INTRODUCTION



They were the first Americans to explore the Middle East-"western Asia," they called it. They sailed up the Nile and island-hopped in Greece, but it was the Levant, an arc of land lining the eastern Mediterranean, where they spent the most time. For much of the 1820s, they sojourned in the great cities of Smyrna (Izmir), Alexandria and Cairo, Aleppo and Damascus, Jerusalem and Beirut. They made their way between them in caravans crossing the desert and in vessels plying the sea. They tried to master languages-French and Italian to converse in cosmopolitan merchant circles and then Turkish or Greek or Arabic to talk with everyone else. They made their first acquaintances with the few other Westerners who passed through or stayed on, most of them British and American naval officers and consuls, merchants and sea captains. Thereafter, they came to meet a wide circle of people native to the region-Muslims, Eastern Christians, and Jews. Of all those encounters, they kept careful records, making daily entries in journals dispatched back to the United States every few months. Newspapers and magazines there printed long excerpts, installments designed to bring many more Americans, if only in the mind's eye, to that part of the world.

Whisked over the Atlantic, through the Strait of Gibraltar, and across the Mediterranean, readers might set down anywhere in the Ottoman sultan's dominions. It could be on an island off the coast of Turkey, a high range of mountains ridging its length like a great limestone spine, the lowlands fragrant with orange and lemon trees, the mosques ablaze with light, and the cannons booming at sunset to break the Muslims' Ramadan fast. It could be on the slopes of Mount Lebanon, which, as they found out, was not a single peak "but a multitude of mountains thrown together," and at the foot of one rose the famous cedars, hundreds of them, the largest some forty feet around. Or it could be on the shores of the Dead Sea, its water so bitter that a sip turned the stomach, which made it easy to believe the Bedouins' stories about the "Apples of Sodom," local fruits that looked luscious but, once split open, crumbled to dust and smoke. What a thrill it was for readers to imagine themselves in such spots, seeing even greater wonders-the ruins of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, the settings of the Bible, the castles of the crusaders. To feature themselves riding donkeys along the coast between Beirut and Jerusalem, sailing a canal boat from Alexandria to Cairo, even crossing the Sinai on camels. To feel almost worldly in the knowledge that this great biblical desert was not so barren after all, because nearly everywhere thistles, grasses, and flowers sprouted from the sand.

The customs of these parts held even more fascination. A clash of cymbals heralded the entry of a Jewish bride to her wedding in Cairo. Mount Lebanon's Druze matrons seemed sprung from a race of unicorns, the silver horns of tantours sprouting from their heads, shimmering veils flowing from the tips. Muslim women were harder to spot, but "Mussulmen" turned up often. One was the spitting image of the Turks depicted in American geography books, this landlord of a village coffeehouse in Asia Minor, lounging on a sofa, "with a pipe in his hand and a sword and pistols behind him." More unexpected were the Arab sheikhs of Ottoman Syria who saluted male friends by grasping hands, then "put their foreheads together, and smacked their lips but without bringing their faces into contact." Stranger still, scarcely a stone's throw from Memphis, the city of the Pharaohs, an "idiot" man walked about "perfectly naked," neither taunted nor molested because Egypt's Muslims viewed such people as marabouts or saints who had "some peculiar connexion with the Deity." With every turn of the page, more curiosities, delights, and surprises tumbled out of the adventurers' dispatches. For many Americans, those reports made up the whole stock of their knowledge of western Asia and for many more, the fodder for dreams and fantasies.1

Not even half a century old in the 1820s, the United States had little in the way of profit or power at stake in the Middle East. If many in the West were predicting the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which encompassed most of the region except for Persia and part of the Arabian Peninsula, its fate chiefly concerned the French, the British, and the Russians. For the United States, strategic and economic investments lay many decades in the future. Petroleum hid deep in desert sands, its presence as unsuspected as its uses. The biggest American business in Ottoman domains was the opium trade, a commerce conducted by expatriate merchants who dispatched the drug from Turkey to China. The piracy practiced by the Barbary States of North Africa prompted occasional flurries of protest between 1785 and 1815, and the fledgling U.S. Navy retaliated with brief campaigns against Tripoli and Algiers. The Greek war for independence from the Ottomans fixed all eyes in the West on the eastern Mediterranean during the 1820s, but Americans did not stand to gain or lose by that conflict's outcome. The United States had no official diplomatic or military presence anywhere in western Asia until the 1830s, and only a few consuls. The Holy Land did not become a popular tourist destination for the affluent and the adventurous until the middle of the nineteenth century.2

Insignificant as the early United States' material concerns in the Middle East were, spiritual interests in the region ran high. That is what brought the first American explorers and reporters to the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s. They were Protestant missionaries-Yankee evangelicals-and, by the estimate of many in the early republic, nothing less than a new generation of apostles, successors to the disciples of Jesus. These "Palestine missionaries" would restore this stronghold of Islam to true Christianity, the faithful believed, and their accounts of converting the Muslim world, like latter-day epistles, would inspire piety and national pride at home.

Events quickly confounded those great expectations. The missionaries won no converts of any faith but instead learned the unsettling truth that the power to win hearts and minds-even among Western Christians in the Levant-belonged entirely to Islam. But if these explorer missionaries left little impress on the Middle East, they made a profound impact on their vast American audience. By both their words and their silences, by what they did and left undone, the Palestine missionaries shaped the ways in which many in the United States imagined Islam and its adherents. In turn, that invention played a key role in the ways in which evangelicals would come to define the character of their own religious movement. More broadly, this first, fateful encounter between evangelicals and the Islamic world heightened the tension between cosmopolitan and crusading impulses in American Christianity and culture. It is a contest that continues to the present, a legacy of the historical paradox that the nineteenth-century evangelical Protestants who sought religious hegemony at home and abroad also took the lead in introducing Americans to a wider world of many spiritual alternatives.

* * *

The number of God-fearing men and women in the new United States was growing fast after 1800, and the God whom many feared was one who showed special favor to evangelical Christians. Their common religious identity was still a work in progress. Disputes raged over theology and ritual practices; denominational rivalries and class antagonisms also cleaved their ranks, along with divisions over slavery and women's rights. But all evangelicals shared the signature conviction that a dramatic inward transformation-a "second birth" that regenerated the corrupt heart through saving faith in Jesus-defined what it meant to be a true Christian. Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, a growing number of converts promoted that message both at home and abroad, striving to gather as many people as possible into the evangelical fold. They aimed at nothing less than what they called "the conversion of the world."3

Evangelicals in the early republic aimed not only to persuade the world's peoples that their kind of Christianity was superior to all other faiths but also to convince their fellow Americans that it was indispensable to the success of the new nation. Their first discouragement was discovering that the eminences of the Revolutionary generation-many of whom were not Trinitarian Christians, let alone evangelicals-disagreed. In their private correspondence, the Unitarians John Adams and Thomas Jefferson disparaged all believers in the Trinity as "Athanasians," a reference to the fourth-century bishop who had guided church councils toward defining as Christian orthodoxy the doctrine of three persons in one God. For Jefferson, embracing that mystery convicted its believers of "the gullibility which they call faith." More gullible still were the evangelical Protestants in their ranks: he condemned their enthusiasm for missions as "a threatening cloud of fanaticism" and their missionary magazines as "satellites of religious inquisition." The nation's founders did hold one belief in common with evangelicals: both were convinced that everyone else in the world needed and, once properly informed, would desire the same thing. But for evangelicals, what the world's people would want was their kind of religion, whereas for the founders it was republican liberty.4

It dismayed evangelicals to discover how many men and women followed the founders and inclined toward a liberal religious outlook. By 1800, only a few Americans were radical deists, scorning convictions based on faith as superstition, but a goodly number were Christians of a non-evangelical sort-Episcopalians and Quakers, along with some Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and a great many others with no formal church affiliation. Their numbers were not growing at the brisk clip of evangelical ranks, but the Enlightenment's influence continued to draw many people toward some form of liberal Christianity. Believers of this stripe relied more on reason than revelation in forming their religious principles, regarded doing good to mankind rather than experiencing a "second birth" as evidence of being a true Christian, and often understood scripture as poetic rather than literal truth. Some among them were also coming to suspect, even to affirm publicly, that all of the world's religions taught something of value and that any religion had worth if it encouraged moral behavior.

A chorus of evangelicals told these liberals-in thunder-how wrong they were. One of the loudest voices belonged to the Reverend Asa McFarland, a formidable alloy of Scots ancestry and Calvinist conviction, who denounced the view "that it is not of material consequence what men believe, provided they maintain an upright character." On the contrary, as he assured his congregation in Concord, New Hampshire, "our domestic felicity is to be imputed to the influence of Gospel principles." It was a refrain that resounded in evangelical churches and publications: without the proper sort of Christianity, there would be no American republic-at least, not one worthy of that name. Only the right kind of religion, meaning evangelical Protestantism, could make for the right kind of state and society, providing the foundations of family harmony, social order, and political stability. It was a powerful argument in a well-stocked evangelical arsenal, and one often marshaled in the course of their long, bitter struggle to prevail over their Christian rivals-first religious liberals and then Roman Catholics.

Intent on proving their faith's power to promote order, evangelical leaders mounted the countless revivals that swelled the membership of their churches and distributed the millions of Bibles and tracts that reached people throughout the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century. They impressed their views and values on an ever wider constituency by controlling the opinion-making institutions of the new civil society taking shape in the early republic-schools and churches, voluntary societies and fraternal organizations, and the print media. They enlisted their converts in organizations to curb dueling and swearing, to close down all businesses on the Sabbath, and to reform drunkards and prostitutes. The purpose common to all those campaigns was showing evangelical Protestantism's capacity to instill the virtues of self-mastery essential to citizens in a republic. And those efforts met with considerable success. For a growing number of Americans, being an evangelical was coming to define what it meant to be much more-republican, respectable, and, in some sense still dimly understood in a nation so newly independent, patriotic. Once granted that evangelical Protestants made the best republicans, they hoped, it would prove a short step to concluding that all true republicans should be evangelical Protestants.5

* * *

The impact of this protean religious movement registered in every realm of American life during the nineteenth century, inflecting ideals of womanhood and the family, promoting respectability and reform, forging defenses and attacks on slavery and capitalism. Less familiar is the profound influence evangelicals exerted on how Americans understood the world-and how that influence strengthened their religious movement in its contest for ascendancy. Thanks to their mastery of the latest print technology, evangelicals reached an expanding audience throughout the United States, and thanks to the information produced by their foreign missionaries, they could describe distant peoples and cultures more authoritatively than any other group in the early republic. Installments from missionaries' journals became a staple of cheap, widely circulated religious periodicals and even some secular newspapers. Their pages became a primary resource-for some people, the most trusted resource-of information about the rest of the world, endowing evangelicals with the cultural authority that would empower their movement to mold public opinion on matters of foreign policy. No newspaper in the United States stationed a full-time foreign correspondent anywhere in the world until the mid-1840s, and most travel books were too expensive for readers of modest means to purchase. But for less than a dollar a month, religious periodicals took their readers around the globe. And, as one of their pious editors asked, who better than missionaries could "lay open the secrets" of the world? Here were Americans abroad who "associate with the people" and "wind themselves into their confidence," producing reports that "go into a minuteness of detail that can be found in no other accounts."

Put another way, what National Geographic offered the pre-Internet twentieth century-vivid, often intimate, glimpses of faraway places and peoples-missionary chronicles did for the pre-photography early nineteenth century. Week after week and month upon month, missionaries weighed in from western Asia, India, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and the Sandwich Islands (Hawai'i), conjuring indelible images with words alone. Interspersed with those portrayals were accounts of native conversions, exchanges with rabbis and mullahs, priests and monks, and explanations of the differences among the many sects of Eastern Christians, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, and a riotous assortment of pagans. Through their missionary publications, evangelicals became the leading purveyors of a kind of popular cosmopolitanism. Although they did not celebrate the world's diverse cultures in general-and their diverse religions in particular-they were deeply interested in learning about all those differences, sharing their findings with a wide audience, and urging the duty of a globe-spanning benevolence.6

Missionary reports found a ready readership. Consumed as whites in the early republic were with domestic matters-buying and selling, pulling up stakes and moving, politicking and drinking, slaving and Indian fighting-they were newly eager for knowledge about the places and peoples beyond their borders. Americans of this era tore through print like termites and created new settings to read, meet, and talk. By 1820, there were scores of magazines and at least five hundred newspapers circulating in the United States, many more than in Britain, which had at least double the population. Even a country town like the Reverend McFarland's Concord-with some three thousand souls in 1820, not much bigger or smaller than most places in the United States-supported two newspapers and a library of a few hundred volumes. Some farmsteads and cider mills still dotted its main street, yet Concord boasted new gathering spots like the post office, the Phoenix Hotel, and the Blazing Star Masonic Lodge. Under those influences and in those new venues, a fuller awareness of what lay beyond their localities expanded rapidly even among ordinary Americans. They were gestating first impressions and then forming fixed attitudes about the rest of the world.7

Evangelicals meant to play an important role in making up their minds. They believed that the eyewitness expertise of their missionaries would lend weight to evangelical judgments about the world's cultures, as well as informing the ways that Americans understood the importance of religion to the future of their republic. Ultimately, evangelicals were certain, the success of their foreign missions would settle the matter of their kind of Protestantism's superiority by bringing about the conversion of the world. But well before that happy event, their missionaries would confirm that false religious beliefs and practices explained why other countries failed to thrive. Missionaries would serve as unimpeachable observers and trusted commentators whose firsthand testimony would show that the wrong kind of religion fostered gross inequalities, despotic regimes, and despicable customs. As McFarland summed up that strategy, even though some liberal thinkers might suggest "that the condition of society is as happy in heathen as in christian countries," missionary reports about the "religious rites and moral habits of the heathen" would loudly "contradict such an impious assertion."

Americans would also draw a crucial corollary: that evangelical influences alone kept towns like Concord from turning into Cairo. By delivering that message, missionaries abroad would become apostles to Americans at home. Decades before the foreign missions movement made American evangelicals formidable abroad, the campaign to convert the world powered their drive to dominate civil society within the United States.

* * *

It was the Islamic world that held the greatest challenge for evangelicals in the decades around 1800. For centuries before, Western traders and explorers, soldiers and diplomats, clergy and scholars, had fashioned diverse representations of Muslim cultures, constructing an Islam to serve their interests and to satisfy the requirements of their imaginations. Evangelicals now embarked on the same enterprise, even before initiating their foreign missions movement, inventing their version of Muhammad's life, their explanation for the spread of Islam, their propositions about that faith's purported impact on society and politics. Not least among the reasons that Islam riveted their attention was that it claimed a revelation superseding that of the New Testament. Muslims believed that the angel Gabriel had dictated their holy book, the Qur'an, directly to Muhammad, whose way had been prepared by other, lesser prophets before him-Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. By way of rejoinder, evangelicals pumped new life into a very old caricature of Muhammad as a bloody-minded impostor driven by ambition and lust. That particular invention had first seized Christendom's imagination in the Middle Ages, and, more than any other group, evangelicals kept it alive into the nineteenth century. They also took on board the opinions of those Enlightenment thinkers who contended that Islam encouraged the despotism of Ottoman rulers, the subjugation of Ottoman women, and the rejection of Western learning and technology by Ottoman scholars and bureaucrats. Such weaknesses spelled the ultimate doom of the sultan's empire and of Islam itself, they predicted, and evangelicals agreed, finding that outcome foretold in biblical prophecies.

Evangelicals promoted this understanding of Islam-a mix of medieval Christian polemic, selective borrowings from the Enlightenment, and apocalyptic speculation-in countless sermons, books, and religious periodicals. The energy and urgency with which they did so at first seems odd: after all, Muslims, for all their success elsewhere in the world, were not spreading their religious message in the West, and the Ottoman Empire, for centuries Islam's citadel, was fraying at its edges. But reading over the shoulders of people in the early republic-paging through the newspapers, leafing through the magazines, and checking out the libraries-turns up some clues. To enter that realm is to discover that Americans in the decades around 1800 were curious about Muhammad and his faith and that they were becoming acquainted with surprisingly diverse depictions of Islamic history and cultures. Less polemical and even positive estimates of Muhammad and his faith, the work of other Enlightenment thinkers, circulated widely in the United States, and some readers accepted them as more accurate than the Islam described by evangelicals. With his meetinghouse seating twelve hundred and his two weekly sermons, the Reverend McFarland still had prime opportunities to mold the opinions of his congregation, but he had plenty of competition, too.8

The outcome of this lively, even combative conversation about Islam mattered a great deal to evangelicals. They understood its importance for upholding their own faith's singularity, its truth claims, and its superiority to all other religious outlooks. To prevail in the court of public opinion, they counted, first and foremost, on their missionaries to the Ottoman Empire. Within the empire's bounds were all those places sacred to followers of Jesus, and few fixed upon that part of the world more fervidly than evangelicals, steeped as they were in the Bible. From these sacred sites, their Palestine missionaries would serve as informed, experienced experts, establishing beyond any doubt the falsity of Muhammad's creed, the fatuity of its claims to supersede the New Testament, and its poisonous effects on the sultan's dominions. Their reports from the field would amplify the images of Islam that earlier evangelicals had done so much to keep alive, enabling the foreign missions movement to extend its operations throughout the Middle East. Hopes ran just as high that the information provided by their men in western Asia would cultivate unity within evangelical ranks, enabling them to rout religious liberals and Roman Catholics back in the United States. What lay beyond the wildest imagining was that missionary encounters might offer challenges to the evangelical worldview or promote changes within their movement.

* * *

First came Levi Parsons and Pliny Fisk and, a few years later, Jonas King. Theirs were the names intoned from pulpits during missionary sermons, litanied during the monthly "Concert of Prayer" for missions, and whispered by believers during their private devotions. These founding members of the Palestine mission did not preach to large crowds or gather schools or organize churches or dispense medicine. Their primary purpose was to travel and collect information, particularly about the many religions in the sultan's domains. To that end, they moved about almost constantly, an unsettled and sometimes risky existence that ruled out marriage: bachelors they arrived and remained. No matter where travels took them, the three set down their findings in official journals nearly every day, forwarding them every few months to their sponsoring organization in Boston, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. So earnestly did they compile information that they even charted the daily temperature during their first months in a new place. In short, these three Americans aimed to produce knowledge about the Middle East. Knowledge was power, they and their sponsors believed, and every page of these official journals attests to their determination to gain spiritual dominion over Ottoman Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

But acquiring all that information had unintended consequences. It astonished the missionaries to discover how little they actually knew about the beliefs and practices of Ottoman peoples-and how little what they had thought they knew was accurate. Even more of a shock than sounding the depth of their ignorance was discovering that Jews and Eastern Christians, even Roman Catholics and Muslims, found meaning and purpose, wisdom and comfort, in their faiths. From their earliest youth, they had cherished a certainty about the spiritual bankruptcy of these religions, never doubting that ignorance or fear or sheer stubbornness kept men and women within their folds. Now experience taught otherwise: western Asia, like their own New England, abounded in true believers. None were truer, it often seemed, than Muslims, who made up the overwhelming majority of the sultan's subjects and who succeeded at what the missionaries so signally failed-attracting converts to their faith. Here was knowledge and plenty of it, but of the sort that, instead of conferring power, sowed confusion and doubt within the ranks of these would-be apostles.

It was Pliny Fisk who proved most intent on reckoning with this dangerous knowledge about Islam. His first name-a classical ringer among so many biblical Levis and Jonases, Isaacs and Daniels-suggests that an independent streak ran in the Fisk family. There were two celebrated Plinys of Roman antiquity, uncle and nephew, both magistrates and men of letters, and most likely it was the younger from whom Fisk's parents borrowed the name. Pliny Fisk covered much of the ground in the Levant that had been ruled by this noble pagan and, like him, committed a good deal of his time there to fathoming the success of a rival faith and to writing, writing, writing.9

That itch to put pen to paper-and the sheer luck of his record surviving-makes Fisk the most constant witness to the story that unfolds in these pages. During his years in the Ottoman Empire, he would fill five stout, nearly ledger-sized volumes with entries in his private journal and notes on his reading, to say nothing of the hundreds of pages in official reports and letters that he dispatched back to the United States. And Fisk started writing well before his missionary career, spinning a lifeline that threads from the early American republic of the 1790s through the Levant of the 1820s. It might have snapped at several points: most of his papers lay somewhere in Beirut or Constantinople (Istanbul) for most of the nineteenth century, then were shipped across the Atlantic to sit in a cellar or attic on the East Coast, then got sold off to libraries in the mid-twentieth century, only to go missing in their stacks for many more years. If a good man is hard to find, Fisk must have been one of the best, so long were his literary remains scattered and lost. Only now recovered in full, the record of what he made of his worlds-both in the United States and in the Ottoman Empire-startles.10

Fisk speaks most directly in his private journal, an extraordinary chronicle spanning all his years abroad. The final version of the missionary reports published in religious periodicals and regularly devoured by so many American readers were the work of pious, circumspect editors back in the United States who culled the official journals sent from the field, red-penciling with a free hand. But well before that censoring, missionaries themselves composed their official journals with a close eye to the expectations of their sponsors, readers, and editors. They chose their news, even their words, carefully and padded their accounts with boilerplate pieties and prim rectitude. Among the many revelations of Fisk's private journal, then, is the distance between the Ottoman world he experienced and the version he and the other Palestine missionaries concocted for home consumption. Among its delights is the company of a diarist who bears no resemblance to the caricature of nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries as sanctimonious prigs and smug ignoramuses, clueless about non-Western cultures and proud of it.

But the real import of Fisk's private journal abides in its chronicling his encounters with Islam and with individual Muslims. Among the latter was a notorious American convert whom he finally tracked down in Alexandria; there was also a sheikh in Jaffa who drilled Fisk in Arabic and the teachings of the Qur'an. Fisk's efforts to understand this competing creed disclose the fundamental threat that Islam posed for evangelicals, their conviction that some secret accounted for its success, and their determination to find it out. Yet there also emerges from his private journal a deepening complexity in Fisk's response to Islam, a growing fascination with its similarities to all forms of Christianity, and even something approaching a cosmopolitan sensibility. To read closely in these pages is to glimpse the possibility that more missionaries of Fisk's bent might have produced different outcomes in the earliest relations of the United States with the Muslim world.11

If much of this story traces the arc of curiosity about Islam traversed by evangelicals such as Pliny Fisk, a militant crusader marches through its final chapters. As Fisk sought to discover the sources of Islam's power, his partner Jonas King strove to enlist this rival faith in enhancing the appeal of evangelicalism. In King's case, the name and the man made a perfect fit, as if fating him for this future role. His namesake, Jonah, a figure out of ancient legend, found his way into both the Old Testament and the Qur'an by claiming to have been swallowed by a great fish. Telling the first fish story is no small accomplishment, and it might have impressed upon King, a Bible reader from boyhood, the importance of making the most of his own powers of invention. That skill has long prospered among Westerners in the Middle East, and during the 1820s British and American evangelical missionaries joined their ranks. Stiff as the competition was and is, King had few peers, and he brought that talent to bear on one of the problems besetting evangelicals in the United States.

Many obstacles stood between nineteenth-century evangelicals and the fulfillment of their ambition to outstrip rival Christians, but two posed the most abiding difficulties. The first was their division over slavery, which splintered the major evangelical communions into northern and southern churches by the 1840s and embittered their relations for decades after the Civil War. Daunting as that challenge was, a second has proved even more formidable: persuading more American men to commit to evangelical Christianity. Then as now, men took less readily than did women to a faith that demanded a deeply emotional submission to a sovereign deity, and the result was-and remains-a preponderance of women in the pews. That gender gap troubled evangelical leaders far more then than it does now, and they spent most of the nineteenth century casting about for strategies to close it. One of the most ingenious came from King, who found inspiration in his embattled encounters with Muslims to endow his kind of Christianity with an indisputable purchase on masculinity.12

The work of both crusaders and cosmopolitans, inventing Islam reshaped evangelicalism itself. It was a consequence unforeseen by the founders of the foreign missions movement, but those in the present who take a long view of the past will be less surprised, seeing in that outcome yet another instance of a historic symbiosis. Over many centuries, portraying the East has figured as one of the most powerful influences on the West's self-definition. Through its reckonings with Islam, that process began to play out within the precincts of evangelical Protestantism at the opening of the nineteenth century, transforming its character with results that endure in the present. It was an ironic fate to befall those Christian believers who aimed-many of whom still aim-to convert all the world's peoples, especially its Muslims.13



Copyright © 2015 by Christine Leigh Heyrman