'American Apostles'
New book tells story of first evangelicals in Muslim world
1:39 p.m., Sept. 14, 2015--A new book by the University of Delaware’s Christine Leigh Heyrman tells the story of three young American missionaries who traveled throughout the Middle East 200 years ago in a complicated collision with the diverse religious cultures of the region.
American Apostles: When Evangelicals Entered the World of Islam was published in August by Hill and Wang. Heyrman, the Robert W. and Shirley P. Grimble Professor of American History at UD, is a Bancroft Prize-winning historian.
People Stories
'Resilience Engineering'
Reviresco June run
The book chronicles the first American Protestant missionaries in the Middle East, three young men from New England who visited Ottoman Turkey, Egypt and Syria seeking to restore these bastions of Islam to Christianity. They were not only the founding members of the Palestine mission but also among the first Americans to travel extensively in the region.
Heyrman examines how these missionaries played a crucial role in shaping Americans’ understanding of the Muslim world, writing about such adventures as crossing the Sinai on camel, sailing a canal boat up the Nile and exploring the ancient city of Jerusalem, all of which thrilled their readers.
But the book shows that their private journals and letters often tell a different story, revealing that their missions did not go according to plan. Instead of converting the Middle East, the members of the Palestine mission themselves experienced unforeseen spiritual challenges as they debated with Muslims, Jews and Eastern Christians.
Some developed an appreciation of Islam, but others created images of Muslims for their American audiences that both fueled the first wave of Islamophobia in the United States and forged the future character of evangelical Protestantism, according to the publisher's description of the book.
Heyrman, who joined the UD faculty in 1990, is also the author of Commerce and Culture: The Maritime Communities in Colonial Massachusetts, 1690-1750 and Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt.