Evangelical missions are thick with descriptions of American encounters with the wider world. Growing from an epiphany of five students living in New England into an agency of six hundred missionaries operating in any land, American missionaries not only delivered the gospel word to the ten regions of the world, in the Middle East, they met new realities, made new identities, and penned their activities, leaving behind a vast supply of books, journals, memoirs, and pamphlets. However, despite their manifest strides, they are largely hidden in historical sight.
Once called “the invisible men of American history” by John Fairbank, president of the American Historical Association, American missionaries remain to be a rich subject matter worth addressing, and yet they have not entirely eluded scholarly attention (1969, 877–878). Scholars, such as Michael Oren, Heather Sharkey, and Ussama Makdisi, have placed them in the major chord of US–Middle Eastern melodrama (Oren, 2007; Sharkey, 2008; Makdisi, 2008). While being well researched, produced, and received, much of the historiography has adopted a familiar approach and somewhat distorted the matter by over-scaling the extent to which the missionary movement changed the status quo. By adopting a novel approach and taking a literary turn, Hami Gumus produces an alternative account of how the missionaries imagined their life and times in the Ottoman Empire.
In the mind of American evangelical missionaries, the idea of the Ottoman imperial state figured as a microcosm of the world. It embodied a diverse population of infidels living in a wide realm spanning from Constantinople to the Holy Lands. During the early part of the 1820–1898 period, many hopeful missionaries strode toward the region for opening schools and hospitals and interacted with locals in trying circumstances. American Missionaries in the Ottoman Empire opens with a historical overview of this period and a specific discussion of the book's questions, sources, and methods. This is a book that tells about American missionaries’ mental cosmos through the prism of metaphors they evoked from the Bible and the fieldwork.
The middle chapter is an interesting genealogy of conceptual metaphors that allowed the missionaries to blend their local experience with an evangelical grand narrative. Drawn from conceptual metaphors published in pre-1898 issues of The Missionary Herald, this chapter offers a third space to see missionary history as a tool by which to understand the link between text and context. From this perspective, it makes sense for missionaries to associate their particular states with Biblical source domains—including the “light” and “goodness” “opening” a “path” of “harvest” against the “dark” and “badness” (ordered by reviewer for a better read). The following chapter examines two particular cases of ill-fated conversions and massacres and finds that at times, the missionaries made inconsistent stories out of their specific tribulations. Ultimately, the book serves as a reminder that Ottoman authorities and American missionaries created antithetical narratives partly by attributing to each other some ulterior motives.
While ably navigating through metaphors, this book features some weakness in its content and form. Given the breadth and depth of missionary activities and imperial politics, for instance, it sounds controversial to “bear in mind that all of these activities served one sole purpose: conversion of the local population and finally establishing self-sufficient Protestant communities comprising of natives” or that “the missionaries undermined Ottoman legitimacy” (34, 43). But more seriously than quick arguments, long quotations and alliterations abound with some other dissertation-turned-books, the analytical reliance over a single archival dataset and few scholarly opinions may undermine the book's capacity to reach a wider readership.
In blending conceptual tension with experiential observation, Gumus's effort is to provide an indispensable overview of the missionaries’ conceptual landmarks, not an exhaustive history of American missionaries. By so doing, his study brings authentic texts into a discursive narrative, one that defines missionaries not simply as invisible men but that reveals their sense-making in situations both relatable and temporal at times. Especially to scholars prone to neglecting conceptual aspects of evangelical missions, American Missionaries in the Ottoman Empire delivers a counterweight. For many others in humanities, it shall offer another testament of how nation and narration are intertwined in those big metaphor islands so far hidden in our common sight.
