Conversion, controversy, and cultural production: Syrian protestants, American missionaries, and the Arabic press, ca. 1870-1915
[Thesis]
Deanna F. Womack
Young, Richard F.
Princeton Theological Seminary
2015
463
Committee members: Guder, Darrell L.; Moorhead, James H.
Place of publication: United States, Ann Arbor; ISBN=978-1-321-84173-2
Ph.D.
History and Ecumenics
Princeton Theological Seminary
2015
This dissertation is a historiographical examination of the missionary encounter in Ottoman Syria (modern Syria and Lebanon) during the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Nahda, or Arab renaissance. It begins in 1870, when the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions transferred its Syria Mission to the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. It ends in 1915 with the escalating effects of World War I in the Ottoman Arab provinces. Building upon Middle East mission historiographies, studies in world Christianity, and postcolonial critiques of missions, this study approaches the story of Syrian Protestantism as an enmeshed history in which Syrian and American lives became inextricably entwined. Moving beyond the traditional narrative, which presents American missionary men as the primary actors, this research points to the complex relationship of Syrians with American, British, and other missionaries in Ottoman Syria. It uses rare Arabic publications from the late Ottoman period and archival sources from the US, UK, and Lebanon to underline the agency of Syrian Protestant women and men who built the Syrian Evangelical Church and contributed to the socio-cultural currents of the Nahda alongside other Syrian Christians and Muslims.
Religious history; Middle Eastern history; World History
Philosophy, religion and theology;Social sciences;Christianity;Islam;Lebanon;Missions;Nahda;Syria