Ussama S. Makdisi
Professor of History
Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair of Arab Studies
On Leave 2008-09
Email: makdisi [] rice.edu Phone: x2561 Office: 307 Humanities
Education
- Ph.D., Princeton University, 1997.
- B.A., Wesleyan University, 1990.
Areas of Interest
- Ottoman Empire
- Arab World in the 20th Century
- Islam and the West
Research and Teaching
Ussama Makdisi is Professor of History and the first holder of the Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair of Arab Studies at Rice University.
Professor Makdisi is the author of The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (University of California Press, 2000). He is also the author of “Anti-Americanism in the ArabWorld: An Interpretation of Brief History” which appeared in the Journal of American History and “Ottoman Orientalism” and “Reclaiming the Land of the Bible: Missionaries, Secularism, and Evangelical Modernity” both of which appeared in the American Historical Review. Professor Makdisi has also published in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and in the Middle East Report. Makdisi's latest book is Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Cornell University Press, 2007).
In Artillery of Heaven, Makdisi presents a foundational American encounter with the Arab world that occurred in the nineteenth century, shortly after the arrival of the first American Protestant missionaries in the Middle East. He tells the dramatic tale of the conversion and death of As'ad Shidyaq, the earliest Arab convert to American Protestantism. The struggle over this man's body and soul—and over how his story might be told—changed the actors and cultures on both sides.
In the unfamiliar, multireligious landscape of the Middle East, American missionaries at first conflated Arabs with Native Americans and American culture with an uncompromising evangelical Christianity. In turn, their Christian and Muslim opponents in the Ottoman Empire condemned the missionaries as malevolent intruders. Yet during the ensuing confrontation within and across cultures an unanticipated spirit of toleration was born that cannot be credited to either Americans or Arabs alone. Makdisi provides a genuinely transnational narrative for this new, liberal awakening in the Middle East, and the challenges that beset it.
By exploring missed opportunities for cultural understanding, by retrieving unused historical evidence, and by juxtaposing for the first time Arab perspectives and archives with American ones, this book counters a notion of an inevitable clash of civilizations and thus reshapes our view of the history of America in the Arab world.
Selected Publications
- Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Cornell University Press, 2007)
- Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa (Indiana, 2006) co-edited with Peter Silverstein
- The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (Univ. of California, 2000).
 |
 |
| Artillery of Heaven (2007) |
The Culture of Sectarianism (2000) |
Curriculum Vitae
CV as of March 2008
Links