The last few decades have seen a rise in the number of studies on Christian missions. These studies are located within a wide range of fields and are written from different perspectives. They tend to abide by national boundaries and to focus on mission organizations and missionaries, not least because of the availability of source material in Western languages. Recent historiography on Christian missions to the Middle East, however, has seen a profound change in approach, methodology, and sources. We can locate three main shifts: a national to a transnational approach, a reevaluation of local agency, and a new emphasis on unintended consequences.Footnote ¹

The five studies under review here on Protestant missions in the Middle East and the Ottoman Balkans are all part of this turn. In the recent anthology, Shaping the Transnational Sphere: Experts, Networks and Issues from the 1840s to the 1930s, Davide Rodogno, Bernhard Struck, and Jakob Vogel define the transnational sphere as “a space where encounters across national borders took place.”Footnote ² Protestant missionaries of the 19th and early 20th centuries were central actors in shaping such spaces on both the social and ideational levels. While traveling across borders to spread the Christian gospel to local communities, they dispersed ideas on educational reform and modern notions of health and hygiene. Rodogno, Struck, and Vogel note that “the process of transfer [of new ideas] encompassed adaption and modification to specific local and national contexts.”Footnote ³ The significant links between, on the one hand, missionary welfare, educational practices, and ideas, and on the other hand, local welfare and educational institutions, have had a marginal or no place in national and colonial histories. In their adoption of a transnational lens, these five works therefore make a significant contribution.

All five studies also move away from the traditional image of missionaries as the main players in the mission encounter, an impression created by missionaries themselves in the vast printed material that they produced. Instead, they focus on interactions between missionaries and local actors.Footnote ⁴ To give voice to local actors, Baron, Makdisi, and Sedra draw on autobiographical and biographical material. All five authors not only reinterpret missionary sources used in an earlier literature, but they also read them alongside local sources, including government reports, educational and religious literature, and women's journals.

Our five authors show that through these interactions the missionaries themselves changed. Makdisi, Sharkey, and Reeves-Ellington trace how missionaries transformed from evangelizers to educators. This shift was not uncommon among Protestant missionaries in the Middle East, nor among their Catholic counterparts who began arriving in the region up to a century earlier and shared similar experiences.Footnote ⁵ The reason for this is largely that, unlike in Asia and Africa, winning converts was, in the words of the Anglican bishop and scholar Kenneth Cragg, the “saga of the few” (Sharkey, p. 218). Missionaries faced major obstacles in their attempts to convert locals. For Muslims, conversion to Christianity was forbidden; for members of the Orthodox churches, it could result in persecution and social expulsion. Although the Americans and Anglicans did not succeed in converting more than small numbers of Bulgarians, Copts, Maronites, and Muslims, their emphasis on education and willingness to accommodate local demands for secular education influenced Ottoman and Egyptian society at large. During the 19th century, the network of American protestant mission schools became the largest foreign school system in the empire. According to Reeves-Ellington, in 1869 the Ottoman government issued educational reforms developed largely in response to the success of American education among Christian populations (p. 104). The unintended consequences of the missions' focus on education had a gendered dimension as well, since the majority of Protestant missionaries were women and the need for educational institutions was more acute among Muslim and Christian girls and women than among the male population. The female educated missionary embodied a new role for Muslim and Christian women in the region, as shown by Sharkey and Reeves-Ellington.

Ussama Makdisi, in Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East, goes back to the beginning of this process in the early 1820s, when the first American missionaries established schools for both boys and girls in Lebanon. Arriving in Ottoman Syria in 1819, a couple of young American Protestant missionaries decided to work among the Christian Orthodox Maronites in Mount Lebanon who had ecclesiastically submitted to the Roman Catholic Church. Ottoman Arabs in Syria, like the rest of Ottoman society, regarded mutual recognition between different religious communities as a guarantee of order and harmony in an unequal, multireligious, Islamic society. In this they clashed with the American mission movement, which was founded on the belief in individual freedom of conscience and an evangelic Protestantism that did not tolerate accommodation of other religions. This is the starting point of Makdisi's pathbreaking study in which he draws on a large body of local Arabic sources and mission material that together convey how complicated was this cultural encounter—an encounter previously viewed only from the side of the missionaries.

Focused on Lebanon, Makdisi provides a vivid picture of the lives of early missionaries—confident, educated, and resourceful young men who had been trained and employed by the East Coast-based American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mission (ABCFM), the largest and most influential mission organization in the 19th-century United States. While the American missionaries had set out to save the religiously “mingled” people of the East, where Islam's power was seen as declining and the Orthodox Churches as “corrupted,” their organization had long been active in mission work at home among American Indians. Makdisi argues that the organization's work among the Indians informed how they approached the Ottoman world. But while the mission project at home was tainted by settler colonialism, the non-Christian world outside the Americas seemed to offer an ideal arena in which to Christianize “heathens” (including Eastern Christians).

In the Ottoman context missionaries were few in number and without a militia. They chose to work among an Orthodox Christian community that had a strong sense of its own Christianity and was part of a world confident in its standing vis-à-vis the West. The Maronite patriarch saw the Protestant missionaries as a danger and worried their presence would lead to the disruption of the social order in Lebanon. When in 1825 the local Maronite Asʿad Shidyaq, a teacher, poet, and writer from a well-regarded family who became one of the missionaries' earliest converts to Protestantism, came to a new understanding of faith through dialogue with missionaries, the patriarch condemned him for heresy. In the Maronite and broader Ottoman worlds, conversion and upholding multiple religious identifications challenged how religion was organized and governed. The American protestant missionaries, by contrast, saw the ability to change one's religion as a fundamental freedom upon which their work was based. This conflict of worldviews played out in the dramatic story of Asʿad's conversion. The Maronites saw him as a heretic and he was persecuted and killed for changing his faith. To the missionaries, he had become a martyr. Through his varied source material, Makdisi gives voice to not only the missionary accounts of events, but also to those of central agents in the Maronite Church and to Asʿad himself.

Protestant missionaries narrated Asʿad's story differently over time. From a tale of evangelism removed from all wordly attachments, it became a parable of modernity in which the United States was an unproblematic land of liberty and progress and the East a stagnant other. This latter narrative, Makdisi argues, was a celebration of an exceptional “America.” The one actor who showed true ecumenism and humanism in this encounter was a Maronite who had converted to Protestantism, Butrus al-Bustani. Though condemned by the Maronite Church, al-Bustani had status as a prominent writer, educator, and reformist. In writing the biography of Asʿad he was also the one to break the Ottoman Arab silence surrounding Asʿad's story. Al-Bustani's biography focuses on the general historical development of the Ottoman Empire and not on the missionaries. Through Asʿad's story he attempted to illustrate that it was possible to be both evangelical and Maronite. The liberal separation of church and state, he asserted, could serve as the basis for a new form of coexistence. Al-Bustani recognized that the missionaries had opened up the possibility for the East to relate to religious authority in a new way. Makdisi argues that in al-Bustani the American missionaries had unwittingly created an apostle for ecumenical humanism.

But Protestant missions were undergoing changes of their own, which likewise had unintended consequences. In a fast-changing Ottoman world, evangelizing increasingly had to give way to a diaconical dimension of Christian mission. This meant that missionaries began to give priority to the development of health clinics, hospitals, schools, and colleges. For example, local demands for secular education led the American Board to establish a large number of schools and institutions of higher learning in the region. Makdisi argues that by the end of the 19th century American mission had shifted from illiberal evangelization to welfare and educational work, in which it competed with a number of European Protestant and Catholic missions and Ottomans to shape a multireligious and multinational Ottoman modernity. Missionaries' reorientations when facing “the futility of direct evangelism in deeply multireligious lands” (p. 217) led to unintentional results that had deep social implications for a significant part of the population in the Middle East.

Barbara Reeves-Ellington's book Domestic Frontiers: Gender, Reform, and American Interventions in the Ottoman Balkans and the Near East also examines the unintended consequences of Protestant missionary encounters with locals in a multirelgious context—in her case, the Bulgarians of the Ottoman Balkans. Reeves-Ellington uncovers how American Board missionaries used education as a strategy for converting female souls, while Ottoman communities took the message and formed it to suit their own needs. Drawing on rich, varied, and multilingual sources (Ottoman, Bulgarian, Russian, French, and English), she explores the little-known and little-researched, though deep and complex, encounter between American Protestants and Bulgarians who, like the Maronites, were part of a society undergoing great change. By the time the American Board started its expansion into the Ottoman Balkans at the end of the 1850s, the Ottoman government had introduced reforms establishing citizenship and equality between Muslims and non-Muslims. Simultaneously, Bulgarian nationalist forces were mobilizing in order to achieve greater autonomy from both the Greek Orthodox Church and the Ottoman state. Protestant mission schools for girls became a contested arena within Bulgarian society and between Bulgarians and the American missionary community.

At the core of the American Protestant educational ideology for girls was the notion that a Christian wife and mother, while subordinate to her husband, was the head of the household. This ideology of domesticity claimed that changing the position of local women would change society as a whole. Before the American Civil War it was mostly married couples who were sent out to the mission field. A number of the married missionary women had attended the prestigious Protestant Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. In the Ottoman Empire, these women had to negotiate between, on the one hand, tasks associated with the domestic spheres, and on the other, teaching and overseeing schools. Reeves-Ellington argues that through their work, they aimed at transplanting an American culture of female moral authority to the Ottoman world.

Reeves-Ellington also focuses on the history of converts from the Bulgarian Orthodox Church to Protestantism. Most Bulgarians saw their religion as a crucial marker of identity. Protestant mission, with its aim of converting souls and establishing a new gender order, threatened the Bulgarian Orthodox community. As in Lebanon, conversion meant to choose individual initiative over civic identity and communal allegiance, particularly as Bulgarian Orthodox Christians increasingly began to equate religion and nation: to be a Bulgarian was to be an Orthodox Christian. A Bulgarian convert to Protestantism was thus a threat to the Bulgarian nationalist project (paralleling in many ways the threat that Maronite Protestant converts posed to the Maronite Church). But by providing the Bible and other reading material in modern Bulgarian, American missionaries also came to indirectly support the Bulgarian national project. This support of a Christian minority's struggle for independence from Ottoman rule may also be seen as an unintended consequence of mission activity in the region.

The Ottoman government had not established any schools for girls prior to the end of the 19th century. While Bulgarian convent schools provided the origins of formal education for Bulgarian girls, by the 1860s leading members of Bulgarian society had opened several girls' schools where Bulgarian language, customs, and religion were taught as part of creating national awareness. Thus, by the time Protestant missionaries decided to emphasize education for Bulgarian girls, a potential market for education already existed. Reeves-Ellington argues that Bulgarians saw mission schools as useful for educating their daughters, an act seen as contributing to the emerging Bulgarian nation. This might be to overemphasize the national consciousness that existed among middle-class Bulgarians, who may have wanted to send their young women to school because it offered prestige or because they valued education as an end in itself.

Despite the desire among Bulgarians to educate girls, their fear of undue Protestant influence and conversion sometimes led to protests and boycotts, and even to the closing down of schools. When a young, poor Bulgarian woman converted to Protestantism in 1867, local protests led the American mission school that she had attended to close. The girl came from a very different background than Asʿad Shidyaq, but her conversion, like his, challenged the customs of local Orthodox society and Ottoman law. From the woman's vantage point, Protestantism was a personal choice that also led to social mobility.

Reeves-Ellington discloses how American ideas of domesticity were transmitted to Bulgarians not only through mission schools, but also through the Bulgarian mission monthly magazine Zornitsa. Established in 1864, Zornitsa was modeled on evangelical magazines in the United States and offered articles by and for women. With its wide audience, the publication is indicative of the influence often wielded by the printed materials produced by Protestant missions. Reeves-Ellington argues that when nationalist Bulgarian women activists promoted girls' education, their rhetoric showed the influence of Zornitsa and the Protestant mission. These activists used the language of domesticity and argued that educated mothers could contribute to national progress by organizing schools for girls. The latter theme also appeared in women's journals in European countries at the time, and one might ask if educated Bulgarian women had been influenced as well by nonmission material.

Despite the rhetoric of the Protestant mission concerning the respected position of women in Christian societies, in the hierarchy of the American Board single professional women ranked as “assistant missionaries” to ordained male missionaries. Reeves-Ellington shows how tension between the ideal of equality in Christ and the conventions of the American Board manifested as well in the local clergy with regard to nationality. Both Bulgarian male ministers and Bulgarian Bible women received less pay than their respective American counterparts. In the historiography on Christian missions, it is generally agreed that local evangelists and Christians, and not American and European missionaries, were the primary missionary agents after the earliest phase.Footnote ⁶ As Reeves-Ellington highlights, this point is not clear in the material produced by the American Board or in mission material in general. The American Board mission narratives continued to portray missionaries as the prime movers, deemphasizing the role of local agents or even rendering them invisible.

The attitudes of male missionaries toward single women and converts exposes the inequalities that operated in mission circles. However, Reeves-Ellington shows how the American Board mission in the Ottoman Empire also mirrored global developments at the time, with women missionaries gradually gaining influence over their own work. In the early 1900s, for example, American female teachers gained control over the American College for Girls in Istanbul, “a centerpiece of American education in the Near East” (p. 141). The Constantinople Home School, later renamed the American College for Girls in Istanbul, was originally founded and funded by the Woman's Board, but was controlled by male missionaries from the Western Turkey Mission in Istanbul, who were responsible only to the American Board (p. 147). This Protestant school was the first institution to offer a tertiary-level education in English to Armenian, Bulgarian, Greek, and Turkish women. Reeves-Ellington shows how, sensitive to political and social developments in the Ottoman Empire, women missionary teachers shifted the school's overall aim from evangelizing to educating. Though still Protestant, the school offered a nonsectarian, liberal arts program to women of all faiths. Thus, the American Board's mission in the Near East, which had initially transferred ideals of female domesticity into the region, came to offer a modern, secular higher education for women. In a clear voice, Barbara Reeves-Ellington demonstrates how this mission encounter changed American and Bulgarian women and men.

Similar to Reeves-Ellington, Paul Sedra, in Mission to Modernity: Evangelicals, Reformers and Education in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, focuses on missionaries' transfer of ideology and education, as well as the local reception of ideas. His starting point is the arrival in Cairo of the German reverend from the English Church Missionary Society (CMS) John Lieder in 1825. A shoemaker turned Lutheran missionary, Lieder worked among Cairo's Coptic community until 1865. He and his English wife, Alice Holliday Lieder, a missionary in her own right, became central educators in Mehmet Ali's Egypt. Nevertheless, in all of his years in Cairo Lieder converted no more than a handful of souls to Anglicanism, which dismayed his employer greatly. For Lieder, however, to convert to Christianity was to adhere to a particular order in life. His principal tool for conversion was the textbook and education.

Drawing on a rich body of Arabic and English sources from Egyptian and English educators and missionaries, Sedra relates how the ideas on education that Lieder brought to Egypt fused together with those of local educationalists to shape the establishment of modern schools in the country. He argues that while working for conversion, 19th-century Protestant missionaries also shared a common aim with Egyptian educationalists, both Muslim and Copt, to eliminate an oral culture in which the speakers of words, rather than texts, were bearers of authority. Only with the elimination of an oral culture, with the depersonalization of authority, could an abstract morality prescribing behavior operate universally. Sedra's mission is to expose what made these textualizing impulses so urgent in the course of the 19th century.

In England, educational and social reform of the 18th century was driven largely by a religious agenda, and the individual actors promoting reform were evangelical Christians. These Christians, along with other educators, established the British and Foreign School Society with the aim of spreading the monitorial system, whose ethos was rooted in industry, discipline, and order, throughout Britain and globally. All of the major 19th-century British mission societies put this scheme for disciplinary education into practice. During this time period, the spiritual and cultural dimensions of conversion to Protestantism were considered inseparable: Christianity was industry, discipline, and order. Although Sedra does not explore them, there were important gender dynamics within the monitorial system that were also embedded within the transnational transfer of ideas.

European educationalists brought the monitorial system to Egypt, where local Christian and Muslim educationalists adopted it. One of these was Joseph Hekekyan, an Armenian educational reformer in Mehmed Ali's administration. Hekekyan agreed with missionaries on educational methods but did not believe that only Christianity could be the basis for the moral improvement of Egyptian society. John Lieder, who established a day school for Coptic boys had also used it. His school attracted a large number of pupils from mostly poor backgrounds. After finishing their education, many of these students became government employees and were able to support themselves and their families. The CMS also established the Coptic Institution, which educated Copts intending to enter the Coptic priesthood. Sedra argues that “there exists no better illustration of the technique of subtle infiltration mounted by the CMS, with the aim of infusing the Coptic community with the evangelical ethos” (p. 115).

In 1854 Patriarch Cyril IV became head of the Coptic community in Egypt. Cyril not only had to deal with the threat of Protestant influence on his community, but he also had to defend Copts against the advances of the Egyptian state. Sedra shows how Cyril IV mounted a reform campaign that addressed evangelical concerns over the need for change in the Coptic Church. The Coptic Patriarch also employed evangelical techniques. For example, he established schools for girls and boys, including the Great Coptic School, which was heavily influenced by Lieder and his methods. The sons of the Coptic elite who were educated in this school did not approve of the CMS schools, however. According to Sedra, they rejected not the principles associated with modern education but the schools' promotion of Anglicanism. Influenced by the monitorial system to which they had been exposed, these students would eventually take up modern values and advocate industry, discipline, and order in schools established by both the Egyptian government and the Coptic community. In the same manner as the Bulgarian men, these young men struggled for citizenship rights in Egypt while the Church hierarchy sought to preserve the status quo of a “separate” protected community. As modern Coptic intellectuals, they saw the need to educate the “lower orders,” establishing schools based on values brought to Egypt by evangelicals in order to turn the poor into disciplined laborers. This goal the Coptic elite shared with its Muslim counterpart.

According to Sedra, the systems through which the evangelicals sought to cultivate the values of industry, discipline, and order within the Coptic community were effective. The CMS educational ideas also influenced the Egyptian state school system: inspired by the CMS schools, the Egyptian government established its own schools in Cairo following a similar model. This connection between mission and government educational institutions has had no place in Egyptian educational or colonial history. Through his close reading of sources from Egyptian, Ottoman, and English educationalists, Sedra uncovers these important links. He also challenges the narrative of Coptic exceptionalism, placing the history of the Copts within the broader context of Egyptian history. The Coptic Church and members of the Coptic elite played a critical role in the development of modern Egyptian education.

The first American Presbyterian missionaries arrived in Cairo in 1854, almost thirty years after John Lieder's arrival. They were sent by the United Presbyterian Church of North America (UPCNA), and established what would soon develop into the largest Christian missionary enterprise in Egypt. The many-faceted century-long history of the Presbyterian mission in Egypt is the theme of Heather Sharkey's American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire. Sharkey states that “American missionary encounters bridged the United States to Egypt,” and as with missionary encounters elsewhere, they “were intensely local, global, and transnational at once” (p. 2). Her history works on all three of these levels, presenting us with actors engaged in one, two, or three of them. Sharkey knows the local context well and eminently contextualizes the long and complex history of the American Protestants' mission in Egypt. However, here it is the missionaries and their organization that are given the main role.

Based on both Arabic and English sources, Sharkey's book shows how an evangelical Protestant mission changed through its encounters with a multireligious Egypt where few people converted to Protestantism. By the mid-1950s there were around 200 living converts from Islam within a small Presbyterian community of almost 27,000 members. Even so, from the 1850s until World War I, American Protestant missionaries promoted a kind of Protestant Reformation in hopes that Muslims or Coptic Orthodox Christians might adopt attitudes and values that reflected the core of that Protestant movement.

In the same manner as Makdisi, Reeves-Ellington, and Sedra, Sharkey draws attention to ideological features in the United States and abroad that shaped UPCNA policies at home and in Egypt. These included opposition to slavery; support for Bible-centered education; and anti-Catholic sentiment. Sharkey argues that the Presbyterians' work among the Copts was deeply influenced by their work among African Americans in the US South. In both cases the emphasis was on education, reform, and self-reliant congregations. Thus it was not only Egyptian conditions that shaped American missionaries' approach toward the Copts; a broad mission philosophy that had emerged in the United States was also critical.

After the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, the American missionaries developed close ties with British missionaries and authorities in Egypt. Feeling protected by the British and the Capitulations, American Protestants began to focus on Muslim conversion. But Muslim converts were rare. In theory, Islamic law prescribed the death penalty for apostates who did not return to Islam. In practice, the courts never imposed a death sentence for conversion during this period. Even so, a male Muslim's sustained conversion to Christianity amounted to social death. According to Sharkey, Muslim females who showed an interest in converting to Christianity were often young women who encountered the religion in schools or orphanages, but under the guardianship of male relatives they were usually pulled from school before conversion could occur. It was almost impossible for Muslim women to convert to Christianity and be allowed by their families to live a Christian life in public. For Copts, the choice of leaving the Orthodox Church to become Protestant could be motivated by a religious experience but also by a rejection of the existing social order. Coptic women who attended mission schools often did not have any other choices for pursuing an education. To both Coptic and Muslim women, Protestant missionaries presented new female roles in religious and communal life.

The interwar period saw reorientations in Protestant missions in general. The carnage of World War I had ended the prewar optimism that these missions had felt. According to Sharkey, in the United States there was mounting criticism of foreign missions, and the UPCNA headquarters cut foreign mission funding. In Egypt the American mission faced growing hostility and new laws that made work among Muslims increasingly difficult. After Egypt became nominally independent from British rule in 1922, Christian missionaries played a symbolic role in debates about the future of Egypt. Meanwhile, new Muslim organizations criticized the government for not reigning in Christian missions. By the late 1920s antimissionary rhetoric in Egypt led to the emergence of new forms of Muslim social activism. New Muslim organizations adapted Christian missionary methods in their welfare work among Muslim children and the poor. Sharkey argues that the antimission activity and missionary self-reflection in Egypt during this period led to a “quiet” shift toward an understanding of mission that respected non-Christian religions and a diversity of religious beliefs. The focus was no longer to be on gaining converts, but on social service. The American Protestants were thus part of a global movement, with anticolonialism and increasing secularization leading missionaries to reinvent themselves as faith-based nongovernmental organizations. For the American mission this meant that its social work became professionally specialized in areas such as maternal care and dairy farming. Sharkey reveals how the history of the American University in Cairo, which had strong links to the American Protestant mission, is tied up with this shift toward forms of social engagement that after 1945 became associated with nongovernmental organizations.

Increased secularization in the Western world meant that by the 1960s Protestant mission was becoming irrelevant to the general public. But, as shown by Sharkey, it was mainly political developments in the Middle East that led to the closing of the American Presbyterian mission in 1967. By then the reputation of the United States in the region had eroded in large measure due to US support of Israel. With the defeat of Egypt in the 1967 war, anti-American sentiment in Egypt became so pronounced that all Americans were evacuated. This marked the end of one hundred years of American missionary presence in Egypt.

Beth Baron's The Orphan Scandal: Christian Missionaries and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood focuses on one of the last phases of Christian mission activity in Egypt: the battle between Protestant missionaries and Islamic activists over “the bodies and souls of Egyptian children on the field of social welfare” in the 1930s (p. 25). The book explores how Egyptian Muslim encounters with Protestantism transformed Islam and Egyptian society. At this time, radical evangelicals and especially female missionaries represented a cultural challenge to Islamists and the gender order they envisioned. While the number of Muslims converted to Protestantism was very small, the few conversions that took place broke family ties and had a disruptive effect on Egyptian society.

In 1933 the Swedish Salaam Mission in Port Said, a faith-based mission established in 1911 by the Swedish missionary Maria Ericsson that included a girls school and an orphanage, was accused of forcibly converting orphans. The institution became infamous after an incident in which a fifteen-year-old Muslim orphan girl named Turkiyya Hasan was beaten for refusing to rise in respect of her elders. To Muslims in Egypt this incident became known as an orphan scandal, where a missionary had beaten an orphan in an attempt to convert her to Christianity. The story was one of many conversions and attempted conversions in Egypt at the time. It created a national uproar and marked the beginning of the end of foreign missions in Egypt. It also marked the growth of Islamist organizations, including the Muslim Brotherhood. Drawing on sources from different Protestant missionary archives and the US and British National Archives, in addition to Egyptian Arabic sources, Baron uses the Turkiyya Hasan affair to examine the relationship between Christian evangelicals, Islamists, and officials of the semicolonial Egyptian state.

While the Egyptian-Ottoman government had attempted to strengthen social welfare through state intervention and by allowing the establishment of missionary institutions (as seen in the studies discussed earlier), British colonial policy cut back on state involvement. Private actors, especially foreign missionaries, filled the gap, in part by caring for orphans. Baron shows how the ambiguous status of abandoned children and the high economic costs of founding orphanages meant that few were established by local Egyptians. Instead, Egyptians helped to support foreign orphanages. Thus foreign missions gained control over the care of orphans and abandoned children, establishing a monopoly.

As noted by Sharkey, by the late 19th century single women missionaries formed the majority of Protestant missionaries in Egypt. The three evangelical mission establishments on which Baron focuses were all led and organized by single American and European women. Baron personalizes these missionaries by giving attention to their social and religious backgrounds, from the conservative Presbyterian Margaret Smith of the UPCNA, to the born again Lutheran Swede Maria Erikson, to the unaffiliated American evangelical Lillian Hunt Trasher, one of the most recognized Pentecostal missionaries worldwide. In all three orphanages girls from various religious backgrounds were exposed to Protestant rituals, Bible reading, and hard work—the legacy of industry and order established by the earlier Protestants described by Sedra.

As mentioned previously, the interwar period saw a reorientation of missions in the Middle East and globally away from proselytizing and toward education, health, and welfare. The aggressive evangelization of Smith, Erikson, and Thrasher in Egypt of the 1920s thus represented an exception to the general trend in Christian missions at the time. In Egypt it coincided with a seeming rise in the number of underage girls who converted to Protestantism in the late 1920s. The high and visible activity of Protestant evangelicals led to incidents that Muslims interpreted as assaults on Muslim children and youths, provoking a strong antimissionary response. As a way of countering mission influence, the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, formed local committees that launched new initiatives, including the establishment of schools and social work. Baron argues that the Muslim Brotherhood's initiatives and organizational structure often showed the clear imprint of missionary influence.

In Port Said, members of the Muslim Brotherhood monitored the Swedish Salaam Mission as part of a strategy of “rescuing” Muslim girls rumored to be in danger of conversion. When news got out that Turkiyya Hassan had been mistreated, the Muslim Brotherhood intervened, taking Turkiyya under their protection and making the story known nationally through the press. The missionaries defended themselves by insisting that they had not used force to convert the young girl, but Egyptians did not believe them. The Turkiyya Hasan affair ultimately changed the way missionaries were perceived in Egyptian society. Barons shows how the incident also created competition over the leadership of the Muslim community, with laymen gaining an advantage and interpreting Islam in new ways.

In response to the critiques of Muslim activists, the government started a policy of extracting Muslim children from missionary orphanages, forcing it to expand state orphanages and build new ones. This process led the Egyptian state to take on welfare activity that earlier had been the domain of private religious groups. But the state focused on the Muslim orphans and did not include Jews and Copts in its welfare work. Baron argues that the segregation of orphans by religion that resulted from the orphan scandal deepened religious divides in Egypt—yet another unintended and profound consequence of missionary encounters in the Middle East. While Baron's well-told story concentrates on political and social conflicts and power struggles caused by the missionary presence in Egypt, it gives vivid life to the people on all sides of these encounters.

“The missionary enterprise is hard to pin down because it was constantly evolving,” says Heather Sharkey (p. 178). Some Protestant missionaries chose to continue aggressive proselytizing despite hostile reactions from the society that hosted them. But in general, in the words of Ussama Makdisi, “missionaries left evangelization in order to accommodate themselves to foreign realities” (p. 215). These five books all deal with the issue of how Christian missionaries in the Middle East faced the challenge of accommodating foreign realities and with the unintended consequences of and local responses to their religious and social activities. With their transnational approach and pluralistic focus, these eminently researched studies open up new ways of understanding both the history of missions and the history of the Middle East.