Evangelical Awakening: Becoming Protestant in the Arab Renaissance

Chapter 1 considers what it meant to become Protestant in the sectarian landscape of nineteenth-century Ottoman Syria in a period of widespread socio-cultural and political transformation. It compares and contrasts American missionary and Syrian Protestant views of evangelical identity and religious conversion as it examines Protestant conversion accounts written after 1860, including an account by the renowned scholar Butrus al-Bustani. Drawing upon shared values of literacy, Bible reading, and evangelistic printing, these narratives demonstrate how Syrian and American Protestants upheld the printed word as a cultural force, a concept that fit with the intellectual currents of the Nahda in the late Ottoman period. Whereas traditional studies of this literary renaissance characterize it as a secular movement, Syrian Protestants tell a story of nahdawi identity entwined with evangelical commitments.