Artillery of heaven
Subtitle: American missionaries and the failed conversion of the Middle East
By: Ussama Makdisi
Series: The United States in the world
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Ithaca
Language: eng
Number of pages: 262
ISBN-13: 9780801446214
Subjects: Shidyāq, Asʻad, -- 1798-1830; American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions; Missions, American -- Lebanon -- History -- 19th century; Missions, American -- Middle East -- History -- 19th century; Religious pluralism -- Middle East -- History -- 19th century; Maronites -- Lebanon -- History -- 19th century; Christianity and other religions -- Islam; Islam -- Relations -- Christianity
Description: "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."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [221]-251) and index
Table of contents: title: Mather's America; title: "The grammar of heresy" : coexistence in an Ottoman Arab world; title: The flying of time; title: The artillery of heaven; title: An Arab puritan; title: The apotheosis of American exceptionalism; title: The vindication of Asʻad Shidyaq