Artillery of Heaven

American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East

Ussama Makdisi

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780801475757
• eBook ISBN: 9780801457746
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

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.

Part I

PRELUDE

Chapter 1

Mather’s America

John Eliot was the preeminent Puritan missionary of his time. When the American Board decided to name a mission station to the Choctaw Indians in the southeastern United States after Eliot in 1818, it was because his name evoked for them the promise of unfulfilled benevolence to the heathen. He was among the few missionaries in the country’s colonial past to whom the American Board could point; he was, in their eyes, an example of what a new Christian nation might yet become: powerful yet charitable toward the remaining Indians of the United States, expansive yet racially inclusive, and above all singularly evangelical. In laying claim to Eliot’s name, nineteenth-century American Protestants recalled and sought to rework an earlier incarnation of the famed missionary at the hands of the Puritan divine Cotton Mather. Mather made Eliot the subject of a prominent memorial in his Magnalia Christi Americana, an epic of conquest and Christianity in New England published at the turn of the eighteenth century.1

Taken together, Mather’s hagiography of his fellow Puritan and his account of Indians encapsulated some of the enduring problems—indeed, paradoxes—of American mission work that nineteenth-century missionaries hoped to resolve. The most obvious of these was the overwhelming fact of settler colonialism, the aggressive expansion of English settlement that in its Puritan form in New England both promoted and undermined missions. Mission work served, crucially, at once as an atonement for the gross violence of the colonial experiment and a reflection of its presumed benevolent spirit.

The second problem very much stemmed from the gross disparity of power between whites and Indians which sustained and frustrated missionaries; the missionaries attempted to maintain what they saw as a noble Protestant mission, with its attendant notion of literacy, voluntary conversion, and choice, amidst the ongoing intimidation and subjugation of Indians. The sincere belief among missionaries that faith must not be compelled was matched by their obviously hierarchical and largely unaccountable relationship to their native converts. Although they witnessed steady displacement of Indians at the hands of settlers, and recognized, and sometimes even lamented, the inherent violence of the settler colonialism of which they were a part, Puritan missionaries clung to the notion that their labors were less coercive and more spiritual than what they viewed formulaically as “Papist” missions. They not only recorded Indian voices but easily redacted them as well into mission apologetics whose audience was not Indian but white:sympathizers with mission on the one hand and skeptics on the other.

The third problem was the contradiction between purity of self and the purification of Indians; what missionaries such as Eliot idealized as a patriarchal relationship between Puritan evangelical fathers and converted Indian babes in Christ remained for the vast majority of their Puritan and non-Puritan compatriots an antithetical relationship between Christian survival and heathen savagery. As a result, Puritan missions, and their ideal of a universal Christian community, foundered amidst a gradual, grudging Puritan toleration of non-Puritans and an increasingly adamant rejection of coexistence with the unadulterated heathen. The meager harvest of souls produced in turn equal measures of disappointment and reflection. From this colonial context emerged the defining and exculpatory tropes of American mission work: the barbarous native, the unscrupulous settler, and the benevolent missionary.

Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana chronicled and celebrated an American Puritan world coming into being. It told a story of how Puritans became “the owners and masters of the country,” and about how the native Indians had willingly and inevitably acquiesced in their own subjugation.2 Here, as Mather saw it, was a self-consciously new society that wished to subordinate worldliness to the immutable but interpretable Word of God. It was a society whose impulse was powerfully simple: to eradicate impurity where possible and to shun it where not; hence an arduous voyage to the “desarts of America,” a disavowal of the corruption of the Catholic and Anglican churches, a total reliance on the truth of the Scriptures, a continuation of the European reformation through the agency of churches “very like unto those that were in the first ages of Christianity,” and consequently a fervent desire to set up a truly pious community of visible saints who would brook no heresy, no idolatry, and no error.3

Far from the current stereotype of witch-burning Puritans, a fundamental aspect of the Puritan idea lay in the notion that true Christian faith had to be voluntarily embraced, not compelled. By the same token, a Puritan orthodoxy in New England was determined to stamp its imprint on what was a clearly heterogeneous world which included, besides “wild beasts and beastlike men” (as John Winthrop described Indians in 1642), many immigrants who were not committed Puritans.4 Nobody, therefore, was allowed to settle in Massachusetts without the express consent of the colony’s magistrates, themselves elected only by full members of a Puritan church who had demonstrated evidence of their own regeneration; all were required to observe the Sabbath and attend church services, of which only the Congregational form was tolerated. Heretical books were burned. Roger Williams was famously banished in 1635; Quakers were persecuted, Baptists shunned, and Jesuits banned. Indians, however, were allowed to settle near the English in order to further their conversion, but only if, the General Court declared, they shall “there live Civilly and Orderly.”5

Mather described Eliot’s mission in the third book of Magnalia under the title “The Triumphs of the Reformed Religion in America.” He tellingly situated Eliot’s mission to surviving Indians of New England following decades of settlement, warfare, and disease. Mather had already recounted in the first book of Magnalia a story of how a “chosen Generation” arrived in a “howling wilderness” in New England that had been “wonderfully prepared” by the Hand of God to receive its new inhabitants.“The Indians in these parts,” he wrote, “had newly, even about a year or two before, been visited with such a prodigious pestilence, as carried away not a tenth, but nine parts of ten, (yea, ’tis said, nineteen of twenty) among them: so that the woods were almost cleared of those pernicious creatures, to make room for a better growth.”6 Divine inspiration and assistance was supplemented, Mather admitted, by “our English guns,” which further terrified “ignorant Indians.”7

Even as Mather set Eliot’s life within the framework of a larger story about the welcome destruction of uncivilized Indians, he also elevated Eliot as a genuine model of missionary piety to these same Indians. To a Puritan outlook in which Indians were in many ways beyond the pale of what Puritans considered an apostolic church order and society, Mather’s history of Eliot constituted an important corrective. Despite the solemn and original aspirations and pretensions of the first generation to “win and incite the natives of that country to the knowledge and obedience of the only true God and Saviour of mankind,” few Indians were converted.8 The colony of Massachusetts Bay, whose seal famously depicted an Indian calling out to the Puritans to “Come Over and Help Us,” had witnessed only fitful missionary efforts. If facts on the ground had already raced ahead of ideals, here was a story that allowed these ideals to keep pace with, and even steal a march on, the facts. Here, finally, was a missionary’s place in the story of the kindling of an allegedly pure and primitive Christianity in America. Here, finally, was an American Moses to take his place alongside an American Joshua in Mather’s Magnalia.

Eliot was a Moses in two senses for Mather. First he helped deliver his own English people out of bondage, and then he became a lawgiver to another, quite different Indian people whom Mather referred to as “the veriest ruines of mankind which are to be found any where upon the face of the earth.”9 He was instrumental in leading the Puritans from persecution in England into the promised land of America, where he helped propagate a new way of life under a church government in New England. Eliot, Mather wrote, “came to New-England in the month of November, A.D. 1631, among those blessed old planters which laid the foundations of a remarkable country, devoted unto the exercise of the Protestant religion, in its purest and highest reformation.” So important for Mather was this sense of rupture with an immediate past that he made it a point to insist that he could not “presently recover” the name of Eliot’s “place of his nativity” and that, moreover, it was unimportant to do so, for it had been superseded by a new society in a new world that Eliot had helped found.10 Eliot became a model of piety, humility, family religion, and mortification for a new American society; he wore simple clothes and loathed long hair; and he was deadened, Mather insisted, to the pleasures of this world. Eliot was first a Christian, then a minister to fellow Puritans, and finally an evangelist to the Indians, a sequence that highlighted the difference between a minister’s relationship with his own congregation and a missionary’s relationship to an isolated and subordinated people. According to Mather, Eliot was the embodiment of charity, for in his view it was charity that had inspired the evangelist to lead the Indians collectively and completely away from the devil’s “ancient possessions.”11

Almost all histories of John Eliot, and certainly those that Mather drew upon to paint his portrait of the selfless missionary, begin with him reaching out to ...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I PRELUDE
• Part II INTERSECTIONS
• Part III REORIENTATIONS
• Epilogue
• Notes