“Publishing” the Gospel, Reading the Nahda: Protestant Print Culture in Late Ottoman Syria

Chapter 2 turns to the American Mission Press in Beirut, which was a site of American-Syrian collaboration and a resource for Syrian Protestants to participate in the Arab cultural and literary renaissance. Locating the Nahda in Beirut within the context of broader nineteenth-century Ottoman reform movements, the chapter explores the socio-cultural contributions of Protestant men who wrote for the American Mission Press beginning in the 1870s. It demonstrates that these authors - including the nahdawi scholar Ibrahim al-Hurani - engaged in Nahda production not only through Arabic poetry, scientific studies, and other “secular” publications, but also in their writings on Islam and through press debates with Jesuit missionaries, Syrian Catholics, and Greek Orthodox leaders.

Introduction

This book picks up where most books on the American Syria Mission have left off-in 1860, when civil war threw the Syrian Protestant community and the wider Ottoman Syrian society into chaos. This opening chapter introduces the diverse characters who sought to rebuild Syrian society and became enmeshed or entangled in one another’s history during the Arab renaissance (Nahda) that picked up steam in the late nineteenth century: American missionaries, Ottoman administrators, Syrian Protestants, and others from Syria’s Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Druze sects. It proposes setting the dominant Western male missionary narrative alongside the overlooked stories of Ottoman residents-especially women-and it locates this exploration of Syrian Protestant history within the field of World Christianity.

Ministers and Nahdawi Masculinity: The Beirut Church Controversy

The gendered dimensions of institutional Protestantism and the rough edges of missionary authority come to the forefront in chapter 4, which considers the various printed media that Syrian Protestant men employed to assert their masculinity and claim independence from male missionary authority. Tracing the history of the Syrian Evangelical Church of Beirut and its connection to the Nahda, this chapter uses an anti-missionary publication from the turn of the century to examine the asymmetrical relationship between (male) Presbyterian missionaries and Syrian pastors on the one hand, and between Protestant men and women in Syria on the other. Multiple forms of patriarchy operated in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Beirut during church controversies involving missionary Henry Harris Jessup and the prominent Syrian Protestant Khail Sarkis.

A Feminist Awakening? Evangelical Women and the Arab Renaissance

Syrian Protestant women did not join in the published theological debates of the Christian presses in Beirut, but chapter 3 reveals that in the 1880s they began publishing sermons and articles on female education and child-rearing (tarbiya) for the mission periodical al-Nashra al-Usbu’iyya (The Weekly Bulletin). Along with the books and novels that women published at the American Mission Press, these largely neglected articles put Syrian Protestant women at the forefront of the Arab women’s awakening that gained momentum in the early twentieth century and united Christian, Muslim, and Jewish women activists. These proto-feminist authors occupied the traditionally masculine sphere of Arabic production and carved out a space for women’s intellectual and spiritual leadership in the Protestant community. Among these women were the acclaimed journalists Farida ’Atiya, Hanna Kurani, and Julia Tu’ma al-Dimashqiyya.

Syrian Women With A Mission: Preaching The Bible And Building The Protestant Church

As counterparts to the women writers of the Nahda, Syrian Biblewomen (women evangelists) pursued equally subversive activities as they preached spiritual revival in Muslim, Jewish, and Christian homes and in rural areas far beyond the elite Protestant circles of Beirut. This final chapter pieces together the elusive history of these women preachers who were members of the American mission’s Evangelical Churches but turned to the female-led British Syrian Mission to support their preaching vocations. This research considers how the Victorian era’s conception of “woman’s work for woman” manifested itself in Syria. The chapter introduces another layer of complexity in the Syrian missionary encounter, which brought together American Protestants, Syrians of all religious backgrounds, and members of other Western missionary societies.

Conclusion

The networks connecting American missionaries, Syrian Protestants and other residents of Ottoman Syria expanded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as mission churches and institutions multiplied, as the American Mission Press advanced the Arab renaissance, and as Syrian Protestants engaged their own society through ...

Evangelical Awakening: Becoming Protestant in the Arab Renaissance

Chapter 1 considers what it meant to become Protestant in the sectarian landscape of nineteenth-century Ottoman Syria in a period of widespread socio-cultural and political transformation. It compares and contrasts American missionary and Syrian Protestant views of evangelical identity and religious conversion as it examines Protestant conversion accounts written after 1860, including an account by the renowned scholar Butrus al-Bustani. Drawing upon shared values of literacy, Bible reading, and evangelistic printing, these narratives demonstrate how Syrian and American Protestants upheld the printed word as a cultural force, a concept that fit with the intellectual currents of the Nahda in the late Ottoman period. Whereas traditional studies of this literary renaissance characterize it as a secular movement, Syrian Protestants tell a story of nahdawi identity entwined with evangelical commitments.