In the spring of 1826, a young Arab began a long imprisonment in the mountains of present-day Lebanon. It marked a stark end to his promising beginnings: birth into a prominent family; grooming for the priesthood in the Maronite Church; stints in the service of the Maronite bishop of Beirut, a Muslim emir, and a Druze notable; and authorship of books of poetry and a treatise on the relationship between kinship and marriage. With that past as prologue, no one could have predicted that As'ad Shidyaq would end his life in a remote monastery sometime in 1830, weakened by torture, wasted with illness, and denounced as “Lord of Hell” by the Maronite patriarch, Yusuf Habaysh. But Shidyaq's life had veered sharply from its appointed course when he encountered American Protestant missionaries, embraced their evangelical principles, and determined to preach among his fellow Maronites.

By the reckoning of Ussama Makdisi, professor of history at Rice University, the differing accounts of As'ad Shidyaq's career that emerged over the nineteenth century constitute a “foundational encounter” (1) between a distinctive group of Arabs, the Maronite Christians, and a particular group of Americans, the missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). Drawing on both missionary archives and Arabic documents—including Shidyaq's testimony to his evangelical faith and a prison diary—Makdisi recovers both sides of this encounter, crafting a deft narrative of the “rich history of confrontation and collaboration across cultures” (6).

What sets his story in motion is the arrival of the first American missionaries in the Levant in 1819. They came filled with hopes of redeeming America from the Puritans' failed efforts to evangelize the Indians and overflowing with millennial fantasies about the waning power of Islam and the imminent conversion of the Jews. Those notions decisively shaped the missionaries' image of the Bible lands and their behavior once established in Beirut, a small town of about 5,000 souls in the 1820s. Styling themselves the “artillery of heaven,” they quickly came to focus their energies not on converting Jews or Muslims but rather on reclaiming Eastern Christians from the clutches of Rome. Clueless about the importance of tact and discretion in a multireligious land such as Lebanon, where it was virtually taboo to pry into the faith of others, the missionaries seized every opportunity to quiz the Eastern Christian clergy about their beliefs and to provoke theological debates. Ironically, the missionary most immersed in local culture and most fluent in Arabic also emerged as the most blunt and confrontational, one Jonas King. Perhaps it was King's very daring that drew Shidyaq—an intellectually venturesome young man only a few years his junior—into the missionaries' orbit. By the summer of 1825 he was tutoring the missionary in Syriac, and a few months later he helped to translate King's “Farewell Letter,” a sulphurous denunciation of Roman Catholicism. By the fall of that year, he was employed at the mission in Beirut itself, working closely with King's colleague, Isaac Bird.

The man most outraged by the missionaries' doings and Shidyaq's defection was Yusuf Habaysh. The Maronites, who date their church back to the seventh century, submitted to papal authority at the end of the twelfth century; but for long thereafter, both Latin and Orthodox Christians suspected them of embracing heretical beliefs. In response, the Maronites had developed a narrative emphasizing their perseverance in “perpetual orthodoxy,” despite challenges from infidels of every creed. To the patriarch, then, it was wormwood and gall: the apostasy of a star pupil whose spiritual career should have confirmed the Maronites' adherence to Rome. Here was exactly the sort of scandal that threatened to revive charges of the church's heresy. The irony was that for his part, Shidyaq had no wish to repudiate his culture, even as he questioned Maronite religious traditions, engaged in public controversy, and strove to preach the Gospel in colloquial Arabic. His tragedy, as Makdisi subtly discerns, “lay in the impossibility of sustaining an intellectual argument for Protestantism from his position as an obedient Maronite subject” (109). It was an irreconcilable contradiction for Habaysh, invested as he was in the fiction of Maronite orthodoxy and immersed as he was in a religious etiquette that proscribed foisting one's religious views on others.

As the patriarch and most of his Maronite contemporaries told the tale, As'ad Shidyaq was a man run mad or worse—a man on the make, taking bribes from the missionaries. But to Isaac Bird, Shidyaq was a martyr to the cause of evangelical Protestantism, and his fate was a clarion call to redoubling missionary efforts. In his dispatches to the Missionary Herald and subsequent biographies aimed at both juvenile and adult readers, Bird cast Shidyaq as an exemplary figure, rivaling other celebrated evangelical converts such as the Hawaiian Henry Obookiah and the Cherokee Catherine Brown. Even so, more than a whiff of condescension rose from those hagiographies, and in the case of Shidyaq, according to Makdisi, “his embellished martyrdom underscored only the barrenness, not to say barbarity, of local culture” (153). And in the hands of missionary chroniclers later in the nineteenth century, Shidyaq's story “increasingly idealized America and orientalized the East” (142). For Henry Harris Jessup and most of his contemporaries at the Syria mission, the “original millennial enthusiasm, which had bound missionaries and heathen together in a race against time … was superseded by a modern enthusiasm according to which certain advanced races were destined to lead backward races” (171). Standing in sharp contrast to this missionary perspective is the contemporaneous Arab relation of Shidyaq's life by another Maronite convert to evangelical Protestantism, Butrus al-Bustani (1819–1883). A teacher, journalist, and leader in the native Beirut Protestant community, he cast Shidyaq as a tragic hero, a figure whose striving for intellectual freedom exemplified Bustani's liberal hopes for an Arab renaissance and a future of cultural dialogue and political equality among Christians and Muslims as well as East and West.

Artillery of Heaven stands as a signal contribution to the growing body of North American and British scholarship that is remaking the history of missions and missionaries. Moving beyond the spent debates over whether western missionaries were saints or cultural imperialists, Makdisi and this company of likeminded scholars train their attention on those who were the objects of conversion and their agency in shaping colonial encounters. Readers will find much to admire in his eloquent and balanced book and much to ponder in its evocation of the earliest beginnings of the complex relationship between the United States and the Middle East.