Christian Missions and Humanitarianism in the Middle East, 1850-1950: Ideologies, Rhetoric, and Practices

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction / Inger Marie Okkenhaug and Karène Sanchez-Summerer -- Missions, Charity and Humanitarian Action in the Levant (19th-20th Century) / Chantal Verdeil -- Liberated Bodies and Saved Souls : Freed African Slave Girls and Missionaries in Egypt / Beth Baron -- Physical Expressions of Winning Hearts and Minds : Body Politics of the American Missionaries in "Asiatic Turkey" / Nazan Maksudyan -- Spiritual Reformation and Engagement with the World : Scandinavian Mission, Humanitarianism and Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1905-1914 89 / Inger Marie Okkenhaug -- 'A Strange Survival' : The Rev. W.A. Wigram on the Assyrians before and after World War I / Heleen Murre-van den Berg -- Missionary Hubris in Colonial Algeria? Founding and Governing Christian Arab Villages 1868-1930 / Bertrand Taithe -- Missionary Work, Secularization and Donor Dependency : Rockefeller-Near East Colleges Cooperation after World War I (1920-1939) / Philippe Bourmaud -- "Machine Age Humanitarianism" : American Humanitarianism in Early 20th Century Syria and Lebanon / Idir Ouahes -- Scottish Presbyterian Churches and Humanitarianism in the Interwar Middle East / Michael Marten -- Confined by Conflict, Run by Relief : Arabs, Jews, and the Finnish Mission in Jerusalem, 1940-1950 / Seija Jalagin -- Catholic Humanitarian Assistance for Palestinian Refugees : The Franciscan Casa Nova of Jerusalem in the 1948 Storm / Maria Chiara Rioli.

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"From the early phases of modern missions, Christian missionaries supported many humanitarian activities, mostly framed as subservient to the preaching of Christianity. This anthology contributes to a historically grounded understanding of the complex relationship between Christian missions and the roots of humanitarianism and its contemporary uses in a Middle Eastern context. Contributions focus on ideologies, rhetoric, and practices of missionaries and their apostolates towards humanitarianism, from the mid-19th century Middle East crises, examining different missionaries, their society's worldview and their network in various areas of the Middle East. In the early 20th century Christian missions increasingly paid more attention to organisation and bureaucratisation ('rationalisation'), and media became more important to their work. The volume analyses how non-missionaries took over, to a certain extent, the aims and organisations of the missionaries as to humanitarianism. It seeks to discover and retrace such 'entangled histories' for the first time in an integral perspective. Contributors include: Beth Baron, Philippe Bourmaud, Seija Jalagin, Nazan Maksudyan, Michael Marten, Heleen (L.) Murre-van den Berg, Inger Marie Okkenhaug, Idir Ouahes, Maria Chiara Rioli, Karène Sanchez Summerer, Bertrand Taithe, and Chantal Verdeil"-- Provided by publisher.