Ottoman History Podcast - An Interconfessional History of Missions in the Middle East and North Africa

Episode Date: March 6, 2023

Episode 537 with Norig Neveu, Karène Sanchez Summerer, and Annalaura Turiano hosted by Andreas Guidi Since the 19th century, different forms of missionary activities and preaching have been shaping the role of religion within the societies of the Middle East and North Africa. Not only Christian congregations, but also Muslim and Jewish institutions participated in this phenomenon. Emulation but also competition existed across confessional boundaries and intersected with colonialism, wars, emancipation projects, and state authority. In this episode, we approach the galaxy of missions and preaching in the longue durée with the three editors of a recently published edited volume, Missions and Preaching: Connected and Decompartmentalised Perspectives from the Middle East and North Africa (19th-21st Century). This episode is cross-listed with The Southeast Passage. « Click for More »

We started in 2016-2017. We were all researchers working on a very specific aspect of missions. So we very quickly came to the idea that Catholics are extremely diverse, Muslims as well, and we had no taboo in the sense that we also ask ourselves, missions in Judaism, is this possible? How, when, how to qualify? So we started with that. Working on mission in the Middle East raised the question of who are the public. So, how should

we qualify the fact of addressing this public? Is it preaching? Is it totalitarianism? And to raise this comparison with Islam and Judaism. The preaching of the doctrine of Sunni Islam

to groups deemed heretical at the end of the Ottoman Empire has much in common with Jewish internal missions, aiming to preach a reformed version of Judaism. This preaching was not always formal, public, and it was not only related to sermon giving. And it was not only related to sermon giving. Informal preaching was and is still done in schools, hospitals and even associations. Preaching implied being part of creating a community. Since the 19th century, missionaries and preachers have contributed to shaping the societies of the Middle East and North Africa. Before and after the end of Ottoman rule, this vast region was much more than a stage monopolized by Western, that is, Catholic or Protestant, congregations. Other forces too, including Jewish and Muslim groups, more or less related to the nation-states emerging in the region, develop their own strategies to make and unmake communities

based on religion. A new edited volume entitled Missions and Preaching, connected and decompartmentalized perspectives from the Middle East and North Africa 19th to 21st Century, published by Brill, discusses this topic through an interdisciplinary approach, gathering contributions by historians, anthropologists and sociologists. The book covers case studies from Armenia to Tunisia, and many of these studies insist on the mobility of models and actors through which the galaxy of missions developed through time. In this episode, we will be listening to Norit Neve, Karen Sanchez-Sammerer and Anna Laura Turriano, the three editors of this volume.

They will present their own research topics that range from the civilizing mission within Islam carried out by the late Ottoman state in Jordan, to Christian missions in 20th century Palestine, to schools run by Italian religious congregations in Egypt. But beyond these aspects, Norik, Kanen and Ana Laura will tell us more about their edited volume, so how this collective work addressed issues like confessional pluralism, the temporality and the periodization of missions, as well as their intersections with colonialism and gender. ¶¶ Hello and welcome to a joint episode of the Southeast Passage and Ottoman History Podcast. I am Andreas Guidi and today we will talk about missions and preaching in the modern Middle East and North Africa. I have the pleasure to host Norik Neveu, Karen

Sanchez-Summerer, and Ana Laura Turiano, and we will start with Norik, who is a historian working at the CNRS, the French National Center for Scientific Research. She is based at the IRMAM, the Institute of Research and Study on the Arab and Muslim World at Ex-Marseille University. Norik's work has investigated issues related to gender and territoriality linked with the domain of religion, but especially the notion of religious authority. She shared with us an example from her study of Jordan at the turn of the 20th century through which we can recognize a particular Muslim and Ottoman interpretation of missions. The example I will use today leads us to the region of Kerak and Ma'an which are in southern

Ottoman Transjordan or southern Bilad-e-Sham at the end of the 19th century. One of the elements I studied was the Ottoman official policy of sending ulama and religious authorities to reshape the religious education in Jordan. So those ulama were really sharing the same problematic with the Christian missionaries, taking care of not having shared practices towards holy sites and reshaping the religious boundaries between Christians and Muslims. And even the general narrative used by those authorities and then the Ottoman representative was very much echoing the narrative of the Christian mission,

describing how Bedouins and Arabs in this region would be under-educated and in a state of backwardness, more or less. This, of course, has been studied, for instance, by Regent Rogan, Selim de Rengil, Oussama Magdisi. So in this region, the Ottoman representatives sent different ulamas to preach to the Bedouin people. So they were the target population to be re-educated to religion. And they also sent many copies of the Koran.

For instance, on June 27, 1894, local administration asked for sending copies of the Koran and books with explanation of the Koranic text for one of the nom and books with explanation of the text, of the Quranic text, for one of the nomadic tribes, which also echoes other missionary strategies, like, for instance, sending Bibles with translation in local languages. So most of those ulama or alim, they were coming not from the region, but from Palestine, Syria. The redeployment of those preachers and of those Rulamas went within a broader frame of reestablishment of the Ottoman authority

in the southern province of Bilhadeh Sham for different reasons, because of the loss of European provinces, because of the tenzimat at this time, those reforms, and the development of the educational system, the will of modernizing and bringing civilization to those provinces. So the religious aspect was just part of this project. The late Ottoman state adopted strategies addressing its Muslim and Bedouin populations that bear similarities to the way Christian institutions aimed at

normalizing certain practices among their co-religionists in the region. Now this is linked to one of the most interesting contributions of the book, Missions and Preaching, because we usually associate these terms with Christian missionaries, whereas many chapters show examples of circulation, emulation, and even competition across confessional boundaries. The book is really an attempt to revisit the compartmentalization of approaching religion. So our perspective was that the Middle East would be a kind of laboratory for the reshaping of modes of preaching during the 20th century for different reasons. One of them is the new interest for this part of the world because it's holy land for Christians,

it's holy land and place for the Zionist project for Jewish population, and it's also where political Islam will blossom in the region. I mean, many religious dynamics occur in this region at the same time. For instance, the example developed by Emmanuel Atrevisan is really interesting because from the experience of a Christian missionary, you also have the renewal of a Jewish movement from Ethiopia to Israel that's developed. So it gives an idea of the kind of mobility of the people embodying this mission. And you have more or less the same idea in the article of Maya Kararioli also, more in a competitive way between Christianity and Judaism.

And maybe just to give a third example, I think the article of Nechati Alkan also shows well, one, that the Ottoman policy to send preachers in the different territories of the empire somehow copies the Christian missions. It's at minimum a response, and it tackles the same specialization, education, sometimes medicine. I mean, you also have some domains of the missions that are overlapping. موسيقى This plural concept of Holy Land accentuates even more the centrality of Palestine for the study of missions and preaching. This territory is the focus of Karen Sanchez-Sammerer's research.

territory is the focus of Karen Sanchez-Sammerer's research. Karen is professor and chair at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Groningen. Karen has been working on a social and cultural history of Christian institutions and she will tell us more about how they underwent important changes throughout the 20th century while the political world surrounding them was changing even more dramatically. This is part of a research on German culture and language in Palestine that Karen will publish in a new monograph next year. German was a forbidden language in Jerusalem after the First World War, though these missionaries were in fact present since the last quarter of the 19th century. So looking back into how we approach the topic, I decided to go in what is today a very dynamic school from a political point of view, but also training a lot

of very clever girls. The Schmittschule, it's next to the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem. This is also a highly political place where every time there are manifestations, there are problems occurring. So you have, at the beginning of the century, a flourishing institution that is very much looking into all types of population coming to the Holy Land. And of course, you have a lot of German, Austrian during the 20s and the 30s coming. Many of them are of Jewish confession, of course. But you also have a lot of Muslim families asking for girls' education in Jerusalem.

And you have these German sisters who will slowly but surely train several generations of Palestinian Arab feminists. So how, after the beginning of the British mandate, the German language is forbidden for years, and how do you transmit German, what is called in the archives, values and discipline for the best of the Holy Land. This is actually what mission and preaching is for these sisters. These sisters are Catholic. So you also have different level of complementarity. When we speak about mission and preaching, we always have to look into the diversity of different confessions. Within this very general envelope of Christian missions, you have a real analysis of what the other ones are doing.

So my anecdote is I entered in a kind of cellar where I found a lot of documents full of humidity. And when I unpacked these after several months and living there and you know how it worked, it was almost a religious initiation, I would say.

Then when I entered the Holy of the Archives, what I found was amazing because you find all the lists of the family names, the type of curriculum they were following. But you also find reports on who is doing what in this holy city and why we should go further in terms of planification. So you also have part of document who are telling,

obviously, we cannot transmit the German language, but we have to convert them to German values and discipline. The only one that will save this Arab slash Jewish question. You can trace them at the beginning of the 20s, hesitating, redefining what a mission should be. And you see a big evolution at the beginning of the 30s, when the German language is not forbidden anymore, but you have such an influx of German and Jewish Austrians coming to the country that you see they are trying to make links with this type of immigrants. And you also see them asking for fundings in a new way

and at the same time trapped, of course, with Nazism. So you come from one very difficult situation of a language being forbidden to a difficult period where the political system is not helping you in this Holy Land. So this is the example I wanted to give because the diversity of actors also means that some of them have a pre-conceptual idea of

what mission should be and will never reach the point of realizing that fully and on the ground acting as such but you also have people who are planning long time ahead and have tools of measuring if the action are efficient according to either governmental criteria but also religious one and this is the nodal point where you see them struggling between a local, regional, but also transnational dynamic in how to preach and how to be efficient when you have sometimes, I would say on the surface, antagonist goals. The adaptation to a changing environment

links the history of missions to the history of politics. This, in turn, brings us to the issue of temporality. In other words, how can we measure and assess changes within specific institutions or within even broader shared patterns of missions? As the title of the book suggests, an overarching look at the modern and contemporary ages in the Middle East and North Africa can be fruitful, although this is surely a challenging task when it comes to narrating the whole story. possibility, we had to try to have a comprehensive, inclusive, and cross-archival analysis. So also to unpack very specific periods in terms of nationalism, instrumentalization of religion, change of religious practices. So there are several schools, you know, to interpret the missionary action. But what is common to everyone is that you see at the end of the 19th century a very

religious approach to what a mission is. You have a lot of nuances coming in, First World War, Second World War, and the real relationship built with local population to the point that some of the anthropologists today speak about a missionarization of NGOs and NGOization of missions from the 40s onwards and mainly after the Second World War. On one side, you have religious missions that use the best practices of associations that are like NGOs, secular. And you also have in the Middle East

this missionarization of NGOs, so secular organizations, who progressively are having a more religious framework, still very valid until today. un terme, un terme aujourd'hui. me call it home. Go on me man, I'm going home. Go on me man, I'm going home. Go on me man, I'm going home. I'm going home. Just like the Schmittsch Schule in Jerusalem, many missionary schools moved in between the political influence of their sending countries,

their own agenda, but also the type of students they addressed locally. This topic has also been researched by Anna Laura Turiano, who is a postdoctoral researcher affiliated to the already mentioned Institute Iremama at Ex Marseille University. Anna Laura is preparing a book on the history of Italian missionary schools in Egypt, in which she investigates topics like philanthropy, education and migration. So my book tells the story of an Italian Catholic mission, the Salesian mission, and its network of schools, vocational schools in Egypt between the 19th and the 20th century. Christian missionaries in the Middle East targeted mainly Eastern Christian communities.

The Salesians who settled in Alexandria in 1897 had a slightly different objective. They targeted the European migrants and workers whom they considered in need of spiritual assistance. So I argue that this activity was the main specificity of the Salesian mission, at least in the beginning. So where the migrants the Salesians were caring for? They were mainly workers, craftsmen, mechanics, for instance, for whom colonial Egypt was an attractive land, as it offered job opportunities in multiple sectors. For this immigrant European and Italian

proletariat, the Salesians opened different schools of arts and crafts, trade schools, and promoted also different initiatives like the creation of employment offices. They pushed too many objectives. On the one hand, strengthen the fate of the migrants, and on the other hand, avoid the risk of assimilation, as most Italian immigrants lived in poor neighborhoods and mixed with a much larger Muslim population. Muslim population. In addition to this pastoral care for migrants, what is also interesting in this case study is that missionaries were quickly involved in the Italian national and colonial project in the Mediterranean. Indeed, as the Italian community in Egypt was the largest in the Mediterranean, the Italian

government considered it as a potential bridgehead for a colonial expansion in Africa and the Levant. So in this context, missionary schools were seen on the one hand as a means of strengthening national and linguistic ties within the Italian diasporas, national and linguistic ties within the Italian diasporas, and on the other hand, as a vehicle for training potential clients for Italy's economic interest in the Mediterranean. So for all these reasons, Italian representatives in Egypt actively supported the missionaries and financially backed their schools. So indeed, my book shows how the Salesian mission survived the departure of Italian communities from Egypt in the 1950s, 1960s. Already in the interwar period, Salesian vocational schools started attracting increasing numbers

of Egyptian students who were seeking practical and manual training at a time of economic crisis. During the Nasserist era, Salishan school provided vocational training in various trades like mechanics and electromechanics, which were considered useful for Egypt industrial development projects. for Egypt industrial development projects. In 1970, Italy and Egypt signed several technical cooperation agreements, including aid for vocational training.

And the Salesian schools were part of these cooperation schemes. So my book shows how in a decolonized sea, missions and missionaries continued their activities under a new label that is technical cooperation. And I argue more specifically that the rhetoric of development aid served to justify new forms of Christian presence, Christian witness. Missions and preaching only marginally achieved conversions through proselytism. They came to be more concerned by legitimizing their action and their authority in imperial settings where multiple hierarchies existed. The edited volume addresses these hierarchies that were not only based on citizenship or race or, of course,

religion, class and gender were also part of the equation impacted by missions in the last two centuries. There is no doubt that missionaries were active players in the imperial game. They largely participated in the development of a colonial system of knowledge and power relations that characterize colonization were not limited to class, religious or even racial hierarchies. But they also entailed the gender inequalities. And that's why I believe that adopting a gender perspective in the study of mission may shed new light on the history of colonialism. And in this sense, one interesting point concern women missionaries and the gender of missions in the process of empire building. Indeed, colonial authorities considered women missionaries as important, if not privileged players in the imperial game,

since their action was seen as benevolent, silent and uncontroversial. Missionaries were not only proselytizing, as we already mentioned, they also brought to the colonies their vision of the family, models of femininity and masculinity. And they sought to reproduce these models in societies that functioned often according to different dynamics. So, for instance, missionaries who settled in the Middle East insisted in their writings on the subjugation of women, their presumed lack of civilization and education. Despite this rhetoric, missionary action often ended up reinforcing or introducing new forms, or even introducing new forms of gender inequalities, like relegating

women to domestic and family tasks or reinforcing their subjection to their husband. In addition to women and femininity, questions about masculinity are also interesting. One can wonder, for instance, how colonial manliness was transposed in colonial settings by a missionary institution, or also how gender identities were negotiated in times of growing nationalism. My work on Italian missionaries, for instance, showed how missionaries' pedagogy was often at odds with imperial interest. And I also showed to what extent missionaries' gender ideals were challenged and to some extent even transformed by contact with students, families, and other local actors. So just to conclude, I believe that themes of gender and religion constitute a fertile

ground for scholars of colonialism by reflecting on negotiation, also on reappropriation of gender norms and role models in missionary spaces, one can get a more complex picture of the co-production of colonial encounters. I أعطي برايك الله أعطي برايك الله أعطي برايك الله أغسمت بالبجري والليل دا يسري In this episode, you are listening to a conversation among historians. But the interdisciplinary scope of the book points to a bridge toward the current state of missions and preaching in the Middle East and North Africa.

So I asked our guests and editors of the volume to share some remarks on how the history of missionary actions echoes until today. Today, I think the actions of missions in the Middle East are unavoidable, we said, on several levels, humanitarianism, religious. So something we spoke less about during this podcast is the notion and the evolution of the state of Israel today, a new platform, you know, like a Torah box, our colleague Sébastien Torper mentioned in this article this new platform of missions. We did not mention the very vivid movement that other colleagues are working on, missions from the global south to the global south because we were not only looking into a north-south approach of course not and we see that at different level i myself as an, but you have people tackling this phenomenon within different areas today as anthropologists. I want to conclude also with this idea of probably the collective memory of mission and preaching.

memory of mission and preaching. Today in some region of the Middle East you have an evangelical, almost military, you know, offensive and initiatives. Partial voices tend to represent a pseudo majority of missionaries, which is not the case. So we wanted to do justice to the various missions and their, I would say, legacy today in the Middle East. Yeah, we are having now a discussion between historians, but I think having those political scientists, ethnologists, anthropologists also mentioning using this approach is for us really interesting. The book tackles the notion of missionary work,

which I think is also interesting to analyze Islamic, Jewish, and Christian action on the ground and what it means in terms of gender dynamics, but also domination dynamics, how the migrants can also become preachers that's what for instance Armour Pied shows in the case of the migrant churches in Istanbul for the most contemporary part of the book our perspective was to tackle different aspects one of them is of course what has been called the Arab Spring or the revolution movements toward North Africa and the Middle East, and also the interaction between missions and

states. Esther Sigillo shows how, with the revolution in Tunisia, preaching and the mission fit within the expectation of the new state. And then there is the contribution of Gabriel Anger on the Gulen movements and this transnational competition in between the local part of the staff and the foreign staff, foreigners being Turkish for most of them. So another aspect that the volume highlights is the shifting geographies of missions. Many contributions have mentioned, for instance, the growing importance of missions from south to south and from south to north.

And this brings me to another aspect relevant, in my opinion, to exploring the past and present missions, which is the pastoral care for migrants. which is the pastoral care for migrants. So how missionary preaching took place and still happens among migrants, people on the move, refugees, is definitely an important question to be addressed. Ultimately, the question of the materiality of preaching is, in my view, at the heart of past and present missions. Sebastian Torp's contribution, but also Emir Maheddin and Kadia Boissevin, showed how material or dematerialized media

have an impact on missionary preaching and the way they participate in shaping new forms of preaching. So, as the volume suggests, the sensorial and sensitive aspect of preaching is a relevant and promising avenue of research and one that may help connect the study of missions in the MENA region. Our guests, Norik Neveu, Karen Sanchez-Sammerer and Ana Laura Turiano, took us on a journey across space and time. Our episode focused on only a few aspects related to their edited volume,

Missions and Preaching, Connected and Decompartamentalized Perspectives from the Middle East and North Africa, published by Brill. If you want to delve into the topic, let me remind you that the book is available as open access and that you will find a link to it on our websites. The editors also agreed to share some visual material about the many worlds of missions and preaching initiatives in the MENA region. So stay tuned for more upcoming episodes of the Southeast Passage and the Ottoman History Podcast, and visit our websites and social media platforms,

where you can also interact with our community of followers. This was all for today. Until next time, take care. you