Status Updates From Artillery of Heaven: Americ...

Because rank rather than religion was the defining aspect of local political life under Shihabi hegemony, the leading Maronite families shared an elaborate elite culture with their Druze and Shi'a counterparts. A veritable taboo existed within Mount Lebanon against publicly probing into, let alone denigrating, the faith of others.

This story at first glance appears to be a simple missionary tale. At its center is a young man inspired by foreign missionaries to renew his faith in God. Though persecuted by his former coreligionists, he dies true to his new beliefs. The convert’s name was As'ad Shidyaq. He belonged not to the Muslim majority, but to the Eastern Christian community of the Maronites in a land we today call Lebanon.

From a presumably Christian center, missionaries saw themselves enlightening the darker areas of the world.

A cultural clash occurred at the meeting point of two powerful currents of history. The former was an unconstrained and unaccommodating American protestant expansive movement. The latter an Ottoman Arab orthodoxy that is accommodating of multireligious Islamic society.

This book is about American futile quest to graft a bold but uncompromising puritanism on an implacably multireligious world.

American missionaries regarded themselves as the true "artillery of heaven," divinely inspired by heaven.

American missionaries from Boston had set out in 1819 to reclaim the lands of the Bible and to evangelize its Muslim, Christian, and Jewish inhabitants.

Under the Ottomans autonomous religious liberty was granted for the Christians and the Jews yet Islam was given primacy in an unequal Ottoman world.

This book is a narrative testament to the complex and consequential involvement of America in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire.