I. Ahmed Fahmy in the Missionary Context

Ahmed Fahmy, who was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1861 and died in Golders Green, London, in 1933,Footnote ¹ was the most celebrated convert from Islam to Christianity in the history of the American Presbyterian mission in Egypt. American Presbyterians had started work in Egypt in 1854 and soon developed the largest Protestant mission in the country.Footnote ² They opened schools, hospitals, and orphanages; sponsored the development of Arabic Christian publishing and Bible distribution; and with local Egyptians organized evangelical work in towns and villages from Alexandria to Aswan. In an age when Anglo-American Protestant missions were expanding across the globe, they conceived of their mission as a universal one and sought to draw Copts and Muslims alike toward their reformed (that is, Protestant) creed. In the long run, American efforts led to the creation of an Egyptian Evangelical church (Kanisa injiliyya misriyya) even while stimulating a kind of “counter-reformation” within Coptic Orthodoxy along with new forms of social outreach among Muslim activists and nationalists.Footnote ³

The American Presbyterians in Egypt did not focus on Muslim evangelization until after the British Occupation of 1882 when Protestant missionaries, buoyed by the waves of British imperial expansion, entered their own period of rhetorical and tactical muscle flexing. Ahmed Fahmy's conversion, which occurred in 1877, therefore predated the British Occupation and the missionary turn toward Muslim evangelization by five years. Since there are no signs in missionary records that the Americans had actively tried to convert him, and since the missionaries appeared to greet his declaration of Christian faith with a degree of surprise, Ahmed Fahmy was in some sense an accidental convert. He was certainly one of a relatively small group: according to the missionary Andrew Watson, writing in 1906, the American Presbyterians in Egypt had reported just 140 converts from Islam in the mission's first half-century in Egypt, though some of these people, Watson noted vaguely, had reverted to Islam.Footnote ⁴ Judging from his papers surviving in London, Ahmed became a committed evangelical Christian and went on to pursue his own mission in southeastern China under the auspices of the British interdenominational London Missionary Society (LMS). Many Egyptian Protestants (and especially those who had come from Coptic backgrounds) became lay evangelists or evangelical church pastors over the years, but not until 1953 did another Egyptian evangelical attain the status of “missionary” in the ranks of Anglo-American counterparts.Footnote ⁵ In this regard Ahmed Fahmy was decades ahead of his time, and his pursuit of a career with the British LMS mission explains why American Presbyterians celebrated his case for so long.Footnote ⁶

Since the 1990s leading scholars have recognized the transnational dimensions of missionary encounters. They have traced, for example, the social and historical links that connected nineteenth-century British missionaries in southern Africa and the Caribbean to churches and societies in Britain, or American missions in the Ottoman Levant to earlier missions to Native Americans.Footnote ⁷ A few have scanned the history of single mission societies as they operated globally in places as far afield as India, Polynesia, and Australia, or have brought new attention to bear on the interrelated history of British imperial and Protestant missionary expansion.Footnote ⁸ Still others have scrutinized the local implications of transnationalism. For example, one historian has considered how, in what is now Nigeria, Yoruba-speaking evangelists, who worked for a British mission society, seeded changes at the grass roots while establishing a new Yoruba culture of writing by means of the reports they prepared for and sent to London.Footnote ⁹ The ambitious goal of all these works has been to cast light on the presentation, transmission, and reception of Christianity, often while considering how, through churches and other social spaces, non-Western peoples made Christianity, and Christian cultures, their own.Footnote ¹⁰ Yet even relative to these richly detailed case studies, the story of Ahmed Fahmy appears special because it illuminates transnationalism on so many fronts. His life and career linked three separate missions (the missions of the United Presbyterian Church of North America [UPCNA] and the Reformed Church in America [RCA], as well as the LMSFootnote ¹¹), two mission fields (Egypt and China), two major mission-sponsoring countries (the United States and Great Britain), and even two world religions (Islam and Christianity).

Ahmed Fahmy was both a one-man exemplar of Christian transnationalism and the product of our modern age of globalization. He did not, however, represent a unitary “global Christianity,” if that term is meant to imply either some kind of religious homogenization across continents or regions, or some kind of non-Western religious bloc.Footnote ¹² Just as cultural theorists recognize that modern globalization has not led to cultural uniformity but rather has made people “aware of new levels of diversity” even within worldwide webs of interdependency,Footnote ¹³ so some historians of religion now argue for the existence of “world Christianities,” with an emphasis on the plural, as a way of recognizing the cultural diversity inherent in the world's Christian communities.Footnote ¹⁴ Yet if Ahmed Fahmy's career does not support the idea of a blurring or converging global Christian culture, it does nevertheless illustrate the complex and at times intersecting paths of change that missionary efforts pushed forward.

On the more personal level, Ahmed Fahmy's experiences in Egypt also offer insights into the social (re)invention of the convert. His short career as a convert in Egypt, which lasted less than a year (1877–1878) before he fled to Britain, confirms the idea that conversion, across cultures and periods, is a process, and not a spiritual event or flashpoint.Footnote ¹⁵ Conversion is, moreover, an intensely social process, involving not just the individual convert but also the convert's family and community. In Ahmed Fahmy's case, conversion led to his rupture from Egypt's Islamic society. Far from being a mere abstraction of belief, Ahmed Fahmy's conversion therefore demanded that he address his own “problems of self-identification in a shattered social world.”Footnote ¹⁶

This article first describes Ahmed Fahmy's experiences as a convert in Egypt and the implications of his conversion for the American Presbyterian mission in that country. It then considers his career in China by assessing his work, impact, and place within the British mission that originally deployed him. Ultimately, the career of Ahmed Fahmy was both unique and representative. His experience of converting from Islam to Christianity in Egypt and then of becoming a medical evangelist in China (where he appears to have been the only non-Anglo listed on the LMS roster of “English” missionariesFootnote ¹⁷) made him a rare cultural hybrid, indeed, one of a kind. Yet, the trajectories of his emigration from Egypt, together with his participation in a global missionary movement, made him an embodiment of an Anglo-American Protestant movement that was fostering the plurality of “world Christianities.”Footnote ¹⁸

II. Ahmed Fahmy in Egypt

What do we know about Ahmed Fahmy? From American Presbyterian missionary sources, including the diaries of missionaries who described his conversion as it unfolded, we can gather that he came from an upstanding and prosperous Muslim family that owned estates in Minya (Middle Egypt) and a residence in Cairo. Ahmed himself had studied for a time at al-Azhar, the venerable Sunni Muslim university mosque, and had some knowledge of English and French. His father held the respected post of chief clerk in a Muslim court of appeal. Ahmed had two brothers, named Muhammad and Mahmud, and all three of them had attended the American mission boys' school in Cairo: this would have been in the 1870s, when wealthy Muslim students were beginning to attend missionary schools in greater numbers, encouraged by parents who wanted sons and daughters to learn European languages and gain exposure to Western ideas.Footnote ¹⁹ One of Ahmed's brothers was even working for the American missionaries in Minya at the time Ahmed professed his Christian belief. About Ahmed's mother, the missionary sources only say that she grieved upon his baptism and pled with him to recant.Footnote ²⁰

In 1875, when Ahmed was fifteen, the mission hired him to teach Arabic to one of the new female missionaries, Miss Margaret Smith (1847–1932), and they read various devotional books together, including a daily chapter from the Bible. “After several months with Miss Smith,” the senior missionary Andrew Watson wrote, “he began to ask questions, and finally he became satisfied as to the truth of Christianity.” When Ahmed professed faith and underwent baptism in 1877, Watson added, “news of his defection from the religion of his fathers spread rapidly through the city.”Footnote ²¹ Thus Ahmed became an apostate, violating the Muslim doctrine and popular belief that conversion into Islam was permitted but conversion out was not. Theoretically, scholars point out, the Islamic legal tradition provided apostates with opportunities to recant but failing that cited death as the ultimate sanction for renouncing Islam;Footnote ²² in practice, in the Egypt of Ahmed Fahmy, the first line of sanction was pressure—intense pressure to recant under threat of assault and possible death.Footnote ²³ The goal for Muslim society—and indeed more specifically for Ahmed's family—was to return the apostate, alive and whole, to the fold.

American missionaries described the pressures that Ahmed faced after his baptism, along with his efforts to take sanctuary in the mission house. Missionaries reported that Ahmed's brothers and friends came to plead with him after his baptism. When that failed, they reported, some friends and relatives dressed up as peasants, waited outside the mission house, and kidnapped him by hauling him away in a horse-drawn wagon. Thereupon they confined him in his father's house. The missionaries appealed to American and British consuls, who interceded with the Khedive Isma'il (ruler of Egypt, 1863–1879) and his government to extract information and guarantees for Ahmed's safety. Yet Egyptian authorities reportedly said that Ahmed's father had “a right to retain him” while the consuls declared it “a very delicate case.”Footnote ²⁴ Andrew Watson, the primary missionary source on this issue, concluded that the Egyptian government “would rather have the name of religious intolerance than do justice.”Footnote ²⁵ The missionary Anna Young Thompson (who had also studied Arabic with Ahmed Fahmy) wrote in her diary at the time that a certain “Sharif Pasha” sought help against the missionaries from the Khedive, who ambiguously declared, “There is freedom of religion; nothing can be done.” Sharif Pasha also appealed to the rector of al-Azhar, who reportedly said that Ahmed should be burned.Footnote ²⁶ Meanwhile, Andrew Watson claimed, the family variously threatened to kill Ahmed (according to one version, by hiring Greek thugs to do him in, and later by threatening to poison him), hired a sheikh to write amulets to restore his Muslim faith, and forced him to sign a document of recantation in the office of the chief of police. Eventually he got word to the missionaries that his Christian faith was intact and escaped to one of their houses.Footnote ²⁷

News of Ahmed Fahmy reached the young Lord Aberdeen, who happened to be in Egypt on his honeymoon. This was the seventh Lord Aberdeen, also known as John Campbell Hamilton-Gordon, who went on to serve as governor-general of Canada from 1893 to 1898.Footnote ²⁸ His father, the fifth Lord Aberdeen, had been a devout evangelical Christian who was passionate about ministering to the British poor and who was inspired by the Ragged Schools Movement.Footnote ²⁹ The elder Aberdeen had gone to Egypt in the early 1860s in an attempt to recover from what was probably tuberculosis. There he developed friendships with American Presbyterian missionaries and with them launched an initiative to distribute Arabic Bibles in Upper Egypt.Footnote ³⁰ This fifth Lord Aberdeen had died in 1864, thirteen years before Ahmed Fahmy's conversion. Yet when his son, the seventh Aberdeen, arrived in Egypt as a honeymooner in 1877, he sought out his father's old friends among the American Presbyterians and heard about Ahmed Fahmy's travails. Aberdeen decided to take the young man under his wing and arranged his escape from Egypt—claiming in his memoirs that he found an English sea captain to collude with them, smuggled Ahmed Fahmy on board, and foiled an Egyptian search party. Lord Aberdeen then arranged for Ahmed Fahmy to study medicine in Scotland and supported him for the decade that followed. Lord Aberdeen's memoirs, written in 1925 and reflecting primarily on his career in Canada, constitute a valuable source about Ahmed Fahmy and his career as an émigré.Footnote ³¹

Four points regarding Ahmed Fahmy's experience in Egypt deserve closer attention:

First, as part of the effort to persuade Ahmed Fahmy to recant, Ahmed's family enlisted help from Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838–1897), the most famous Muslim activist of the late nineteenth-century Islamic world, and a man who became closely identified with the pan-Islamic, Muslim anti-colonial, and Muslim modernist movements.Footnote ³² (Afghani still has many supporters today; for example, the Swiss Muslim thinker Tariq Ramadan [b. 1962] cites him as a major inspiration.Footnote ³³) Strikingly, the American missionaries held Afghani in contempt because they regarded him, in Andrew Watson's words, as “more of an infidel than a Muhammadan.”Footnote ³⁴ Nearly a century later, one Middle East historian wrote in a similar vein that Afghani practiced a “false but shadowy devotion” for the sake of his activism.Footnote ³⁵ Anna Young Thompson, a young missionary who overheard the discussion that occurred in the mission house, described in her diary the appearance of this “learned Moslim man known as ‘The Philosopher’ for his much & overwhelming talk & arguments, [a man] from Persia or Afghanistan … who can argue that there is a God or that there is none.” She heard them discussing Christ, Muhammad, the Bible, and Voltaire and added, “Our friends said these men had no religion, that they were nearly infidels. But Ahmed's father had sent them to talk and he Ahmed was not afraid to answer them.”Footnote ³⁶ Afghani's cameo appearance in the story of Ahmed Fahmy offers a neat illustration of the intersecting global histories of Islam and Christianity, on Egyptian soil, in this period.

Second, American missionaries lost touch with Ahmed Fahmy after his departure from Egypt and were only dimly aware of his subsequent career as a missionary in China. Nevertheless, American Presbyterians continued to cite the case of Ahmed Fahmy in subsequent histories of the mission, to view his experience as a case study in the trials facing Egyptian converts from Islam, and to connect his experiences to the struggle for what they called religious liberty in Egypt. In important ways he embodied both the missionaries' hopes and disappointments in Egypt. For example, in 1907, thirteen years before he inaugurated the American University in Cairo, Charles R. Watson (the son of the mission leader Andrew Watson) concluded that the case of Ahmed Fahmy “showed that the day had passed when a Moslem could be legally put to death in Egypt for becoming a Christian, but it also revealed the power of Islam and its relentless hostility toward Christianity.”Footnote ³⁷ American missionaries continued to celebrate Ahmed Fahmy's conversion for years to come, describing his case even in the mission's centennial history published in 1958.Footnote ³⁸ Yet they appear to have believed that, as the son of a well-to-do and well-connected Muslim family, Ahmed Fahmy was able to persist in being a Christian and to go on to a missionary career because he left Egypt. Ahmed Fahmy certainly gained, through emigration, the freedom to reinvent himself as an English-speaking evangelical Christian.

Third, the idea of Egyptian emigration to North America appears to have been in the air when Ahmed Fahmy's baptism occurred. This idea gained momentum so that, by the late twentieth century, encounters with American mission-founded institutions, and above all with mission schools, eased the path of emigration for Egyptians, both Muslim and Christian, to the United States.Footnote ³⁹ The missionary Anna Young Thompson confided to her diary on November 17, 1877, that Ahmed's brothers accused him of converting merely so that he could “marry an American wife, & go to America & get an education.”Footnote ⁴⁰ And indeed, his relationship with Margaret Smith—officially just a relationship between tutor and student—may have contributed to his evangelical turn. According to Thompson, Ahmed's own family believed that physical or romantic attraction was at play, and suggested marriage to a suitable Egyptian woman as a possible cure for his malaise.Footnote ⁴¹ As it happened, Ahmed went to Scotland, not the U.S., for an education. But twenty-eight years later, following the death of his first, Scottish wife in a cholera epidemic, Ahmed did marry an American—in a Protestant union church in Hong Kong—and only then made his way to America.Footnote ⁴²

Finally, among indigenous Egyptian Christians (that is, Copts) in the nineteenth century, hybrid identities were becoming more common—and more accepted—as missionary activities inspired some Egyptian Christians to leave Coptic Orthodoxy for Protestant or Catholic churches. In the late nineteenth century, Copts of all sectarian backgrounds were also increasingly intermarrying, producing hybrid Catholic-Orthodox, Protestant-Catholic, and Protestant-Orthodox households. Church authorities (Orthodox, Protestant, and Catholic alike) were often unhappy about these “mixed marriages” but had no legal power to prevent them.Footnote ⁴³ By contrast, Egyptian Muslim authorities and families, often backed up on the ground by local police forces, did have considerable legal and social power to prevent Muslim apostates from retaining or gaining their social footings and from establishing hybrid Muslim-Christian households.Footnote ⁴⁴ In short, there was no culture of live-and-let-live that would have allowed a Muslim-born (and high-born) man like Ahmed Fahmy to carve out a Christian existence in Cairo. When he jumped on the ship in Alexandria harbor, Ahmed Fahmy may have believed that staying Christian would mean leaving Egypt and creating a career, family, and community anew.

III. Ahmed Fahmy in China

Information about Ahmed is scanty for the ten years after his departure from Egypt. An LMS register of missionaries records that after reaching Britain early in 1878 he began to study medicine and liberal arts in Edinburgh. Edinburgh University records confirm that he matriculated in 1878 and completed his qualifying medical examinations in 1886.Footnote ⁴⁵ On January 20, 1887, he married Mary Auchterlonie Chalmers in Edinburgh; twenty days later, he and his bride sailed for China.Footnote ⁴⁶ On April 1, 1887, the couple arrived in Amoy, Fukien (Fujian) province, and set out to open a new mission station in the nearby city of “Chiang Chiu” (also known as Changchew, or Zhangzhou), thereby becoming, according to the LMS sources, the “first foreigners” in that locale.Footnote ⁴⁷ Missionaries described Zhangzhou at the time as a prosperous, but still very provincial, small city located in southeast China; it had a strong agricultural base and centuries-old connections to the silk trade. Its residents, whom an LMS chronicler described as “proud and haughty,” and as having “the most supreme contempt for foreigners,” greeted the arrival of Ahmed and Mary Fahmy, and of missionaries in general, with some hostility.Footnote ⁴⁸ In 1987, one hundred years after the couple's arrival in Zhangzhou, one of their missionary successors in the city looked back on the missionary enterprise and remarked, “Foreigners, then in the 1880s, were not welcomed generally [in Zhangzhou], and Dr. Fahmy was stoned on occasion.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Information on Ahmed Fahmy grows richer after 1887, when he began to send letters and reports from China to the LMS headquarters in London. In Zhangzhou, Ahmed opened the town's first Western hospital, which he called in colloquial Chinese the “Hokim I-Kuan” or the “Gospel Healing House.” Papers show that he was the driving force and organizational dynamo behind this venture until his retirement in 1919.

“Thirty Years in Changchow: A Beloved Physician,” by C. G. Sparham, photograph taken at Ahmed Fahmy's retirement party in Zhangzhou, south Fukien, China, on December 12, 1918. Reproduced from the London Missionary Society/Council for World Mission Archives.

Ahmed Fahmy wrote so much like an English evangelical missionary of this period and, indeed, he signed all his papers “A. Fahmy” (thereby reducing his quintessentially Muslim given name, Ahmed, to an initial) that one might never have known that he began his life in Egypt.Footnote ⁵⁰ Judging from his writings, his cultural conversion from Egyptian-Muslim to Anglo-Christian was, by the time he reached China, substantial. “The Hospital work is divided into two distinct, though naturally and intrinsically intermingling, departments,” he wrote in an 1888 report, “… the evangelistic and the medical. While the former is doubtless the main and grand object of the Institution, the latter is nevertheless the practical expression of God's ‘good will toward men,’ and men's fraternal love toward one another; and is also the Door thro' which we usher in these long-benighted heathen within hearing of the ‘Glad news of Salvation.’”Footnote ⁵¹ He wrote in an 1891 report, meanwhile,

With his comments on the spiritual “dullness” of the Chinese, Ahmed Fahmy sounded the tone of cultural imperiousness that was common among so many British and American missionaries of this era.Footnote ⁵³

What impact did Ahmed Fahmy have on the Zhangzhou community, and how did his work relate to the LMS mission that sponsored him? Here, too, a few points are salient.

First, Ahmed Fahmy influenced the culture, practice, and business of local medicine, and judging from his reports and from the assessment of one of his successors, he did so with little help from the LMS.Footnote ⁵⁴ He performed appendectomies, removed tumors and gallstones, operated on eyes, amputated limbs, treated fractures, did plastic surgery on faces, and more. He carried out and promoted smallpox vaccinations and—at a time when Protestant missionaries were speaking out loudly against the British opium tradeFootnote ⁵⁵—treated recovering opium addicts. Perhaps most significantly, he trained young Chinese men as his medical assistants, and by 1896 several of these had become Christians and had gone on to establish their own “medicine shops” in the town. (This missionary practice of training local assistants may help to explain why, by 1900, Chinese Protestants throughout the country were disproportionately represented in professions like medicine.Footnote ⁵⁶) Ahmed Fahmy claimed that he had to keep training new assistants because these local medicine shops, which he likened in 1902 to “branch dispensaries” of his hospital, were so lucrative.Footnote ⁵⁷ By 1908, Ahmed reported, thirteen medical shops were being operated in Zhangzhou, all of them by his own former assistants or by those who had trained with other missions.Footnote ⁵⁸ By 1913, all five of his new trainees were second-generation Chinese Christians, and one of these was the son of a woman who had recovered from an opium addiction and had then embraced Christianity.Footnote ⁵⁹

Judging from Ahmed Fahmy's letters and reports, his hospital treated mainly poor and humble people and had a clientele that was mainly illiterate. On occasions when a high-ranking “mandarin” sought treatment, it earned special mention in his reports.Footnote ⁶⁰ Most of his patients were male: out of 2,885 new patients treated in 1896 (out of 12,349 total cases), only 528, or 18 percent, were women.Footnote ⁶¹ In the long run, Ahmed Fahmy's hospital became the foundation for a joint Protestant hospital in Zhangzhou, operated by the LMS, the English Presbyterians, and the RCA, though Japanese bombs destroyed this hospital during World War II.Footnote ⁶² His American widow, Susan Rankin Duryee Fahmy (1864–1961), provided a bequest that enabled missionaries to build a new hospital in Zhangzhou, though the Communist Chinese government eventually nationalized it.Footnote ⁶³ In the 1980s a small group of retired American and British missionaries went to Zhangzhou and visited the government hospital that had evolved from Ahmed Fahmy's efforts.Footnote ⁶⁴

It is much harder to assess the impact that Ahmed Fahmy had on the propagation of Christianity in Zhangzhou and its environs. In 1893 he reported that just twenty-four people, out of 13,145 patients treated during the previous year, had registered a turn to Christianity.Footnote ⁶⁵ He acknowledged that his medical work was just one part of the process by writing, in 1917,

His papers suggest that he devised his own system for evangelical outreach. Thus he required each patient who came to his hospital to attend daily hymn-singing and worship services, and he made sure that illiterate patients were taught to memorize colloquial Chinese hymns. In a 1900 report he explained further that “every inpatient when discharged is given a letter of introduction to the preacher of the church nearest his home. By this means we are enabled to follow up many of the cases who wd [sic] otherwise be lost as possible fruits of our labours.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Like missionaries around the world, Ahmed Fahmy sometimes despaired over the paucity or slow rate of conversions, even as he noted in reports to London special cases of people who, feeling miraculously cured, embraced Christianity and in his words renounced or destroyed their “idols” and “ancestral Tablets.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Eventually a small Christian community took root in the town, clustered around churches that missionaries founded. Douglas Harman, who regarded himself as Ahmed Fahmy's successor and who worked as a medical missionary in the town from 1939 to 1950 (when missionaries were forced to leave China), recalled the presence of a thriving and close-knit Chinese Protestant community in Zhangzhou. Harman's papers show that in the 1980s—after a gulf of silence that had extended some thirty years—he and his missionary colleagues were able to re-establish contact with the children and grandchildren of Chinese Christians they had known. (Harman claimed, too, that many of the elderly Chinese Christians he had known during his own missionary career had remembered Ahmed Fahmy with particular fondness).Footnote ⁶⁹ The situation that Ryan Dunch described, vis-à-vis Chinese Protestants in Fuzhou (another city in Fujian province) before and after the Nationalist Revolution of 1926–1927, sounds potentially applicable to Zhangzhou: the Chinese public's openness to a Protestant civic vision may have ended in the late 1920s, but Chinese Protestantism persisted. “There were twice as many Protestants in China in 1949 as in 1927,” Dunch observed, “and there were at least ten times as many at the end of the 1990s as there were in 1949.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Ahmed Fahmy's relationship to the British LMS mission and to British society at large was fascinating but also sad. He became increasingly detached from the LMS, which struggled with problems of finances. LMS contributions to Ahmed's hospital declined until, by 1902, Ahmed had devised a scaled system of fee-paying among patients that enabled him to make his hospital wholly self-supporting.Footnote ⁷¹ Even then, he noted in 1903, only half the hospital's funding came from patient fees (which he waived for about the 6 percent of patients who were deemed poorest); Ahmed raised the other funds by serving as a physician to missionaries of the RCA.Footnote ⁷² Thus the missionary experience as he knew it, in Egypt as later in China, was intrinsically ecumenical and Anglo-American.

Ahmed Fahmy's hospital operated on the margins of the LMS mission while Ahmed himself lived, in some ways, on the margins of British society. Clearly there were those who registered his origins in Egypt. Consider the fate of his Scottish wife, Mary, who had worked as a schoolteacher for the mission (but without being recognized and salaried as a “missionary”) ever since reaching China in 1887. According to Lord Aberdeen, when Mary Fahmy died in a cholera epidemic in 1902, the British consul “prevented her burial in the British cemetery” on the grounds that her husband, Ahmed, was not a British subject himself. Ahmed had to bury her instead on a piece of land on the city fringes, on a plot over which buildings and roads were eventually built.Footnote ⁷³ Similarly, Ahmed had registered his eldest son as a British national during a furlough in Scotland but had not done the same for his younger children, so that British consular officials in China later refused to register them as British subjects in the opening years of the twentieth century. Lord Aberdeen, by this time retired as governor-general of Canada, stepped in to help, claiming in his memoirs that he “had much correspondence with the Foreign Office, whose officials were quite friendly, but could not find means to over-ride the action of the British Consul [in China], which was technically correct.” Aberdeen also wrote that, “When the Boxer riots arose, fresh difficulties presented themselves, for Dr. Ahmed Fahmy and his family and hospital had no right to British protection.” Aberdeen managed to persuade the Foreign Office “to send a letter to the British Consul requesting him [sic]”—as opposed to requiring him—“to give protection to Dr. Fahmy and his mission [hospital].” Aberdeen added, “Ultimately the question of his nationality was solved through his marriage to an American lady as his second wife, and subsequently he became an American citizen.”Footnote ⁷⁴ His second wife, née Susan Rankin Duryee, had been an RCA missionary in Amoy, and they met at interdenominational Protestant missionary meetings in the district.

Ahmed Fahmy's children, all born in China, fared differently. His younger son, Eric Fahmy, was deemed British enough to fight with British troops in World War I, where he died in France.Footnote ⁷⁵ His elder son, Ernest Chalmers Fahmy, whom he had managed to register as British during a furlough, played on the Scottish national rugby team and went on to become a distinguished obstetrician and gynecologist in Edinburgh, at one time serving as president of the Edinburgh Obstetric Society.Footnote ⁷⁶ His daughter, Alice Duryee Fahmy, was American, and settled in her mother's home state, New Jersey.Footnote ⁷⁷ His family, like much of the Protestant missionary movement itself, was Anglo-American.