Hany’s Reviews > Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East > Status Update

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.

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.