Read Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East By Ussama Makdisi Full Books Online in HD Quality

The complex relationship between America and the Arab world goes back further than most people realize. In Artillery of Heaven, Ussama Makdisi presents a foundational American encounter with the Arab world that occurred in the nineteenth century, shortly after the arrival of the first American Protestant missionaries in the Middle East. He tells the dramatic tale of the conversion and death of As'ad Shidyaq, the earliest Arab convert to American Protestantism. The struggle over this man's body and soul--and over how his story might be told--changed the actors and cultures on both sides.

In the unfamiliar, multireligious landscape of the Middle East, American missionaries at first conflated Arabs with Native Americans and American culture with an uncompromising evangelical Christianity. In turn, their Christian and Muslim opponents in the Ottoman Empire condemned the missionaries as malevolent intruders. Yet during the ensuing confrontation within and across cultures an unanticipated spirit of toleration was born that cannot be credited to either Americans or Arabs alone. Makdisi provides a genuinely transnational narrative for this new, liberal awakening in the Middle East, and the challenges that beset it.

By exploring missed opportunities for cultural understanding, by retrieving unused historical evidence, and by juxtaposing for the first time Arab perspectives and archives with American ones, this book counters a notion of an inevitable clash of civilizations and thus reshapes our view of the history of America in the Arab world.

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East

Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East

More Books

The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917–2017

Rashid Khalidi

Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History

Michel-Rolph Trouillot

The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller

Carlo Ginzburg

السعي للعدالة: الطب والفقه والسياسة في مصر الحديثة

Khaled Fahmy

Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Cultural Memory in the Present)

Talal Asad

Genetic Crossroads: The Middle East and the Science of Human Heredity

Elise K. Burton

لماذا تأخر المسلمون ولماذا تقدم غيرهم؟

شكيب أرسلان

Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798 -1939

Albert Hourani

Orientalism

Edward W. Said

Modern History of Lebanon

Kamal Salibi

The Wretched of the Earth

Frantz Fanon

Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality

Eric J. Hobsbawm