Conflict, Conquest, and Conversion: Two Thousand Years of Christian Missions in the Middle East. By Eleanor H. Tejirian and Reeva Spector Simon. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. 280 pp. $35.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Conflict, Conquest, and Conversion: Two Thousand Years of Christian Missions in the Middle East . By Eleanor H. Tejirian and Reeva Spector Simon . New York : Columbia University Press , 2012. 280 pp. $35.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesThis survey joins an ever-increasing number of studies on Christian Missions in the Middle East. Western Catholic and Protestant missions have been the object of much scrutiny and curiosity, especially after the rise of the "Orientalism" and "Clash of Civilizations" paradigms that have been raised by Middle Eastern scholars in the last quarter of the twentieth century. With several U.S. led invasions of Iraq, the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and with the seismic shifts taking place in nationalist identities due to the Arab Spring, studies of such intercultural and interreligious engagements will only increase. This work is part of a larger and longer term project by Eleanor Tejirian and Reeva Spector Simon on the study of Western interaction with the Middle East. Having held several international conferences in the area of Middle East Studies, these two scholars published the results of a pre-9/11 and pre-2003 Iraqi Invasion conference titled Altruism and Imperialism: Western Cultural and Religious Missions in the Middle East by Columbia University Press in 2002.While previous studies have undertaken specific tasks of considering particular mission agencies, areas or events, Conflict, Conquest, and Conversion sets out to analyze the Middle East as the place of origin for all Christian mission. It attempts to examine the Middle East as an entity in and of itself, as the place where Christianity was born, settled, expanded out of, returned to and clashed with the indigenous peoples. The authors' intentions are to provide an overarching "historical and religious context" of the region. As Tejirian and Simon indicate, the survey is "to provide a benchmark narrative that tells the story of Christian missions to the Middle East from the beginning of Christianity to the present" (x-xi). A major emphasis of this narrative provides particular attention to the social and political constructs from which and into which Christian missionaries engaged.The book is divided into nine very manageable chapters laid out in a historical progression. Chapter 1 lays the foundation for the "First Thousand Years" of Christianity, noting its origin as a Middle Eastern religion. The mediaeval period is taken up in chapters 2 and 3 where the focus is primarily upon Latin Christian mission and culture. Western Protestant missions take up the lion's share of the book, comprising chapters 4-7. Significant attention is given to the cultural projects of Western Protestant mission agencies. Chapters 8 and 9 conclude with the role of Western mission after the great World Wars and the rise of nationalism. The attention to the impact of the cultural issues of Western missions in the midst of dramatic political changes is not new to this field but is an important focus of this work and is done well.Surveys are always difficult projects. To provide a compelling narrative while maintaining faithfulness to complex issues is never easy. A work of this design would have better served its readers in several ways. First, while the authors are to be commended for their intention to provide a broader social, religious, and political context of missions in the Middle East, the 207 pages of content do not do justice to the topic. This of course is an economic issue, but certainly a survey of two thousand years deserves more pages. Pages are jam packed with terms, ideas, and movements that necessarily rush along. In some cases definitions are not clearly given.Second, given the broad landscape of history and issues covered in this survey, using a variety of voices by different authors might have helped to underline the importance, complexity, and care with which a topic of this magnitude calls. …