| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East. By Ussama Makdisi. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. xiv, 262 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8014-4621-4.)
This book's title hints at a teasing complexity: a failed mission without much to instruct us about mission or failure, since the one is but a version of the other. Much of the commentary is taken up with driving this point home.	1
Ussama Makdisi describes the triumphalistic Puritan mission among the Indians and argues that this experience was extended to the Middle East. Indoctrinated at Andover Seminary with notions of evangelical superiority, the missionaries would not indulge any appreciation for other forms of Christianity in Syria. Consequently, Maronite Christians were attacked in terms identical to the Indians. Makdisi offers a small consolation by sparing the missionaries the charge of cultural imperialists because they lacked the power of sequestration over the Maronites that they had over the hapless Indians. The missionaries' method "was the translation of a missionary ethos that arose in a colonialist America in which missionaries were cultural imperialists into a world where they were not" (p. 88). Significantly, that discrepancy is left unexplored.	. . .

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