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American Apostles: When Evangelicals Entered the World of Islam
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The surprising tale of the first American Protestant missionaries to proselytize in the Muslim world

In American Apostles, the Bancroft Prize-winning historian Christine Leigh Heyrman brilliantly chronicles the first fateful collision between American missionaries and the diverse religious cultures of the Levant. Pliny Fisk, Levi Parsons, Jonas King: though virtually unknown today, these three young New Englanders commanded attention across the United States two hundred years ago. Poor boys steeped in the biblical prophecies of evangelical Protestantism, they became the founding members of the Palestine mission and ventured to Ottoman Turkey, Egypt, and Syria, where they sought to expose the falsity of Muhammad's creed and to restore these bastions of Islam to true Christianity. Not only among the first Americans to travel throughout the Middle East, the Palestine missionaries also played a crucial role in shaping their compatriots' understanding of the Muslim world.
As Heyrman shows, the missionaries thrilled their American readers with tales of crossing the Sinai on camel, sailing a canal boat up the Nile, and exploring the ancient city of Jerusalem. But their private journals and letters often tell a story far removed from the tales they spun for home consumption, revealing that their missions did not go according to plan. Instead of converting the Middle East, the members of the Palestine mission themselves experienced unforeseen spiritual challenges as they debated with Muslims, Jews, and Eastern Christians and pursued an elusive Bostonian convert to Islam. As events confounded their expectations, some of the missionaries developed a cosmopolitan curiosity about-even an appreciation of-Islam. But others devised images of Muslims for their American audiences that would both fuel the first wave of Islamophobia in the United States and forge the future character of evangelical Protestantism itself.
American Apostles brings to life evangelicals' first encounters with the Middle East and uncovers their complicated legacy. The Palestine mission held the promise of acquainting Americans with a fuller and more accurate understanding of Islam, but ultimately it bolstered a more militant Christianity, one that became the unofficial creed of the United States over the course of the nineteenth century. The political and religious consequences of that outcome endure to this day.

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Format:
Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read
Street Date:
09/01/2015
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780809023998
ASIN:
B00TDQ1RZE
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APA Citation (style guide)

Christine Leigh Heyrman. (2015). American Apostles: When Evangelicals Entered the World of Islam. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Christine Leigh Heyrman. 2015. American Apostles: When Evangelicals Entered the World of Islam. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Christine Leigh Heyrman, American Apostles: When Evangelicals Entered the World of Islam. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Christine Leigh Heyrman. American Apostles: When Evangelicals Entered the World of Islam. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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      • bioText: Christine Leigh Heyrman is the Robert W. and Shirley P. Grimble Professor of American History at the University of Delaware. She is the author of Commerce and Culture: The Maritime Communities of Colonial Massachusetts, 1690-1750 and Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt, winner of the 1998 Bancroft Prize.
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fullDescription

The surprising tale of the first American Protestant missionaries to proselytize in the Muslim world

In American Apostles, the Bancroft Prize-winning historian Christine Leigh Heyrman brilliantly chronicles the first fateful collision between American missionaries and the diverse religious cultures of the Levant. Pliny Fisk, Levi Parsons, Jonas King: though virtually unknown today, these three young New Englanders commanded attention across the United States two hundred years ago. Poor boys steeped in the biblical prophecies of evangelical Protestantism, they became the founding members of the Palestine mission and ventured to Ottoman Turkey, Egypt, and Syria, where they sought to expose the falsity of Muhammad's creed and to restore these bastions of Islam to true Christianity. Not only among the first Americans to travel throughout the Middle East, the Palestine missionaries also played a crucial role in shaping their compatriots' understanding of the Muslim world.
As Heyrman shows, the missionaries thrilled their American readers with tales of crossing the Sinai on camel, sailing a canal boat up the Nile, and exploring the ancient city of Jerusalem. But their private journals and letters often tell a story far removed from the tales they spun for home consumption, revealing that their missions did not go according to plan. Instead of converting the Middle East, the members of the Palestine mission themselves experienced unforeseen spiritual challenges as they debated with Muslims, Jews, and Eastern Christians and pursued an elusive Bostonian convert to Islam. As events confounded their expectations, some of the missionaries developed a cosmopolitan curiosity about-even an appreciation of-Islam. But others devised images of Muslims for their American audiences that would both fuel the first wave of Islamophobia in the United States and forge the future character of evangelical Protestantism itself.
American Apostles brings to life evangelicals' first encounters with the Middle East and uncovers their complicated legacy. The Palestine mission held the promise of acquainting Americans with a fuller and more accurate understanding of Islam, but ultimately it bolstered a more militant Christianity, one that became the unofficial creed of the United States over the course of the nineteenth century. The political and religious consequences of that outcome endure to this day.

reviews
      • premium: False
      • source: Charles B. Dew, The New York Times Book Review
      • content: "An extraordinarily rich exploration of the first hundred years of evangelical faith in the South . . . Heyrman has given us a great deal to think about in this wonderfully told and beautifully written story."
      • premium: False
      • source: Kirkus Reviews
      • content: "This is an outstanding book, impressively saturated with primary sources, beautifully written, and spiced with pervasive wit."
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        July 6, 2015
        Through excerpts from missionary journals and evangelical periodicals, Heyrman (Southern Cross) uncovers early American evangelical encounters with the world of Islam surrounding the Mediterranean at the beginning of the 19th century in this fascinating study. American missionaries, endeavoring to convert the masses in the Ottoman Empire (and simultaneously challenge Roman Catholicism and Eastern Christianity), brought back to the U.S. a caricature of Islam that fit their own political goals. Heyrman argues this interaction formed a permanent imprint on American Christianity that stifled increased pluralism while also producing forms of “muscular Christianity.” Filled with curious characters and careful analysis, this archival work reads in part like a historical novel, with well-researched sources and documents mined for depth and continuity. While Heyrman’s conclusions are sometimes speculative, anyone interested in evangelical history, American Christianity, foreign missions history, or Christian-Muslim relations will readily enjoy this work.

      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        June 1, 2015
        How evangelical missionaries, dispatched from New England to the Ottoman Empire in the early 19th century, failed spectacularly to convert the Muslim masses but had a lasting impact on the face of American Christianity. Heyrman (American History/Univ. of Delaware; Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt, 1997, etc.) uses the voluminous diaries and correspondence of her pious subjects to explore the origins of evangelicalism's ongoing fascination with Islam. Then as today, women greatly outnumbered men in the pews, and editors of church bulletins hit on the idea of "command[ing] the attention of male readers, perhaps even draw[ing] them into the evangelical orbit...by treating them to the exploits of dauntless adventurers in a dangerous place." The austere, bookish New Hampshire churchmen who set out to share the Gospel with the Turks may seem ill-suited to the role of swashbuckling warrior, but this is a story about the power of the written word to shape public opinion. Notwithstanding their comically ineffectual attempts at evangelization, the missionaries' confident chronicles of their derring-do captivated their American audience, giving the church the "manly bona fides" felt lacking. Their private musings were often strikingly different. They came across many more Europeans who had converted to Islam than Middle Easterners who converted to Christianity, and their personal journals alternate between the worry that Islam could be the superior faith and the stubborn conviction that "desperation, drink, and lust brought most Westerners into the Muslim fold and...bravado, shame, and fear kept them there." Heyrman's engaging writing makes even obscure points of doctrine seem exciting and relevant, and her focus on the ambitions and misgivings of the diverse individuals populating her narrative will appeal to casual readers and specialists alike. An incisive sociological lens on a religion in flux, which, though centuries distant, continues to hold relevance for the present day.

        COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        June 15, 2015

        In 1819, Pliny Fisk and Levi Parsons, members of a conservative Protestant sect known as New Divinity, left New England for the Ottoman Empire on the first American mission to the Middle East. Later, they were joined by fellow evangelist and New Englander, Jonas King. Heyrman (history, Univ. of Delaware; Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt) tells their engaging story. Traveling to cities such as Smyrna, Alexandria, and Damascus, all three men kept meticulous written records for the benefit of interested readers back home. Convinced they were living in a new "apostolic age," the evangelists believed that the demise of Islam was imminent and that the Middle East was ripe for conversion to their version of the gospel. The reality proved far different as residents showed no interest in conversion. Furthermore, the missionaries discovered that Muslim men were devoutly devoted to their religion, more so than Christian men were to theirs, a circumstance they found deeply troubling. As a result of their failures, Heyrman argues, the missionaries developed a more masculine and confrontational version of Protestantism (especially through the writings of King) that still exerts a broad influence on the United States today. VERDICT Heyrman is a skilled writer; her descriptions are compelling, thought-provoking, and often humorous. Highly recommended for those interested in American history and religious history.--Dave Pugl, Ela Area P.L., Lake Zurich, IL

        Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

      • premium: True
      • source: Booklist
      • content:

        Starred review from September 1, 2015
        In November 1819, the first American evangelical missionaries departed for western Asia, as the Middle East was then called. They were two unmarried young men, the rather fragile but fervent Levi Parsons and the sturdy farmer's son, Pliny Fisk. They hoped to convert the Mussulmen, the Jews, and the benighted Orthodox and Catholics they would encounter, first and foremost by means of the printed wordthis despite majority illiteracy among their prospective proselytes. Preaching was fraught with danger, and they weren't successful, but by the time of his death, in 1825, Fisk had been turned from a callow religious enthusiast into a serious student of Islam. Parsons having died in 1821, Fisk was sent a new partner, Jonas King, a busy self-aggrandizer and fabulist who reoriented the mission toward non-Protestant Christians, becoming an influential font of anti-Catholic slander during a long life. As she copiously fills in the historical, intellectual, and organizational background of the mission, Heyrman foregrounds Fisk, not least because he kept journals that record his changes, thereby furnishing her with the spine of an outstanding small-scale history that rescues from obscurity an episode bristling with fascinating material and psychological detail. And then there is the rich and satisfying stylea deep pleasure to readwith which Heyrman tells this complex story.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

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shortDescription

The surprising tale of the first American Protestant missionaries to proselytize in the Muslim world

In American Apostles, the Bancroft Prize-winning historian Christine Leigh Heyrman brilliantly chronicles the first fateful collision between American missionaries and the diverse religious cultures of the Levant. Pliny Fisk, Levi Parsons, Jonas King: though virtually unknown today, these three young New Englanders commanded attention across the United States two hundred years ago. Poor boys steeped in the biblical prophecies of evangelical Protestantism, they became the founding members of the Palestine mission and ventured to Ottoman Turkey, Egypt, and Syria, where they sought to expose the falsity of Muhammad's creed and to restore these bastions of Islam to true Christianity. Not only among the first Americans to travel throughout the Middle East, the Palestine missionaries also played a crucial role in shaping their compatriots' understanding of the...

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When Evangelicals Entered the World of Islam
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      • description: Religion / Christianity / History