History, Religion and Progress: The View of the ‘Modernity’ of the American Protestant Missionaries in Late Ottoman Syria

Abstract

The Syrian Protestant College in Beirut is commonly considered very important to the transmission of western ideas in nineteenth-century Syria. What has not been sufficiently investigated until now is the nature of those ideas, which are generally defined as ‘liberal’ and ‘modern’ without further specification. This article investigates the American missionaries’ main ideas concerning history, progress and religion, or, more generally, their concept of ‘modernity’. Finally, after having identified these ideas, the article considers their possible affinity with the ideas of the German philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel.