The articles presented in Cultural Conversions: Unexpected Consequences of Christian Missionary Encounters in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia started as papers presented at a symposium held at the University of Pennsylvania in 2008. As explained by Heather Sharkey, the symposium's convener and the volume's editor, the shared concern of the assembled scholars was to further the understanding of European Christian missionaries as ‘historical actors’ in European colonial projects. While the topic is not discussed in the volume, the writers were clearly hoping to move the discussion of the role of missionaries in shaping colonial histories beyond the debate over the writings of the Comaroffs that dominated research about Christian missions at the turn of the twenty-first century. While it has to be acknowledged that missionaries did not dictate the flow of events and developments in colonized territories, it is still valuable to recognize that the actions of missionaries had consequences, often ‘unexpected’ to use Sharkey's terminology, in the historical struggles that took place between colonizers and the colonized. ‘Missionary history is political’, Sharkey summed up (p. 21), meaning that missionary efforts to convert colonized peoples to European ideas of Christianity, whether they succeeded or not, in some way served as catalysts for nationalist movements.
The nine chapters in the volume all build toward the demonstration of this point. The first three discuss ‘Christian contestations’, that is, instances when indigenous Christians challenged missionary definitions of Christianity. David Gordon talks about the Lenshina movement in mid-twentieth century Zambia, a chiliastic movement under the leadership of its queen or prophet Alice Mulenga, that prompted African Christians to reject the teachings of missionaries, and to purge the countryside of witches in preparation for the establishment of a New Jerusalem. Laura Robson relates the story of the Palestinian Anglican Church, a small but prosperous offspring of the Church Missionary Society that found itself in the incongruous position of protesting the Church of England's decision to support the foundation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Chandra Mallampalli looks into the missionary background behind the conflicting notions of Christian identity aired in a nineteenth century South Asian court case. The case pitted a Eurasian widow's claim that her deceased husband's conversion to Protestant Christianity gave her title to his estate against her brother-in-law's contention that the practice followed by South Asians converted by Catholic missionaries of recognizing Hindu laws of inheritance granted him his brother's property.
A second trio of articles frames missionary proselytizing from the perspective of the doubt or repudiation such activity triggered in adherents of other faiths. Stephan C. Berkwitz provides three examples of Sri Lankan Buddhist characterizations of Christian missionaries. He suggested that over time Buddhist thinkers became more and more adept at depicting missionaries as a threat to Sri Lankan national identity. Beth Baron offers a gripping investigation of the Port Said Orphan Scandal of 1933, a scandal over the caning of a fifteen-year-old Muslim girl by a female missionary. The missionary insisted that she was disciplining a rebellious teenager, but the girl, through the Muslim Brotherhood, made the case in Egyptian newspapers that she was beaten because she refused to convert. Paul Landau's study is ostensibly about the early adventures of the London Missionary Society missionary Robert Moffat in territories that would become the Republic of South Africa. Landau's real interest, however, is in characterizing Moffat's adjustment, in the face of African apathy, of his theological ideas to fit the cultural constructs in the minds of the men he was seeking to convert.
The last three articles look at the languages of Christianity fashioned by and for indigenous converts. James De Lorenzi writes about the emergence of a Christian intelligentsia among the converted in Eritrea and Ethiopia. He shows how the converts spoke in both the language of imperialist Italian Catholicism and the language of Eritrean nationalism. Mrinalini Sebastian narrates an interesting story of how Christianity intersected with class and race in the life and career of the South Asian convert Anandarao Kaundinya. Heather Sharkey, in her turn, contributes a study of the tension in the British Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) over whether to translate the New Testament in a ‘classical’ written Arabic commensurate with the language in the Quran, or to try to reproduce the New Testament in vernaculars spoken by local Muslim peoples. The Protestant sensibilities of the Christians who subsidized the BFBS led to a number of vernacular translations that collected dust in warehouses. Meanwhile, Arab nationalists used the translations as examples of how Christians were seeking to demean Islam and Muslim peoples.
The articles in Cultural Conversions struggle under the weight of two inadequately resolved theoretical issues. To illustrate the unintended consequences brought about by missionaries, it would have helped to have some idea of the consequences missionaries did seek. Missionaries were not just bulls in so many cultural china shops. There needed to be some consideration in the articles of the evangelical ambitions and goals of the missionaries under discussion. Further, it would have helped if these goals and ambitions had been then contrasted with the cultural agendas of colonial states. These agendas came up in most of the articles, yet their importance to the missionaries was not incorporated into the proposed theoretical model.
Still, the volume is worth recommending for use in graduate seminars on Christian missions and colonial history. The contributors all displayed a masterful command of their archival materials and provided a good many ideas that could inspire future research.
