harvard University. The paper concludes that the very agenda of the missionaries, namely, to evangelize the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire, which remained dormant throughout the nineteenth century, resurfaced on the eve of the First World War given the drastic change in ethno-religious map of the Ottoman Empire in favor of Turks and Muslims.

In nineteenth-century colonial Algeria, access to political and legal rights was premised on both religion and sex; Muslim Algerians and Christian settlers were treated under two distinct legal systems, and in each, men and women possessed a differentiated set of rights. Conversion thus signified the passage from one cultural world to another, and with it, the crossing of the multiple social boundaries that made up the imperial world. This paper explores the case study of an Algerian convert to Christianity in an attempt to grasp the significance of conversion to questions of political status and gender. In Septembr of 1834, ‘Aisha Bint Mohammed showed up unannounced to the residence of the highest-ranking general in Algeria to ask to be converted to the Christian faith and to fall under the purview of the French legal system. When the general learned she was recently divorced from an abusive husband, he felt confident her embrace of the new faith would not compromise the patriarchal rights of her former spouse while it would, at the same time, place her under the more benevolent paternalism of the French. News of her conversion, however, provoked vivid reactions in local society, culminating with the resignation of the qadi, and sparking a political scandal among the French political class. Accusations that ‘Aisha is both mad and a woman of little virtue, evidence that she is having an affair with the domestic worker of the French police commissary, and finally indication that she has bribed the interpreter of the French general all complicate the plot, revealing intricate links between racial, gendered and political elements in the story of Aisha’s conversion. Based on the military archives located in Vincennes, my presentation will unpack Aisha’s story of conversion, seeking to understand how categories of religion, race and gender intersected in nineteenth-century colonial Algeria to create discourses of exclusion, but discourses that if subtly reworked could also be manipulated by those such as Aisha who stood on the lower rung of society. In addition, I argue that French attempts to intervene on behalf of a Muslim woman (the “rescue” motif) was central to constructions of colonial masculinity. I argue that conversion in early colonial Algeria was a deeply political act that threatened to upset existing social distinctions.