"American Missionaries in Anatolia and Ottoman Syria in the Nineteenth Century
Mavi Boncuk |Trouble Wherever They Went: American Missionaries in Anatolia and Ottoman Syria in the Nineteenth Century
Jeremy Salt
Muslim World, Fall 2002, Vol. 92, Issue Nos. 3&4, pp. 287-314
When the first missionaries sent by the ABCFM (American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions) set off from New England early in the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was about to enter a period of protracted reorganization and reform. The intention was to modernize and thereby strengthen the empire. Of all the principles and abstract ideas on which reforms were based, the equality of all the sultan's subjects before the law regardless of their religious background was perhaps the most difficult to approach and then put into practice. The first Tanzimat reform decree of 1839 'kindled the rage of the old Mussulmans'[1] and by 1870 the Grand Vizier himself was admitting that Ottoman bureaucrats 'could not understand the full adoption of a new system which was repugnant to all their old prejudices.'[2]
Dr. Jeremy Salt"
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