Ussama Makdisi's Artillery of Heaven is an impressively researched and elegantly written account of the encounter between nineteenth-century US missionaries to the Ottoman Empire and the people they attempted to evangelize. The center of the book is the story of As'ad Shidyaq, a Maronite Catholic who in 1825 was converted to evangelical Protestantism by American missionaries in Mount Lebanon. Five years later, As'ad died in a local monastery, where he had been imprisoned and tortured by the Maronite patriarch. The patiarch and other local officials saw As'ad – correctly, in some ways – as a threat to the settled, multilayered community order of Mt. Lebanon, held intact by Ottoman hierarchies and its limited but functioning forms of tolerance.

Artillery of Heaven, which has been named an “outstanding new book” by Foreign Affairs and awarded the Albert Hourani book prize by the Middle East Studies Association, is about a deadly transnational cultural encounter between Americans and the Middle East. But it is also a passionate argument against the ahistorical and tendentious notions of “cultural clash” that have so dominated popular discourse about US–Middle East relations in the last ten years. Makdisi has previously written an important essay that tracks a history of both pro- and anti-American feeling in the Middle East (“‘Anti-Americanism’ in the Arab World: An Interpretation of a Brief History,” Journal of American History, 89, 2, History and September 11: A Special Issue (Sept. 2002), 538–57). This project, like his earlier scholarship, works “not by denying the violence of history, or the reality of cultural confrontation, but by studying them historically” (216).

The history Makdisi tells is not a pretty one, but it is fascinating. The arrival of American evangelicals on Mt. Lebanon in the 1820s was not an imperial event in any direct sense; unlike European missionaries in this period, the Americans did not have the backing of militaries or the imprimatur of scientific or government support; they did not even have much in the way of economic resources. These first, pioneer generations of missionaries were sent by the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions, but they were essentially evangelical entrepreneurs. Millennialist, exclusionist, and utterly presumptuous, they showed up in Ottoman Syria with no knowledge of Arabic or the local culture, and little to offer but their own certainties.

On the Arab side, the Orthodox Maronites of Mt. Lebanon lived in a community deeply stratified by class and traditional hierarchies, under an Islamic Ottoman regime that allowed for tolerance and pluralism within an official doctrine of Christian subordination. In addition to maintaining their place in the local order, Maronites had transnational allegiances as well, which required that they constantly assure the leadership in Rome that they were proper Catholics. Speaking two languages of subservience, to the Ottomans and to Rome, the Maronites, Makdisi argues, “were able to engage with utter fluency in a third language of coexistence, with its own unwritten grammar of multireligious life, entirely alien … to the nineteenth-century American missionaries who would offer them ‘true’ Christianity” (46).

Part of the strength of Makdisi's book is that he situates the missionary side of the encounter in the context of the failure of the Protestant mission to Native American Indians. Several generations of white American believers had first evangelized local Indian communities with enthusiasm, and then watched with varying degrees of dismay and horror as those communities were relentlessly exterminated. If Makdisi sometimes underplays the degree to which American missionaries were active opponents of the genocidal US Indian policies, he very rightly locates their push toward foreign missions in the context of that disaster. As the American Board of Commissions for Foreign Missions began to send a few missionaries, first to Palestine and Egypt, and then to the larger Middle East, Makdisi argues, the Holy Land became “a proving ground for American redemption,” where Americans “could glory in a language of benevolence that was rapidly running its course with the Indians at home” (11).

These “benevolent” missionaries came to the Ottoman Empire determined to rescue its lands from the dangers of both Islam and “Popery.” They arrived, as Makdisi so beautifully puts it, “in a land they recognized but did not know” (61). The missionaries' first, and for many years only, convert was the young man As'ad Shidyaq, who claimed that he had become convinced by the missionary's call for a biblically based faith and the need for an unmediated relationship between the believer and God. As'ad's mistake was to forget, or to refuse to acknowledge, the rules of the Ottoman community in which he lived. Mt. Lebanon was an area inhabited by Christians, Druze, and Shi'a Muslims who coexisted through rules – written and unwritten – of religious tolerance mediated through a hierarchical system of sheikhs and clans that crossed religious lines.

Makdisi's strength is to make clear the intersecting local alliances in which As'ad operated, and to highlight just what was at stake in As'ad's attempt to forge a position for himself as both Maronite and evangelical. The American missionaries saw the Maronite opposition to As'ad's conversion as an example of Papist heresy and Eastern fanaticism. They neither saw nor cared how the local Maronite community felt threatened, with a patriarch who could neither afford to lose the support of Rome nor allow any individual to make religion into a matter of preference rather than a foundation of social order.

The last part of Artillery of Heaven is about memory. It tells the story of Butrus al-Bustani, who published in 1960 an Arabic tribute to As'ad Shidyaq. The American missionaries had already spent decades hailing As'ad a martyr, but Bustani, himself a Protestant converted by those same missionaries, penned a defense that was also a call for ecumenical tolerance and individual conscience. Highlighting As'ad's right of conscience, Bustani's treatise was a marker of a new kind of anti-authoritarianism, one that challenged the inequalities of the Ottoman system, but which also believed in reconcilation between Protestant and Maronite. Bustani was a figure distinct from the other Christians around him; no longer Maronite, he was one of the few converts that Americans could claim in the more than thirty years since As'ad had died. And he eagerly embraced the opportunities for education, and the sense of intellectual and spiritual openings, that his encounters with missionaries provided. But with Bustani's modern paean to religious diversity was clear evidence that his conversion had taken “an unanticipated direction, which the missionaries could not control and refused to sanction” (197).

Artillery of Heaven has been rightfully hailed as an excellent model for transnational history. In its ambitious scope, it draws on multiple archives, using both Arabic and English sources, showing remarkable erudition in both US and Ottoman histories. If this impressive book does have it limits, that would inevitably be the case for any such ambitious history. Because Makdisi focusses so carefully on the ideological and social encounter that led to As'ad's death and then Bustani's modern recuperation, we actually learn relatively little of how the American missionaries themselves thought about, or were changed by, their Ottoman experiences. The global contexts in which US missionaries operated is relatively undeveloped, and their part of this “transnational” story seems to end when they depart the Middle East, although we know from other sources that the realities of missions to the Middle East had a profound impact on the evangelical community in America, which was also simultaneously evangelizing in China, Hawaii, Africa, and elsewhere. Makdisi mentions these global contexts, briefly, but the missionaries themselves are shadowy figures, whose thoughts and motivations are frequently inaccessible, while As'ad and Bustani are vibrant, extraordinary figures. At its heart, then, this an Ottoman, Arab, and ultimately Lebanese story about the possibilities and dangers of transnational encounter in a world in part defined by US global expansion.

But Artillery of Heaven it is also a work of profound relevance for our larger understandings of the possibilities and problematics of encounter in globalizing contexts. Makdisi's argument is that Bustani is an exemplary figure because he was neither “Western” nor “Lebanese,” but rather the product of commingled Arab and American histories. He was a figure created at the intersections, where a dream of coexistence was forged that challenged both the narrow orthodoxies of US Protestantism and the sectarian rigidities of the Ottoman system. At its most basic, Makdisi's book is a call for reconstructing that dream of an ecumenical, humanistic, global consciousness. After all, Makdisi argues, “we are, in the end, all implicated in one another's histories” (220).