This book examines how the presence of an American evangelical mission in the borderlands between Qajar Iran and the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century contributed to the development of a secular nationalism among the indigenous Neo-Aramaic speaking Christian population of the region. The Americans aimed to “reform” the ancient Church of the East (East Syrians, or Syriac “Nestorians”) by establishing schools, publishing and distributing literature in the vernacular, and preaching a penitential return to “Biblical Christianity,” but their interventions in the region helped to lay the grou ... More

This book examines how the presence of an American evangelical mission in the borderlands between Qajar Iran and the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century contributed to the development of a secular nationalism among the indigenous Neo-Aramaic speaking Christian population of the region. The Americans aimed to “reform” the ancient Church of the East (East Syrians, or Syriac “Nestorians”) by establishing schools, publishing and distributing literature in the vernacular, and preaching a penitential return to “Biblical Christianity,” but their interventions in the region helped to lay the groundwork for the articulation of a new national identity and many East Syrians began to understand themselves as “Assyrians.” A particular evangelical configuration of modernity was cultivated at the mission in the antebellum period, one belonging to a visceral realm often unrecognized in characterizations of secularism and the Enlightenment. In the late nineteenth century liberalizing trends in American Protestantism provided further impetus to the emergence of a distinct Syrian identity as did the proliferation of foreign missions, which caused a fracture in the community resulting in new publicly expressed concerns about the unity of the “nation.” By the turn of the twentieth century some Syrian nationalists responded autoethnographically to the orientalist and biblical archeological knowledge, which the missions had disseminated in vernacular publications, by locating their origins historically in the ancient Near East: they linked the national consciousness that had been developing through the nineteenth century to the name and history of the Assyrians.