SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The American missionary activities in late Ottoman society profoundly changed the Middle East landscape. At the American Historical Association’s Conference in 1968, the American missionaries were addressed as “the invisible men of American history”, implying their significance in shaping American history both at home and abroad. However, in terms of Turkish Muslims, despite being the majority group among Ottomans and in Turkey, their encounters with the American missionaries have largely been neglected in existing literature. This dissertation unveils the painstaking and reticent missionary enterprise by the American Protestant missionaries of American Board of Commissioner for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) to evangelize the Muslim population in the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic (1878-1929): the Muslim Mission. It also examines the Ottoman-Muslim-missionary encounters in various dimensions, including their interactions over educational, medical, gender, and minority issues, and their mutual attitudes and perceptions. This research particularly focuses on the questions of how the American Board developed the Mulism Mission through differentiation from the Christian Mission, and how the American mission was reflected by the Ottoman government and its Muslim subjects in the late Ottoman Empire and the early Republic of Turkey. The question of how the changing societal-political circumstances in the Ottoman Empire forcefully changed the agenda and conceptions of the American missionaries’ ‘Muslim evangelization’ will also be examined throughout the study.