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."
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