This survey joins an ever-increasing number of studies on Christian Missions in the Middle East. Western Catholic and Protestant missions have been the object of much scrutiny and curiosity, especially after the rise of the “Orientalism” and “Clash of Civilizations” paradigms that have been raised by Middle Eastern scholars in the last quarter of the twentieth century. With several U.S. led invasions of Iraq, the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and with the seismic shifts taking place in nationalist identities due to the Arab Spring, studies of such intercultural and interreligious engagements will only increase. This work is part of a larger and longer term project by Eleanor Tejirian and Reeva Spector Simon on the study of Western interaction with the Middle East. Having held several international conferences in the area of Middle East Studies, these two scholars published the results of a pre-9/11 and pre-2003 Iraqi Invasion conference titled Altruism and Imperialism: Western Cultural and Religious Missions in the Middle East by Columbia University Press in 2002.

While previous studies have undertaken specific tasks of considering particular mission agencies, areas or events, Conflict, Conquest, and Conversion sets out to analyze the Middle East as the place of origin for all Christian mission. It attempts to examine the Middle East as an entity in and of itself, as the place where Christianity was born, settled, expanded out of, returned to and clashed with the indigenous peoples. The authors' intentions are to provide an overarching “historical and religious context” of the region. As Tejirian and Simon indicate, the survey is “to provide a benchmark narrative that tells the story of Christian missions to the Middle East from the beginning of Christianity to the present” (x–xi). A major emphasis of this narrative provides particular attention to the social and political constructs from which and into which Christian missionaries engaged.

The book is divided into nine very manageable chapters laid out in a historical progression. Chapter 1 lays the foundation for the “First Thousand Years” of Christianity, noting its origin as a Middle Eastern religion. The mediaeval period is taken up in chapters 2 and 3 where the focus is primarily upon Latin Christian mission and culture. Western Protestant missions take up the lion's share of the book, comprising chapters 4–7. Significant attention is given to the cultural projects of Western Protestant mission agencies. Chapters 8 and 9 conclude with the role of Western mission after the great World Wars and the rise of nationalism. The attention to the impact of the cultural issues of Western missions in the midst of dramatic political changes is not new to this field but is an important focus of this work and is done well.

Surveys are always difficult projects. To provide a compelling narrative while maintaining faithfulness to complex issues is never easy. A work of this design would have better served its readers in several ways. First, while the authors are to be commended for their intention to provide a broader social, religious, and political context of missions in the Middle East, the 207 pages of content do not do justice to the topic. This of course is an economic issue, but certainly a survey of two thousand years deserves more pages. Pages are jam packed with terms, ideas, and movements that necessarily rush along. In some cases definitions are not clearly given.

Second, given the broad landscape of history and issues covered in this survey, using a variety of voices by different authors might have helped to underline the importance, complexity, and care with which a topic of this magnitude calls. There are a variety of inaccuracies and misstatements throughout the text that could have been rectified by having a variety of scholars comment on their own particular areas of expertise. To use only one small example, in the opening chapter the authors claim that after the Apostle Paul “there appears to be no formal missionary mechanism within the Christian Church . . . until the age of Constantine in the fourth century” (5). Of course, Eusebius's classic History of the Church, written at the time of Constantine, is only one source that refers to the variety of missionaries and Christian communities that took root between the first and fourth centuries. In addition, there are numerous Syriac textual sources as well as material culture that provide evidence of early Christian mission throughout the Middle East before Constantine, including the important rise of Edessa as an ancient Christian center, which in the book is limited to the fourth century as a significant site of Christian identity, while other records denote its importance much earlier.

Another important example should be noted. The role of the Nestorian missions is limited to only several sentences (13). In the second chapter the authors claim that after the Muslim conquest in the seventh century, “most Christians were living in western Europe” (24). Such a statement belies a western ethnocentrism that does not take into account the active role of Coptic, Armenian, or West and East Syriac communities that continued as the majority communities and cultures until well into the ninth and tenth centuries. As Samuel Moffett has pointed out in his History of Christianity in Asia, Part I, the Patriarch Timothy I of the Assyrian Church of the East presided over most of the Christians of the world under the Abbasid Imperial rule. Comments like the quote above and such hasty overviews demonstrate a lacuna that could have been covered by one of the many scholars working on the history of Syriac Christianity.

Finally, it would have been helpful to clarify exactly for whom a work of this type is written. The logical target audience would be undergraduate and graduate students engaged in studies of the Middle East and missiology. If this is the case, then there is too much in each chapter to unpack for it to be helpful. In addition, footnotes as opposed to endnotes would assist students in the use and examination of source material (although this is most certainly an editorial issue and not that of the authors). If, however, the work is aimed at a more general lay audience of those interested in such topics, there is just too much dense information in the narrative for any general theme on which to hang one's hat. The authors are to be commended for recognizing that the growing body of literature on Christian Missions in the Middle East might be too specific for a general readership, and for attempting to provide an avenue into this extremely important area of study. However, this reviewer would imagine a generally interested reader getting lost in an encyclopedia of dates and names and issues that could become overwhelming. The question then is what is the overarching point? The final conclusion for the reader in the last chapter is a catalog of Western military and missionary endeavors that have only exacerbated the problems for the indigenous Christians of the Middle East. If this is the case, and there is good reason to make such a claim, then what do the authors recommend for Western Christians who might read this? The evidence does seem to point in the fact that Western Christian incursions, both medieval and modern have created and exacerbated social, political, and religious tensions. The question then is, whither Western Christian missions in the Middle East from here on?