Faithful Encounters

By the early twentieth century, there were close to two hundred American missionaries working in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. They came in droves as early as 1830, organizing hundreds of schools, hospitals, printing presses, and seminaries. Until now, the missionaries' sources and perspectives have dominated discussions of this moment in history, but the experiences of the Ottoman authorities are just as, if not more, revealing of an increasingly tense relationship between Christianity and Islam. An enthralling narrative of how locals made sense of American religious activity in the Ottoman Empire, Faithful Encounters examines the relationships between the authorities who managed the empire from the capital city of Istanbul, provincial agents who carried out the capital's orders, and the missionaries who engaged with them. Exploring a wide range of untapped sources – from imperial ministries, security forces, and local petitions to international reports and missionary collections – Emrah Sahin traces the interactions of the Ottoman authorities, focusing on the viewpoints and manoeuvres they adopted to monitor and conquer the missionary presence at a time of turbulent public and political upheaval. Offering a comparative context from which to reconsider recent cultural relations in the region, Faithful Encounters is not only a history of Christian and Muslim relations. It is a lesson about a failing mission in a failing empire, with stunning relevance to the looming religious and ethnic crises of today.

"Faithful Encounters takes a close, detailed, and necessary look at the imperial and Islamic side of a seminal interaction with American missionaries in the late Ottoman world, without many of the pitfalls present in Islamist or nationalist books on this topic. Appraising hitherto little-used documentation in the Ottoman state archives, it gives intimate insights into the logics and rhetoric of an Istanbul-based Islamic Empire that was faced, from the early nineteenth century, with the challenge of a globe-oriented, egalitarian-minded millennialist mission springing from the United States." Hans-Lukas Kieser, University of Newcastle and University of Zuric, "Sahin's empirically rich book gives the Ottoman perspective on interactions between their government and the American missionaries. The main strength of Faithful Encounters lies in the many fascinating examples of Ottoman-missionary interactions that Sahin employs. Though he utilizes some missionary-produced material, the book is most groundbreaking when it uses evidence from the Ottoman archives." H-Net, "Faithful Encounters makes a major contribution to our knowledge. Governmental authorities were accommodating of missionary work in Istanbul and in larger cities such as Beirut, Latakia, and Damascus, possibly because of these locations' proximity to government control. But distant areas, especially eastern Anatolia, that were prone to public unrest, posed multiple problems." The Journal of American History

Emrah Sahin is a lecturer at the University of Florida.