I. Revivalism: American Missionaries and Syrian Protestants in Ottoman Beirut

Fueled by the awakenings and revivals in Puritan New England, which some scholars have interpreted as an “extension and culmination of the [Protestant] Reformation,”Footnote ⁶ the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) appointed the first American missionaries to the Middle East in 1819.Footnote ⁷ The ABCFM, initially an inter-denominational body with a Congregationalist majority, sent its first recruits to South Asia soon after the Board's formation in 1810.Footnote ⁸ The leaders of this pioneering mission society then set their sights on the Holy Land, aiming to replicate the New England revivals and inspire reformation of ancient Middle Eastern Christian communities, which the leaders imagined would then become partners in the evangelization of Muslims and Jews. The first mission station was established in Beirut, a port city in Ottoman Syria. This was the genesis of the American Syria Mission.

By the late nineteenth century, when John Mott's visit to Beirut brought Syrians into the worldwide Student Christian Movements, Ottoman Syria had experienced a revival but not the sort that the American missionaries had originally intended. Beirut had become the center of a cultural renaissance (known in Arabic as the Nahda), marked by a rise in education and literacy, the growth of an independent Arabic press, and the outpouring of Arabic newspapers, books, and literary-scientific journals.Footnote ⁹ The American Syria Mission—which the ABCFM transferred to the control of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions in 1870—contributed to this flourishing intellectual environment through the American Mission Press (AMP) in Beirut and the elementary and secondary schools it established throughout present-day Lebanon and along the western edge of Syria.Footnote ¹⁰ American missionaries also initiated Syrian Protestant College (known today as the American University of Beirut). This institution, which was independent of the Syria Mission, trained influential men of the Nahda, including Syrian Protestants, Greek Orthodox Christians, and Muslims.Footnote ¹¹ The united efforts of missionaries and Syrian Protestants also resulted in the establishment of the Syrian Evangelical Church, with a handful of congregations throughout the region and a smaller number of ordained Syrian pastors. Between 1870 and 1914, this Syrian Protestant community grew from 294 to 3,120 communicants.Footnote ¹²

These Arabic-speaking Protestant churches were made up primarily of first generation converts from Greek Orthodox, Catholic, or Armenian Apostolic communities and their children. As Ottoman law prohibited the conversion of Muslims to Christianity, and Jewish communities in Syria remained closed to missionary efforts, American evangelists in the nineteenth century focused almost exclusively upon existing Christian communities, approaching them with doctrinal arguments reminiscent of the Protestant Reformation. Missionaries criticized the ritual traditions and clerical hierarchies of Eastern churches; the use of icons, statues, and crucifixes; the veneration of the Virgin Mary; the claims of Christ's real presence in the Eucharist; and the inattention of Catholic and Orthodox leaders to vernacular study of the Bible. Such critiques appeared repeatedly in the Arabic literature produced by the AMP and were central to the theological debates carried out in the 1880s between the Arabic newspapers of the AMP, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, and the Jesuit press in Beirut.Footnote ¹³

Ordained American missionary men maintained administrative and financial control over the Syrian Evangelical Churches and outnumbered the ordained Syrian pastors until the interwar period. As in other global mission fields, however, the Protestant missionary focus on Bible translation and vernacular preaching gave Syrians the impetus to become partners in the missionary enterprise.Footnote ¹⁴ This was apparent in the published theological debates and other literary productions of the AMP in Beirut, the majority of which were written and edited by Syrians. The mission press, therefore, became a means for Syrian Protestants to participate in the literary and cultural currents of the Nahda, contributing to the development of both church and society in Syria. This was particularly true for the generation of Syrian Protestant men and women who came of age in the late nineteenth century.

II. Renewal: Student Movements, Women's Leadership, and Ecumenism in the Middle East

John Mott (1865–1955), the chairman of the International Committee of the Intercollegiate YMCA, organized the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF) with the Swedish leader Karl Fries in 1895 and then embarked on a world tour to unite national Christian student movements in Europe, South and East Asia, and the Near East under the umbrella of this new Federation. Sociocultural change was in the air when Mott arrived that year at the Syrian Protestant College (SPC) in Beirut. Not only was the city a hub for the Nahda but also a generation of Syrians that had grown up in this cultural renaissance and were ready and willing to lead their nation into an era of modernization and reform. For many Syrian Protestants who had been educated in mission schools like the college in Beirut, this vision of reformation also meant spiritual renewal of Christian communities in the region and new endeavors to lead their Muslim neighbors to Christ. Toward this end, the establishment of an American-supported YMCA branch at SPC following Mott's visit gave students at this all-male institution an opportunity to work for “the evangelization of the world in this generation,” the motto adopted by the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions (the missionary arm of the YMCA) at its inception in 1886. With this evangelistic orientation and the emphasis upon Christian spirituality in the Association's constitution, the members of this early YMCA in Beirut were to be Christians, although not necessarily Protestants.Footnote ¹⁵

In what follows, I examine Syrian participation in the YMCA and WSCF from the time of Mott's visit at SPC until 1915, when the effects of World War I disrupted the work of missions in the region. I use the Syrian student movements of this period as a lens through which to understand the development of Mott's worldwide Christian Federation, which soon made great strides toward ecumenical renewal and the empowerment of women for Christian leadership.

Following his 1895 tour of the region, Mott identified SPC as “by far the most important place I visited” in the Levant.Footnote ¹⁶ On his second visit to the school in 1911, Mott would characterize SPC as “preeminently a center from which to impress the Near Eastern World.”Footnote ¹⁷ More specifically, he viewed the college in Beirut, which attracted students from throughout the Ottoman Empire, as a key partner in bringing the Muslim world to Christ. While the SPC leaders did not specify the aim of evangelizing Muslims in the YMCA constitution, it was implied in the organization's stated purpose to enable students “to feel their responsibility . . . to lead other students to Christ and to promote the advancement of the Kingdom of God throughout the world.”Footnote ¹⁸ For the American professors at SPC, who filled most of the leadership positions of the fledgling YMCA, this Association branch offered another opportunity beyond college chapel services and Bible classes to influence the spiritual life of the institution's Protestant, Maronite, Melkite, Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, Muslim, Jewish, and Druze students.Footnote ¹⁹ For Syrians, however, membership in the YMCA provided a sense of unity and connection with a global Christian movement, regardless of their particular affiliation with the Syrian Evangelical Churches established by the American Syria Mission. These denominationally Presbyterian and Congregational churches rigorously examined candidates for membership and often required of spiritual inquirers and “hopefully converted” Christians lengthy periods of probation.Footnote ²⁰ In a number of ways, involvement in the para-church movements of the YMCA and WSCF gave Syrian students welcome means of bypassing such doctrinal rigidity.

First, the declaration cards Mott collected while visiting SPC and other Protestant institutions in the Middle East gave students from the region's diverse religious communities an opportunity to make a commitment to the teachings of Jesus without going through the process of gaining membership in a local Protestant church. After his evangelistic messages at SPC in 1911, Mott noted that one hundred forty-two men of different religions “signed their names with solemn purpose to obey Christ.” According to Mott, one of these “eager inquirers” wrote, “I resolve to go the way of Jesus Christ bravely and obey His teachings, and try to open up my mind and study His life and follow these by practical results.” Another student asserted, “I have decided to study this Christ more profoundly than ever.”Footnote ²¹

Second, in a period of increased transnational migration, American missionaries tended to discourage young Syrians from traveling internationally for fear that potential pastors and school teachers would immigrate to the West. After the foundation of the Beirut YMCA, however, Syrian students experienced face-to-face encounters with a worldwide student movement through the frequent visits of WSCF leaders and through opportunities to attend the Federation's international meetings. For example, Shukri Kessab (b. 1880), an 1899 graduate of SPC, represented his YMCA branch at the world's Student Christian Federation conference in Denmark in 1902.Footnote ²²

Third, although such opportunities came later for Syrian women, global student movements opened new avenues for female students to assert spiritual leadership outside of the Protestant church, where they were often treated as subordinates to American and Syrian clergymen and to Western missionary women. It was after Mott returned to Beirut in 1911 with Ruth Rouse (1872–1956) that the American and British colleges for Syrian women established branches of the YWCA. Rouse, who was a WSCF secretary from 1905–1924, made a lasting impression upon the Syrian and American Protestant women she met in Beirut, and some of them maintained correspondence with her following this visit.Footnote ²³ These included Charlotte Brown, the principal of the American School for Girls in Sidon, and Emma Hay Nelson, who described the newly-organized YWCA at the American-run girls’ school in Tripoli and raised the possibility of forming another branch at her station in Homs.Footnote ²⁴ Unlike the YMCA in Beirut, over which American men asserted primary control, Syrian women played an equal, if not greater, role in the women's student movements than did their American and British missionary counterparts. Almay Hurani, the head teacher at the girls’ school in Sidon, traveled with Charlotte Brown to hear Rouse speak in Beirut and was instrumental in establishing a branch of the Association for the girls she taught.Footnote ²⁵ Marie Kessab and Mariam Baroody, both Syrian Protestant teachers at the British Training College in Beirut, were the only two women to represent Syria at the Constantinople conference of the WSCF in 1911. They attended along with nine American and Syrian men.Footnote ²⁶ According to reports of the female-led British Syrian Mission, Marie Kessab “came back much enthused by all she saw and heard, especially by the meetings with students of so many other nationalities.” It was Marie who led the female pupils at the Training College to form a student branch of the YWCA when she returned from the conference, the first such women's association in Syria.Footnote ²⁷ It was also Marie who, when her British supervisors were expelled from the Ottoman Empire during World War I,Footnote ²⁸ demonstrated her leadership abilities by keeping the British Training College operational, running it out of her own home.Footnote ²⁹

With at least thirty nationalities represented among the one hundred twenty-six delegates, the 1911 Constantinople conference was unique in comparison to previous WSCF gatherings. Indeed, as the majority of the delegates were not American or Western European (delegates came primarily from Mexico, South Africa, Persia, Turkey, Syria, Egypt, India, East Asia, and Eastern Europe), the Constantinople conference stood out from other missionary meetings like the famed World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910, where only seventeen of the 1,214 delegates represented the so-called “younger” churches of South and East Asia and one additional delegate came from Turkey.Footnote ³⁰ Beyond the greater international diversity and higher representation of women at the conference, the Christian heritage of the Near East also enabled an ecumenical richness that went far beyond the Protestant ecumenism of Edinburgh. Members of Maronite, Greek Orthodox, Russian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Armenian, Syrian, and Coptic churches were all present as delegates in Constantinople, including personal representatives sent by some church patriarchs.Footnote ³¹ Following the meeting, John Mott contended, “Not since the early Councils of the Christian Church—held in the part of the world where we met this year—has there been an assembly of Christians so representative of the entire Church.”Footnote ³² In a period when Presbyterian missionaries in Syria still identified Maronites and Greek Orthodox Christians as outside the fold of “true Christianity,” this was a significant achievement. Displaying this same spirit of ecumenical reconciliation and renewal, the general committee of the WSCF passed a resolution at Constantinople which, in the words of American conference delegate Silas McBee, “marks an epoch in the history of the Federation, and is another indication of the spirit of unity that is at work in the world.”Footnote ³³ The new resolution stated:

Thus, the para-church structure of the student volunteer movement better fulfilled the original aim of missionaries, like the Americans who settled in Beirut in the 1820s, to unite Middle Eastern Christians in the work of leading their non-Christian neighbors to Christ. Rather than inducing a revival of Middle Eastern Christianity or a modern Protestant Reformation, the WSCF sought to renew the ecumenical spirit of the early church.

III. Reform: Interreligious National Movements

The WSCF chose Constantinople as the site for its 1911 conference to promote union among Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox churches and for the symbolism of organizing an evangelical Christian conference at the very center of the Islamic world, where the Ottoman Sultan held the title of caliph or successor to the prophet Muhammad.Footnote ³⁵ Much had changed in the Middle East since the first WSCF branches formed in the region in 1895. At that time, such a missionary gathering in Constantinople, the seat of Ottoman power, would have been impossible. In the intervening years, the same spirit of sociopolitical reform that defined the Arab renaissance in Syria had also prompted a movement for constitutional reform in Ottoman Turkey. The Young Turk Revolution of 1908 established a constitutional monarchy wherein the Sultan remained the symbolic head of state. Missionaries throughout the Ottoman Empire spoke enthusiastically at first about the religious freedoms they believed would be opened by the Young Turks, and this new opportunity for student evangelism was not lost on the leaders of the WSCF.Footnote ³⁶ Referencing the political revolution in Turkey three years earlier, Mott wrote, “The convening of a world Christian congress within the gates of what some regard as the greatest citadel of the Mohammedan world bears witness to one of the most wonderful changes of modern times.”Footnote ³⁷

Amid this optimism about the evangelization of the Muslim world, the spirit of reformation exhibited by Muslim leaders, intellectuals, and students in the Ottoman Empire also prompted a shift in thinking among some missionary and student movement leaders. In Syria, the YMCA branch at SPC moved beyond mere Christian ecumenical openness to amend the Association constitution in 1906 “so that students who are members of non-Christian religions, may be elected to the Association as Fellowship Members.”Footnote ³⁸ No evidence of conversion or profession of faith was required, but members would have to affirm the Fellowship Covenant, which read, “In becoming a Fellowship Member in the Association, you desire to testify to the help you have received in your daily life from the teachings and life of Jesus, and you desire to associate yourself with those who are learning from Him.”Footnote ³⁹ While such a statement might serve as a stepping stone toward the Christian faith, these words were ambiguous enough that Muslim students could affirm them without betraying the Islamic tradition, with its reverence toward Jesus as a teacher and prophet.

This inclusion of non-Christian fellowship members also reflected the Syrian Nahda spirit in which Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the region joined together for the pursuit of the common good of the Syrian homeland. This work became even more important after World War I, when Lebanon and Syria were no longer under Ottoman control, and Arab Christians and Muslims labored side by side to restore a society decimated by war-induced famine and poverty. In the political arena, some Christian and Muslim leaders united in an Arab nationalist movement that elevated cultural and linguistic affinities above religious identity or territorial nationalism. Throughout the interwar period and into the 1970s, the students of Syrian Protestant College, renamed the American University of Beirut (AUB) in 1920, were fierce supporters of such Arab nationalist movements.Footnote ⁴⁰ The Christian student movement also took on a more openly interreligious character following WWI. In the 1920s, Dr. Philip Hitti of AUB, a former delegate of the 1911 Constantinople Conference, became the “guiding spirit” of the West Hall Brotherhood on the university campus, a successor organization to Syrian Protestant College's YMCA. This Brotherhood united students of all religious backgrounds in service to the newly-established state of Greater Lebanon (as designated in 1920; the Republic of Lebanon came into being in 1926). This was an arrangement that the executive secretary of the YMCA, Charles Hurrey, enthusiastically commended, indicating his view that the Brotherhood had not departed from YMCA or WSCF aims.Footnote ⁴¹ Embracing their common humanity, reform-minded Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Lebanon could labor together for the good of their nation.

While Christian assertions of solidarity between members of different faiths would become more commonplace in the interwar period, as a para-church organization tied to student movements across the globe the World Student Christian Federation was a forerunner in advocating a more sensitive approach to world religions. At the 1911 Constantinople conference, for example, McBee noted that one heard less “destructive criticism of those religions that have helped millions out of the very depths of human depravity.” While McBee also affirmed that non-Christian religions were “totally inadequate to save humanity from itself,” this appreciative tone was a significant departure from the views of the most vocal American missionaries in the Middle East in the early twentieth century.Footnote ⁴² Henry Harris Jessup (1832–1910), a leading figure of the American Syria Mission, consistently denounced Islam as a depraved religion in his speeches and publications,Footnote ⁴³ and Samuel Zwemer (1867–1952), who worked in Arabia and Egypt, aimed for the “disintegration of Islam” and provoked Muslim student protests when he distributed polemical literature at the Islamic university of al-Azhar in Cairo in 1928.Footnote ⁴⁴ Members of Syrian student movements, however, were more likely to support the sort of views articulated by William Temple Gairdner (1873–1928), the British missionary in Egypt who contended that Christianity came not to destroy but to fulfill other faiths.Footnote ⁴⁵ It is no coincidence that John N. Farquhar (1861–1929), the Scottish missionary who advocated a similar fulfilment theology while working in India,Footnote ⁴⁶ had been among the WSCF conference speakers in Constantinople.Footnote ⁴⁷

Another like-minded Constantinople delegate, Lawson P. Chambers, was the traveling secretary of the YMCA in Turkey. Drawing upon the experiences of Association branches in the Middle East, Chambers advocated for the YMCA to allow “the Christlike man to become an active member of the YMCA whether he be Moslem, or Jew, or Christian by name.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Chambers continued, “How we are to know whether a man is Christlike or not, who is to judge, is also a question that would have to be worked out. I am persuaded that insistence upon name or creed is—in view of the peculiar conditions of Turkey, social, political, racial, religious, and all—not only unnecessary but also prejudicial to the task of regeneration.”Footnote ⁴⁹ These reflections on the “peculiar conditions” in Turkey also rang true for Syria, where being religious in name was essential to the fabric of Ottoman society, from questions of family inheritance to political representation and payment of imperial taxes. Chambers’ statement thus offers insight on the interreligious possibilities of the para-church student movements. While denominationally-based missions like the Presbyterian Board in Syria measured their successes through church membership statistics and officially-sanctioned conversions, involvement in the spiritual life of the YMCA/YWCA allowed Syrians of all religious traditions the possibility of following the teachings of Christ without formally renouncing their cultural or religious heritage or seeking Protestant church membership. This did not alter the intent of the student Christian movements to “promote the cause of Christ's Kingdom,” but such practices did demonstrate a sensitivity and appreciation for Eastern Christian and Muslim perspectives that made the WSCF in the Middle East distinct from denominationally-driven missions in the region. During and after World War I, those Christian student leaders nurtured in these movements were better prepared to work for and with their Muslim neighbors for social restoration and national reform.