American sailors on camels in Cairo, circa 1927

The end of the affair

Thanks to American missionaries and diplomats, the Arab world once looked to the United States as a friend and source of hope.
It didn't last.

By Ussama Makdisi, 10/27/2002

think that anger in the Arab street is real. It is produced by a number of different factors. But in the end, what matters is not whether they hate us or love us - for the most part, they hate us, they did before - but whether they are going to respect our power.'' With these words, spoken to the US House of Representatives in the aftermath of the Gulf War, Martin Indyk - then executive director of the Washington Institute on Near East Policy and later one of the architects of the failed Middle East policy in the Clinton administration - dismissed the history behind anti-American sentiment in the Arab world. ``The antipathy toward the West that is likely to follow this war,'' added Indyk in a prepared statement, ``has long been present in the Arab world. It cannot be resolved through accommodation.'' Indyk's assumption that ``they'' hate ``us'' - and that the reasons for it are essentially immaterial and obscure - has become a staple of American policy makers and pundits since Sept. 11, as if Arabs and Americans are forever doomed to a relationship of mutual antagonism.

But this isn't the case. Anti-Americanism is a recent phenomenon fueled by American foreign policy, not an epochal confrontation. While there are certainly those both in America and the Arab world who believe in a clash of civilizations, and whose politics are invested in such beliefs, history belies them. Indeed, at the time of the First World War the image of America in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman empire was generally positive; those Arabs who knew about America saw it as a great power that was not imperialist like Britain, France, and Russia. Those Americans who lived in the region -- missionaries and their descendents and collaborators -- were often admired as pioneers in the realm of higher education. "Liberal America" was not simply a slogan. It was a reality encountered by Arabs, Turks, Armenians, and Persians in the hallways of the colleges the missionaries had founded.

American involvement with the Arab world began inauspiciously in 1784 when an American ship, the Betsey, was seized in the Mediterranean by Moroccan privateers. A year later more American vessels were captured by Algerians and their crews imprisoned. Thus was inaugurated the series of negotiations, skirmishes, and legends known collectively as the Barbary Wars. Ultimately, the Barbary Wars, and especially the myriad captivity narratives that emerged from them, reinforced existing negative images of the Muslim and Ottoman world. In these stories, America's republican identity was defined in contrast to the image of the despotic "Turk" just as its Christianity was defined in contrast to the "impostor" Muhammed.

As the 19th century proceded, views of the Arab world were shaped by US travelers' accounts of the Orient, and specifically of Palestine. When he toured the Ottoman Empire in the years following the US Civil War, Mark Twain irreverently satirized American travelers' religious obsession with Palestine and their enchantment with the East more generally. Travel books, landscapes by artists such as Frederic Church, and novels such as Robert Hichens's 1904 "The Garden of Allah" (which went into 44 editions over the next 40 years) contributed to the rise of an American Orientalism that exoticized the East as dreamy yet experienced it as squalid, and separated the sacred landscape of the Holy Land from its native Arab inhabitants.

There was, however, another American encounter with the East -- one that was far more direct and had a far greater impact in shaping early Arab attitudes toward America. This was the missionary encounter led by mostly New England men and women. They shared many of the prejudices that characterized 19th-century American travelers; they were driven by feelings of superiority to the natives as they sought to reclaim the lands of the Bible from Muslim and Eastern Christian control. But motivated by "disinterested benevolence," they were also the first Americans to engage with the local populations in a serious and sustained manner -- they wanted to change the Ottoman world, not just describe or experience it. Their spiritual preoccupation with the Holy Land was premised not on overlooking the natives but on recognizing their presence and the urgent need to save the "perishing souls" of the East.

The first American missionaries to the Arab world were associated with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. They departed Boston in 1819 and arrived in the Levant in 1820. Failing to establish themselves in Jerusalem, they settled on Beirut as the center of a missionary enterprise to Syria in 1823.

Most indigenous Christians, Jews, and Muslims refused to accept the missionaries' claim that theirs was the only correct path to salvation. The first Arab convert to Protestantism was a Maronite Christian, but he was imprisoned by the Maronite Church and subsequently disappeared in the late 1820s. Evangelically speaking, the American mission to the Arab world was largely a disappointment.

Had the missionaries devoted themselves only to direct proselytizing, their impact on the region would have been scarcely noticeable and their later achievements impossible. But the missionaries also functioned as a bridge between cultures. Not only did they seek to introduce the Ottoman Arab world to notions of Protestant piety and individual salvation, they also brought with them American manners and customs, clothes, education, and medicine. Intrinsic to the missionary endeavor was a sincere desire to know and evangelize the Arabs -- to establish a Christian fellowship -- mixed with the paternalism that would remain a hallmark of their enterprise. Eli Smith, the famous American missionary to Syria, explained to an audience in New York in May 1840 why he considered the Arabs a peculiarly fascinating and promising object of evangelism:

[They] are a very talented race. . . . In philosophy they often reason more accurately than the most civilized nations of Europe. They generally tell all the facts of the case, insist on no dogmatic inferences, but leave you to judge conclusively for yourselves. Their history is like the Hebrews, full of romance, and chivalry, and high and lofty achievements. Their poetry is like ascending from earth to heaven; it is the soul of sublimity, and for the boldness of its metaphors, the beauty of its rhythm, the brilliance of its language, cannot be surpassed.

Some missionaries learned Arabic, others mastered Armenian, and still others Turkish. Smith devoted himself to revitalizing the Arabic language and Arab history and to studying his hosts' manners and customs. He pioneered the development of modern Arabic printing fonts, which set the standard for 19th-century Arabic printing. He made a powerful and enduring impression on many of the educated inhabitants of Beirut such as the Maronite-turned-Protestant educator, writer, and encyclopedist Butrus al-Bustani. Together with Smith, Bustani established a literary society in Beirut in 1847 that delved into what at the time were controversial topics, including the education of Arab women.

Bustani and other avatars of Arab liberalism in the 19th century were exceptional; they were elitist to the core. But they seized upon a romanticized and as yet unsullied image of America (among other symbols) to advocate a "modern" nation and to educate their otherwise "ignorant" compatriots. In championing the cause of women's liberation, for example, the late 19th-century Egyptian Qasim Amin extolled American virtues and praised the freedom of women in America. ("In the state of Wyoming," he pointed out, "women received their voting rights in 1869.") It was no coincidence that the constitutional Persian government invited an American to reorder its finances to stave off British and Russian imperialism in 1908.

As for the missionaries, they too changed in the crucible of encounter, especially after it became clear that proselytization itself had failed. What began as an evangelical project became an effort to promote the basically secular, liberal higher education embodied in institutions such as the Syrian Protestant College (later renamed the American University) in Beirut and the Robert College in Istanbul as well as the Constantinople Woman's College. These American institutions contributed to and themselves reflected the modernization of the 19th-century Ottoman empire, which set up its own independent schools and universities to compete with American and other foreign missionary institutions. Nowhere was the missionaries' transformation by actual experience in the Orient more evident than in the words of the famous American missionary-turned-college-president Daniel Bliss. When he laid the cornerstone of College Hall in 1871 at the Syrian Protestant College, Bliss spoke the following words, as revolutionary in America as they were in the Ottoman empire: "A man white, black, or yellow; Christian, Jew, Mohammedan or heathen, may enter and enjoy all the advantages of this institution for three, four, or eight years; and go out believing in one God, or in many Gods, or in no God."

The idea of benevolent America among Arabs reached its apex during and immediately after the First World War. Not only were Americans identified with educational efforts in the region, they were also central to relief efforts amid a terrible wartime famine in Beirut and Mount Lebanon as well as among Armenians displaced from Anatolia. Moreover, President Woodrow Wilson's proclamations on self-determination reinforced a notion among nationalist elites in the Arab world that the United States was different from the European powers, who had agreed to partition the postwar Middle East much as they had partitioned Africa in the late 19th century. Most egregious from an Arab perspective was the Balfour Declaration, which promised British support for the establishment of a European Jewish "national home" in Palestine despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of the native inhabitants -- 90 percent -- were Arabs who opposed what they saw as European colonialism bent on dispossessing them of their land.

In 1919 Howard Bliss, the son of Daniel Bliss and second president of Syrian Protestant College, urged Wilson to form a fact-finding mission to determine what the Arab peoples actually wanted. The result was the Inter-Allied Commission on Mandates in Turkey, popularly known as the King-Crane commission, headed as it was by two Americans: Charles Crane, a Chicago industrialist and contributor to Wilson's presidential campaign, and Henry King, president of Oberlin College. The British and the French opposed it from the outset, refusing to participate in what they regarded as American meddling in their respective spheres of imperial influence. It was also opposed by Zionist leaders.

The commissioners toured nearly 40 cities in what were soon to become the mandates of Palestine, Lebanon, Transjordan, and Syria and held hundreds of interviews with the local population. Like the missionaries before them, the commissioners were not oblivious to local realities and sentiments, and they formed their views accordingly. They recommended first and foremost an independent unified Arab state in Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon. If necessary, the commissioners added, this state should be placed under American mandatory control; that was because, they claimed, Arabs had explicitly expressed more faith in America than in any other great power due to its lack of colonial ambition, its missionary presence, its educational efforts, its democracy, and because of Arab emigration to the United States.

On the subject of Palestine, the King-Crane commissioners were emphatic. They insisted that if the Wilsonian principle of self-determination was to be upheld, Zionism had to be essentially abandoned because the overwhelming majority of the native population was opposed to it. "The initial claim," they argued, "often submitted by Zionist representatives, that they have a `right' to Palestine, based on an occupation of two thousand years ago, can hardly be seriously considered." The commissioners warned that in such circumstances Zionism could only be accomplished through violence.

But the King-Crane report fell on deaf ears. Wilson, who had already committed himself to the Balfour Declaration and to British imperial interests, did not publish the report officially. The British and the French proceeded with their predetermined colonial partition of the Arab world. In 1920 Palestine became a British mandate formally committed to the terms of the Balfour Declaration. The French dismantled the fledgling Arab state in Syria, and its exiled leader became instead king of the newly constituted and British-dominated state of Iraq.

Most Americans are not aware of these developments, which are critical for understanding the modern Arab world. It was the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia in 1938 that pushed the United States into a more direct role in the Middle East. In the decades before World War II, the US government contented itself with a largely passive foreign policy in the region, but the post-WWII policy was far more extensive and active. While America has remained a land of opportunity for many Arabs, and American oil companies were and remain instrumental in realizing undreamed of profits for many autocratic Gulf Arab states (as well as, of course, for the companies themselves), the US government has seen itself far less as a force for liberal or democratic change than as a guarantor of the status quo.

"Stability" in the Middle East however, has come at a significant price, for Arabs and increasingly for Americans. During the Cold War, US opposition to pan-Arab nationalism led many Arabs to identify America as a neocolonial power for the first time; the subsequent emergence of radical Islamist opposition movements further strengthened the suspicion of American influence in the region. Amidst a burgeoning yet disenfranchised population, a minority of fanatical and extremely dangerous extremists capitalize on almost ubiquitous Arab despair with their own undemocratic governments and exploit a widespread Arab despair about US policies in the region that talk of democracy and freedom but do little to promote neither.

Nowhere do more Arabs see such a glaring contradiction between stated American ideals of human rights and democracy and actual American policy than on the question of Palestine. American support for Israel is based on the idea that Israel represents Jewish national redemption; that support is a response both to the history of European anti-Semitism that culminated in the Holocaust and to the centrality of the Jewish presence (and marginality of Islam) in Christian, particularly evangelical, thought about Palestine. But from an Arab perspective Israel has never been and could never have been viewed through these lenses. Zionism in Palestine, a land whose overwhelming majority was Arab at the turn of the 20th century and had been for more than a thousand years before that, caused the destruction of Palestinian society and the dispossession of its Arab inhabitants in 1948. The good that Americans and the United States can do in the region will be constantly overshadowed and tainted in Arab eyes by America's largely unfettered military, economic, and diplomatic support for Israel. Israel's continuing control of the occupied territories increasingly damages the image of America in the Arab world.

However, the merest familiarity with modern history would indicate that widespread Arab opposition to America is not based on long-standing hatred of American values but on more recent anger at American policies in the region, especially toward Israel. Anti-Americanism is not civilizationally rooted, even if at times it is expressed in civilizational terms. Nor does it stem from Islam even if it is sometimes expressed (especially at present) in religious terms. To defuse the ticking time bomb of anti-American sentiment in the Arab world, a just solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that recognizes the history, equality, and humanity of both Israelis and Palestinians is absolutely critical and the promotion of a liberal and democratic Arab political culture essential. Stepping away from the precipice requires an awareness of the long history of American and Arab interaction, a history that most Arabs and most Americans simply do not know. It also requires a recognition of the most important lesson of that forgotten history, namely that Americans and Arabs have not always been locked in conflict and have not always been gripped by an inability to understand one another.

Ussama Makdisi teaches history at Rice University. This essay is adapted form a longer article that appeared in the Journal of American History (Sept. 2002).

This story ran in the Boston Globe on 10/27/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.