How do we write a history of Christian missionaries in the late Ottoman Empire that takes human imperfection seriously? What do we learn about missionaries’ effects on the social fabric of the empire – by their actions and presence and the reactions to these – if we foreground emotion, contradiction, and misunderstanding? My paper seeks to explore these questions through the use of missionary records, memoirs, and Arabic journals and treatises. In particular, it utilizes the underused archival records and extensive correspondence of Alexander Watkins Terrell, the U.S. minister plenipotentiary in Istanbul from 1893-1897. Overall, the paper asks what it meant to try and live side-by-side. While older historiography has argued about nationalism, colonial resistance, or whether the missionaries were fundamentally imperialists, I argue for greater attention to the mutual conditionality of Ottoman-missionary interactions and the role of emotion. The largely American, Protestant missionary presence provoked a series of repeated policy and local responses from the Ottomans, which in turn elicited missionary replies. While social, foreign, political, cultural, and economic factors were important, emotions, especially wistful hopes, fear, anger, and frustration, played a profound role in shaping decisions and behavior. And while some interactions were certainly positive, the missionary presence within the Ottoman Empire grew increasingly problematic, especially during periods of social and political violence as in the 1860 Druze-Maronite conflict and the 1894-1896 Armenian terrors. Crucial to all of this was the mutual dependency of Ottoman-missionary behavior, each side giving greater significance to the other’s misdeeds than to good works and cooperation. Both sides had substantial and growing reservoirs throughout this period of real, plausible, and fictitious injustices to feed their fears and responses to each other. This in turn fed their responses, which tended to confirm their worst suspicions, thus having the opposite desired effect for the central Ottoman authorities of easing tensions and restoring social order. Certain regions fared better than others and the Ottomans continued to welcome aspects of missionary activity in education and medicine, but relations frayed more and more until 1914. While the 1850 creation of the Protestant millet had signaled a possible peaceful and stabilizing incorporation of Protestantism into Ottoman life, the subsequent events showed that the decisions and policies followed by the various parties, especially the Ottoman approach to religious liberty, undermined this prospect. Despite intentions, the Ottomans and missionaries both learned that a little tolerance, applied haphazardly, could be a terrible thing.

Despite of the fact, that the primary aim of any missionary activities is a religious one, they also play an important role in politics and ideology, form a way of thinking, determine society’s tastes, and influence its culture. In my presentation I describe the missionary role of Russian Orthodox Church in the general stream of European and American missionaries in Levant. I make the comparative analysis of their activities there, covering the period of the second half of the nineteenth - to early twentieth centuries. My research is focused on the work, which was done by Russian, Western European, and American missionaries for the development of education in Levant together with the formation of its ideology, and the reevaluation of the cultural heritage of the new Arabic intelligentsia. I pay special attention to the specifics of the Russian Orthodox Ecclesiastical Mission in the area and point out to its strongest and weakest sides. The theoretical and methodological base of my research is based (but not limited to) on the works of the following authors: Adams, al-Hajjaj, al-Fakhouri, al-Salibi, al-Khalidi, Almond, Azoury, Beliaev, Coleman, Cook, Cromer, Daniel, Deutsch, Farrouh, Frazee, Fortesque, Gibb, Grabill, Hopwood, Ivanov, Khouri, Khourany, Khalaf, Kirillina, Kotlov, Krachkovskij, Krymskij, Landa, Lavan, Lavreckij, Levin, Lerner, Lewis, Mahameed, Meyer, Petkovich, Pye, Rodionov, Taher, Tibawi, Shbaru, Zhuraviskij. I have also used the materials of discussions on the problems of civilizations and religious issues of several conferences, the speeches of political and social activists, autobiographies, memoirs (Naimy, Uspenskij, Khitrovo), notes and travel journals, together with the primary sources, such as Russian Imperial Orthodox Palestinian Society periodicals, and copies of historical documents (Andersen, Yakushev).

Global encounters through missionary engagement took a vital part in creating what came to be the foundation of American and European relations to the Middle East. Recent research still frames the impact of missionaries during that time as that of a simple transmission of Western identity concepts. It states that when religious conversion failed, the missionaries turned to an agenda of civilizing mission, forcibly and effectively applying a Western distinction of the religious and the secular onto the local societies. I want to challenge these views, arguing that the image and boundaries of a stable Western identity must be questioned. Local and foreign perspectives both changed in the process of communication and all sides contributed to generating the very meaning of religious and secular in a global discourse. At the time, global entanglement was nowhere more apparent than in the Western Anatolian port cities of Constantinople and Smyrna with their cosmopolitanism and illustrious international public from all social strata. There, missionary presence and identity proves to be even in the most basic aspect of the legitimation for their work eminently divergent, conflicting and precarious. I will draw on diverse missionary accounts as well as comparative Ottoman and Armenian sources to argue that missionary and local identities were in a complex process of change, shifting around often times conflicting ideas of a civilizational agenda vs. the search for primordial cultures, emerging (scientific) materialism vs. inwardness and the undecided question which kind of modernity is to be embraced. The paper reexamines these fundamental issues of missionary history in the given politically and ethnically specific, markedly non-colonial context. It evaluates how moral questions shaped the communication about religious and secular identities. Over time, these conflicting issues were drawn into the field of Western identity negotiation as well. The critique of civilization was aimed at the educational work of French or the political affiliations of German missionaries. Thus missionary rivalries also took part in an all sides negotiation of religious identity. This religious dimension of an entangled history defies the monodirectional paradigm. Its consideration can help to shed a new light on the topics of current identity formation, of the evaluation of public policy towards religious or secular interest or of the organization of pluralistic coexistence.

In December of 1841, the Coptic Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria elevated a monk by the name of Andra'us to serve as the new metropolitan for the archdiocese of al-Habashah (Ethiopia.) This was in keeping with a centuries-old convention whereby "Egyptian" church officials nominated Ethiopia's ecclesiastical hierarch from among a pool of "Egyptian" monks who inhabited the monastic settlements of the Eastern Desert. Andra'us, who was now to be known as "Abuna Salama II," would spend the next 25 years of his life attempting to navigate the intricacies of nineteenth century Ethiopian politics. His efforts were only further complicated by mounting tensions between the Egyptian and Ethiopian states, and the ever expanding influences of European powers in Northeast Africa. From his "modern" education in Church Missionary Society schools to his final years of imprisonment on charges of disloyalty to the Ethiopian kingdom, the life and career of Andra'us/Salama II offer a unique window into the renting changes taking place during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Drawing upon archival materials of the Church Missionary Society, in addition to Abuna Salama's official Ethiopian chronicle, official Coptic ecclesiastical documents, and other Arabic, European and Ethiopian sources, I will examine the early stages of a process that would ultimately lead to the sundering of the ancient bonds that had linked "Egyptian," "Ethiopian" and other Christians of the Nile Valley in shared communion. I will also explore the distinctive geography of Abuna Salama's "world," one that transcended not only modern national boundaries but also the sweeping "world regions" of Africa and the Middle East. In the course of this, I will argue that it is not possible to restore the integrity or to grasp the complexity of his biography without challenging and addressing a host of stubborn conceptual frames that have effectively dismembered it.