Heather J. Sharkey

Empire and Muslim conversion: historical reflections on Christian missions in Egypt

This article considers Christian evangelization among Muslims in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and traces its relationship to the global and local dynamics of Western imperialism. Focusing on Egypt, where Anglo-American Protestant missionaries were active, the article examines why missionaries encountered fierce resistance from Muslim audiences despite the small number of Muslim conversions and how they inadvertently galvanized Egyptian anti-colonial nationalist and Islamist movements. Reflecting on this history of cultural encounter from a postcolonial perspective, the article then discusses the challenge of assessing missionary motives, social influences, and long-term legacies given the sharp differences of interpretation that have often prevailed among Christian and Muslim scholars and polemicists. It draws special attention to an Arabic postcolonial genre of anti-missionary treatises that portray Christian missionaries as neo-Crusaders whose legacies have posed a continuing threat to the integrity of Muslim societies.

Chronicles of Progress: Northern Sudanese Women in the Era of British Imperialism

Since the decolonisation movements of the mid-twentieth century, historians have been contesting the impact of European imperialism on the societies of Asia and Africa. While many have agreed that colonial rule was socially transformative, bringing far-reaching changes to local economic, political, and cultural systems, they have differed markedly in assessing its consequences. They debate whether colonialism led to greater development or underdevelopment, prosperity or debility, and whether Europeans promoted or inhibited progress. Analogous questions have arisen in studies that focus on women. Did women emerge from the colonial period with enhanced or diminished access to educations, careers, income, and leadership – more free from or constrained by the weight of social conventions? Several historians of eastern and southern Africa, for example, have shown how colonial government policies excluded women from new wage-labour opportunities, particularly in cities and mining communities, while the codification of once-flexible customary laws inhibited females in legal manoeuvrings. By contrast, in the northern Sudan, writers of different backgrounds and ideologies agree that the era of British domination witnessed a degree of rapid progress for women, particularly in urban areas. This article surveys the history of perceived progress among urban northern Sudanese Muslim women in the first half of the twentieth century by examining debates that took place among three groups: British colonial officials and missionaries (women and men), many of whom emphasised the administration’s ‘record of achievement’ among females; early male nationalists, who debated ways to reform local women for the sake of the modern nation; and Sudanese women scholars and activists, who in the post-colonial period stressed female involvement in anti-colonial resistance as well as local initiatives for change. Strikingly, all three groups regarded the northern Sudanese woman as ‘backward’ in the early twentieth century, and prescribed or described measures for her

A Century in Print: Arabic Journalism and Nationalism in Sudan, 1899-1999

In 1999, Sudans Arabic periodical press observes its hundredth anniversary. A century before, and one year after the collapse of the Mahdist state (1881–98), the Britishdominated “Anglo-Egyptian“ regime (1898–1956) launched an official Arabic-English gazette. Four years later, Lebanese journalists founded the regions first independent Arabic newspaper, catering to an audience of Egyptians and Lebanese employed by the new government. These expatriates sparked an interest in journalism among educated Northern Sudanese men, who within a few years of the newspapers debut were avidly subscribing and contributing to journals.

Sudanese Arabic Bibles and the Politics of Translation

Part 1 translation, in theory, entails the simple conveyance of meaning from one form of language to another. translation, in practice, involves the selection and privileging of certain forms over others, and is therefore an exercise of power. the Sudanese Arabic Bibles of the British and Foreign Bible Society offer a vivid example of how power and politics can become enmeshed in the process of translation. The British and Foreign Bible Society was a Christian publishing mission based in London that aimed to distribute Bibles by selling full editions or smaller “portions” at cheap prices.2 its founders believed that every person, everywhere, should have access to a Bible in his or her own language. this reasoning led the Society to sponsor what became a massive global translation enterprise, starting in 1804–1805 with its first non-English edition: a Gospel of John in Mohawk, intended for Britain’s Native American allies who had lost their lands and moved to canada in the wake of the American Revolutionary War.3 By 1965, the Society was able to claim that it had published Bible translations in 872 different “languages.” it made this claim in The Gospel in Many Tongues, a promotional publication that listed the Society’s imprints. But what indeed was a language? the 1965 edition of The Gospel in Many Tongues counted nine Arabic “languages” in its roster of Bible translations, but listed a total of fifteen distinct Arabic versions overall. For example, the twenty-

Arabic Antimissionary Treatises: Muslim Responses to Christian Evangelism in the Modern Middle East

INTERNATIONAL BULLETIN OF MISSIONARY RESEARCH, Vol. 28, No. 3 I the late twentieth century several Muslim Arab thinkers published treatises that labeled Christian missionary activities in the Middle East as part of a Western imperial crusade against Islam. Together, the polemical works of this nature constitute a distinct Arabic genre characterized by its antimissionary, anti-imperial, postcolonial tone. Despite variations in the social profiles, ideologies, and national origins of their authors, these Arabic treatises share important features. They assert close and enduring historical connections between a triad of tabshir, isti‘mar, and ishtiraq—that is, Christian evangelism, Western imperialism, and Orientalist scholarship on Islam and Muslims. They discuss Christian evangelical methods for the sake of either resisting or imitating them. Most have an activist strain, urging Arab readers to “wake up” and rally to action by blocking Christian evangelical inroads and Western cultural influences, pursuing global Islamic mission (da‘wa, literally a “call” or “invitation”), or rigorously supporting the values of Arab Islamic culture. Some of the more recent works are deeply xenophobic and insist that Christians and Muslims remain enemies and rivals, locked in a battle for global mastery and survival. Why did this Arabic genre flourish so markedly in the second half of the twentieth century? And why did the Muslim authors of these works portray Christian evangelism as such a grave threat to Islam and Muslims, condemning even the social services that early twentieth-century missionaries provided to develop modern schools, ameliorate public health, extend mass literacy, and so on? The vehemence of these authors is all the more striking if one considers, first, that European and American missionaries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries gained few Muslim converts (enjoying far greater success in conversion, by contrast, among indigenous Middle Eastern Christians) and, second, that in the mid–twentieth century newly independent Middle Eastern governments suppressed most missionary activities (for example, by “nationalizing” or appropriating many mission-affiliated schools and universities and by barring missionaries from teaching Christianity to Muslim students). Viewed in this light, the authors’ insistence that there is a continuing foreign Christian threat may seem highly questionable. Nevertheless, a look at more than twenty Arabic antimissionary treatises suggests provisional answers to the questions posed above about the genre’s popular appeal and its sources of anger or anguish. In short, these works may have struck a chord by acknowledging the humiliation that Western dominance has entailed in the modern Arab world, where Britain and France imposed forms of colonial control in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and where, in the second half of the twentieth century, the United States and the Soviet Union repeatedly intervened. Their authors accuse missionaries, as bearers of a Western Christian message, of striking a deep blow at Muslim Arab notions of communal and religious identity, authority, and pride. Arabic Antimissionary Treatises: Muslim Responses to Christian Evangelism in the Modern Middle East

Rethinking Sudan Studies: a Post-2011 Manifesto

This essay appraises “Sudan Studies” following the 2011 secession of South Sudan. It asks two questions. First, what has Sudan Studies been as a colonial and postcolonial field of academic inquiry and how should or must it change? Second, should we continue to write about a single arena of Sudan Studies now that Sudan has split apart? The authors advance a “manifesto” for Sudan Studies by urging scholars to map out more intellectual terrain by attending to non-elite actors and women; grass-roots and local history; the environment and the arts; oral sources; and interdisciplinary studies of culture, politics, and society. They propose that scholars can transcend the changing boundaries of the nation-state, and recognize connections forged through past and present migrations and contacts, by studying the Sudan as a zone rather than a fixed country. Finally, in their introduction to this bilingual special issue, they highlight the increasing relevance of French scholarship to the endeavor of rethinking Sudan Studies.

An Egyptian in China: Ahmed Fahmy and the Making of “World Christianities”

Ahmed Fahmy, who was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1861 and died in Golders Green, London, in 1933, was the most celebrated convert from Islam to Christianity in the history of the American Presbyterian mission in Egypt. American Presbyterians had started work in Egypt in 1854 and soon developed the largest Protestant mission in the country. They opened schools, hospitals, and orphanages; sponsored the development of Arabic Christian publishing and Bible distribution; and with local Egyptians organized evangelical work in towns and villages from Alexandria to Aswan. In an age when Anglo-American Protestant missions were expanding across the globe, they conceived of their mission as a universal one and sought to draw Copts and Muslims alike toward their reformed (that is, Protestant) creed. In the long run, American efforts led to the creation of an Egyptian Evangelical church ( Kanisa injiliyya misriyya ) even while stimulating a kind of “counter-reformation” within Coptic Orthodoxy along with new forms of social outreach among Muslim activists and nationalists.

P. M. H OLT , The Sudan of the Three Niles: The Funj Chronicle, 910–1288/1504–1871, Islamic History and Civilization: Studies and Texts (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1999). Pp. 228.

P. M. Holts The Sudan of the Three Niles is an annotated translation of the Funj Chronicle, a history of the Funj sultanate (1504–1821) based at Sennar, along the Blue Nile, and of the Turco-Egyptian regime that succeeded it at Khartoum. Along with the Tabaqat of Wad Dayf Allah (a biographical dictionary of Sudanese Muslim holy men compiled in the late 18th century), the Funj Chronicle is the most important Arabic source on the northern riverain Sudan in the Funj era, a period in which Islam was spreading widely and the region was developing its pronounced Arab–Islamic identity.

71.00 cloth.

In 1826, Mehmet Ali of Egypt sent a giraffe from somewhere in what is now the Republic of the Sudan to King Charles X of France. The first live giraffe ever to reach France, she arrived when public museums and zoos were emerging, inspiring scholarly and popular interest in science and the world beyond French borders. This article studies the career and “afterlives” of this giraffe in France and relative to giraffes at large in the Sudan, in order to trace a Franco-Sudanese history that has stretched from the early nineteenth century to the present. At the same time, viewing this connected history in the aftermath of the 2011 secession of South Sudan, when colonial and national borders appear contingent and subject to change, this article approaches the Sudan as a zone (as opposed to a fixed country) within global networks of migration involving people, other animals, things, and ideas.

La Belle Africaine : The Sudanese Giraffe Who Went to France

What does it mean to convert? In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British and American evangelical Protestant missionaries arrived in the Islamic societies of North Africa with some clear thoughts on this matter. They imagined conversions entailing public professions of faith that would gain confirmation through ceremonies of baptism and the growth of official Church membership. They imagined converts who would establish families and spread Christianity at the grass roots. To their supporters at home, they emphasised that their missions were universal, appealing to Muslims, Christians and Jews; men, women and children; rich and poor; sick and healthy. However, formal, large-scale or family conversions seldom occurred in Islamic North Africa, except, arguably, in parts of Egypt among Coptic Orthodox communities that were already Christian. By the late nineteenth century, circumstances on the ground were compelling Evangelical Protestant missionaries to change their ideas and expectations about what conversion and Christian identity could mean. In the process, missionaries began to acknowledge that conversions could be partial, private and unknowable to others in addition to being incremental in nature.1 In short, conversions could be highly ambiguous.