American Ottomans: Protestant Missionaries in an Islamic Empire’s Service, 1820–1919^*

Extract

This essay explores a complex, changing encounter between the Ottoman state and an influential community of American Congregationalist and Presbyterian missionaries who worked in Syria over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹ The missionaries’ own accounts present the history of their relationship with the world’s most powerful Islamic empire, where they lived and worked, as a saga of struggle and unmitigated hostility. In 1921, Charles Dana, a managerial missionary who took care of finances for the American Mission Press in Beirut, recapitulated decades of his colleagues’ anti-Ottoman rhetoric when he wrote that “The American Press has in its century of service been forced to fight its way up through countless discouraging reverses, through wars, massacres, pestilence, and famine, and the vicissitudes of the Turkish Empire. Its buildings and grounds have … been the only shelter for the thousands of refugees, fleeing from the fire and sword of the despotic Turk.”² His phrases echo a century of American Protestant missionaries’ writings about their work under Ottoman rule.³