The Orphan Scandal: Christian Missionaries and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, by Beth Baron

Abstract

The Orphan Scandal: Christian Missionaries and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, by Beth Baron. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2014. xxii, 245 pp. $85.00 US (cloth), $24.95 US (paper). The brutal beating of a fifteen-year-old Muslim girl, Turkiyya Hasan, at the Swedish Salaam Mission's Home for Destitutes in Port Said in June 1933 exploded into a scandal. Beth Baron's micro-history of the incident provides an excellent lens for examining the interaction of Protestant missionaries, Hasan al-Banna's fledgling Muslim Brotherhood, British imperialism, and Egyptian politics in the first half of the twentieth century. Writing the history of Christian missions is no longer left primarily to missionaries, and Islamist movements have attracted much scholarly attention. Bringing the two fields together, Baron emphasizes unintended consequences: Christian proselytizing helped provoke the rapid rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in semi-colonial Egypt. She draws on US and British national archives, missionary archives, and Arabic articles, memoirs, and cartoons. After a prologue outlining diverse perspectives on the Turkiyya Hasan affair, chapter one discusses Islamic law and practices regarding destitute children. In mid-nineteenth century Egypt, inadequate social services allowed Protestant and Catholic missionaries to move in with schools, hospitals, and orphanages. Muslims who turned children over to these institutions hoped for care, schooling, and a moral upbringing, but the ultimate goal for most missionaries was winning for Christ. Beginning in 1882, the British occupation provided an umbrella under which the missions flourished. Chapters two and three discuss the Fowler Orphanage, which Presbyterians operated in Cairo, and the orphanage which Pentecostal Lillian Trasher founded in the southern town of Asyut. The United Presbyterian Church of North America's American the largest Protestant missionary enterprise in Egypt, ran the Fowler Orphanage with Quaker support. The Mission was headquartered in Asyut, where a substantial minority of the population were Coptic Orthodox Christians. The Mission primarily proselytized Copts. Trasher's orphanage, which was affiliated with the Assemblies of God, was located across the Nile from Asyut. Taking in widowed mothers as well as children, grew into a village. Much of its support came from local Copts. Chapter four returns to the Swedish Salaam Mission and Turkiyya Hasan's beating by a woman missionary. Maria Ericsson, the Swedish founder of the Mission, was an adherent of the Holiness revival movement who came to Port Said in 1911 to convert Muslims. Islam is not an invention of man, she wrote, it is an invention of Satan himself against the Son of God and against human souls (p. …