Missions, Charity, and Humanitarian Action in the Levant (19th–20th Century)

There is nothing new about the idea of continuity between the missionary apostolate and humanitarian action. Writing of the crisis of the Catholic missions at the time of colonial independence, some 15 years ago, Claude Prudhomme noted that the mid-20th century marked the “end of an era and of the European missionary utopia [...]. Unless humanitarian intervention constitutes a last attempt to reactivate the missionary spirit”.1 Amissionary territory formany centuries, theMiddle East is particularly fertile ground for these ideas in that it is seen as oneof the cradles of Europeanand US humanitarian action.2 At the beginning of the 2000s, this area saw the emergence of large numbers of NGOs, usually seen as a sign of the vitality of “civil society” and as the outcome of the relative disengagement of the state from the social domain, in a context that was economically liberal and politically authoritarian.Hamit Bozarslan, for instance, seesNGOs as a “routewhereby the authorities attempt to depoliticize the social or to promote charity as the only way to overcome economic and social problems of which they have washed their hands”.3 Today, the idea that “Religion might have been instrumental in the establishment of humanitarianism, but it passed the torch to secularism”4 (via the NGO) is disputed: many missionary or religious organizations are very active