Christian Orientals in Conversation with Islam: Two Examples from German Mission History in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

Abstract: The writer describes experiences of Oriental Christians belonging to German missions dealing with Syriac-speaking Muslims in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using the example of two prime Missions in the Urmia-region of Iran—the German Mission to the Orient and the Hermannsburger Mission—he establishes the difference between formally schooled, European-trained Christian rhetoricians, whose forum for debate was public and published, and the less flamboyant, native-born Christians in unpublished discussion with their fellow countrymen. Focus is on two types of encounter: a several-weeks-long published controversy, backed by Turkish political editor Edhem Ruhi but centred on the preaching and writing of Turkish Christian convert John Awetaranian; and the on-the-ground lessons learned by Pera Johannes and his associates at the Hermannsburg Mission in Wasirabad, as they engaged in tentative, non-inflammatory discussion with Muslims of a common cultural background. Both examples show the significance of political involvement, since, on the one hand, Ruhi's newspaper was a forum for his views and thus set into motion as well as called a halt to the Awetaranian-Islam debate, and on the other, the horror stories of the Hermannsburg Mission ultimately showed up the futility and perhaps foolhardiness of combatting culture, even as members of a tolerated minority. On the surface, Awetarian represents the product of self-assured literary activity engaging in open controversy in mission work; and Pera Johannes with the Hermannsburger demonstrates the relatively unlettered, despised native group of Christians in a tenuous situation. The two examples meet, historically, in their encountering realities of politics that could make or break their project.