Book Launch: Faithful Encounters

University of Florida (Keene-Flint Hall), 80 NEWELL DR, GAINESVILLE, FL 32611
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Join Emrah Sahin at the University of Florida, for the launch of his new book Faithful Encounters: Authorities and American Missionaries in the Ottoman Empire. Sahin who is a lecturer at the University of Florida, will be joined by guest speaker, Ussama Makdisi, Professor of History and the first holder of the Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair of Arab Studies at Rice University.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for European Studies, International Studies Program, and the Center for Global Islamic Studies and will be held in room 5, Keene-Flint Hall, University of Florida.

ABOUT THE BOOK

By the early twentieth century, there were close to two hundred American missionaries working in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. They came in droves as early as 1830, organizing hundreds of schools, hospitals, printing presses, and seminaries. Until now, the missionaries' sources and perspectives have dominated discussions of this moment in history, but the experiences of the Ottoman authorities are just as, if not more, revealing of an increasingly tense relationship between Christianity and Islam. 

An enthralling narrative of how locals made sense of American religious activity in the Ottoman Empire, Faithful Encounters examines the relationships between the authorities who managed the empire from the capital city of Istanbul, provincial agents who carried out the capital's orders, and the missionaries who engaged with them. Exploring a wide range of untapped sources - from imperial ministries, security forces, and local petitions to international reports and missionary collections - Emrah Sahin traces the interactions of the Ottoman authorities, focusing on the viewpoints and manoeuvres they adopted to monitor and conquer the missionary presence at a time of turbulent public and political upheaval. 

“Faithful Encounters takes a close, detailed, and necessary look at the imperial and Islamic side of a seminal interaction with American missionaries in the late Ottoman world, without many of the pitfalls present in Islamist or nationalist books on this topic. Appraising hitherto little-used documentation in the Ottoman state archives, it gives intimate insights into the logics and rhetoric of an Istanbul-based Islamic Empire that was faced, from the early nineteenth century, with the challenge of a globe-oriented, egalitarian-minded millennialist mission springing from the United States.” Hans-Lukas Kieser, University of Newcastle and University of Zurich