What makes Artillery of Heaven so compelling a read is that it has all the drama and immediacy of a film thriller while never sacrificing the nuances of context or the complexities of historical analysis. Ussama Makdisi manages to take five years in the life of Asʿad Shidyaq—a Maronite who converted to an evangelical Christianity in 1825, only to find himself detained and tortured by the Maronite Church—and renders a vibrant account of 19th-century American “missionary warfare” in the Middle East as it played out in the life of a soul-searching young man. Yet, the import of Artillery of Heaven is far greater than this would suggest, for it is through a detailed analysis of the ways in which Asʿad's life was subsequently written about—by missionaries, Maronites, and Arab moderns—that Makdisi succeeds in recasting the missionary encounter as inherently plural and fraught rather than a singular, unidirectional imposition of modern values.
In insisting upon this plural vision, Makdisi is responding to a long-standing tendency, among Western historians of mission and Arab historians of the nahḍa, to adopt a parochial view of the 19th-century missionary encounter in the Middle East. Whether this parochial view was a function of language limitations and the seductiveness of missionary biography, as with the mission historians, or of a nationalistic impulse to deemphasize sectarian identities, as with the nahḍa historians, Makdisi aspires instead to a “transnational” approach. This is an approach concerned as much with Boston and Istanbul as with Mount Lebanon and one that accordingly takes advantage of the great variety of sources available on Asʿad's life, whether missionary journals, the Maronite Patriarch's admonitions, or the young man's own reflections on his predicament.
The result is a resolutely ambitious and largely successful effort to understand Asʿad's story as a place where, in Makdisi's words, two “antithetical readings of the world” converged (p. 5). Artillery of Heaven dwells at length in its opening chapters upon how 19th-century American missionary attitudes were informed by encounters in earlier centuries with American native peoples—missionaries dispatched to the Middle East understood themselves as benevolent agents of the Lord whose success evangelizing abroad might redeem earlier failures in evangelizing at home. Set alongside this analysis of the missionary worldview is an analysis of contemporaneous Maronite visions of social order, which cast the missionary enterprise as blasphemous and heretical and thereby sought to preserve the hierarchical relationships of power that characterized the 19th-century Levant.
According to Artillery of Heaven, from the crucible of missionary–Maronite conflict— which resulted in Asʿad's death in 1830 at the age of thirty-two—emerged “unanticipated consequences.” Foremost among these was “a liberal attempt to reconcile cultures” (p. 14), embodied by the key nahḍa figure Butrus al-Bustani. Al-Bustani is perhaps best known for his literary efforts, having assembled pioneering modern Arabic dictionaries and encyclopedias. The book draws attention, instead, to al-Bustani's account of Asʿad's life, which he published shortly before the sectarian battles of 1860. Through a careful reading of this account, Makdisi seeks to demonstrate that Asʿad's experience informed the “inclusivist message of salvation” (p. 205) that al-Bustani adopted and propagated, notably, in the modern school he developed.
Artillery of Heaven is a bold and brilliant intervention in a literature that has, as Makdisi properly argues, remained largely stagnant for decades. The effortlessness with which the book links the local and the transnational, illustrating the bonds between a Maronite convert to evangelicalism, students at Andover, the Cherokees, and the residents of the Sandwich Islands, is both breathtaking and sophisticated. One can only envy the versatility with which the author weaves together these various layers of analysis.
There is only one reservation about the book that seems to linger on reflection. Makdisi attacks both missionary and Maronite historians for their use—or, indeed, misuse—of Asʿad's story to advance particularistic aims. The careful scrutiny allotted to these sectarian histories is, I think, justified given the ways in which Makdisi's transnational analysis undermines their triumphalism. Yet, as one reaches the end of the book, where Makdisi enters upon his discussion of al-Bustani, the level of scrutiny and criticism seems to wane. Indeed, al-Bustani is labeled as nothing less than an “apostle for an ecumenical humanism” (p. 211). Makdisi makes an extremely important point—that al-Bustani represented a departure from the sectarian spirit of missionary and Maronite discourses. However, what sort of departure, exactly? This is a question Artillery of Heaven never entirely confronts despite the laudatory tone adopted vis-à-vis al-Bustani and, indeed, vis-à-vis Asʿad Shidyaq.
