In 1854, American Presbyterian missionaries arrived in Egypt as part of a larger Anglo-American Protestant movement aiming for worldwide evangelization. Protected by British imperial power, and later by mounting American global influence, their enterprise flourished during the next century. American Evangelicals in Egypt follows the ongoing and often unexpected transformations initiated by missionary activities between the mid-nineteenth century and 1967--when the Six-Day Arab-Israeli War uprooted the Americans in Egypt. Heather Sharkey uses Arabic and English sources to shed light on the many facets of missionary encounters with Egyptians. These occurred through institutions, such as schools and hospitals, and through literacy programs and rural development projects that anticipated later efforts of NGOs. To Egyptian Muslims and Coptic Christians, missionaries presented new models for civic participation and for women's roles in collective worship and community life. At the same time, missionary efforts to convert Muslims and reform Copts stimulated new forms of Egyptian social activism and prompted nationalists to enact laws restricting missionary activities. Faced by Islamic strictures and customs regarding apostasy and conversion, and by expectations regarding the proper structure of Christian-Muslim relations, missionaries in Egypt set off debates about religious liberty that reverberate even today. Ultimately, the missionary experience in Egypt led to reconsiderations of mission policy and evangelism in ways that had long-term repercussions for the culture of American Protestantism.

Missionary institutions were social spaces of closest encounters between Europeans and various segments of the Egyptian society, during the period of British colonialism. In European Evangelicals in Egypt (1900-1956) Samir Boulos develops a theory of cultural exchange that is based on the examination of interactions, experiences and discourses in the context of missionary institutions. Drawing upon oral history interviews as well as rich Egyptian, British and German archival sources, a multifaceted perspective is offered, revealing the complexity and dynamics of mission encounters. Focusing on the everyday life in missionary institutions, experiences of former Egyptian missionary students, local employees, as well as of European missionaries, Samir Boulos explores mutual transformation processes particularly on the individual but also on institutional and social level.

"The Emergence of the Evangelical Egyptians traces the complex cultural encounter between American Presbyterian missionaries and the Egyptian Coptic Orthodox leaders over indigenous Protestant conversion in late Ottoman Egypt, 1854-1878"--

This book on Egyptian Pentecostalism is considered the first integrated monograph on the topic. It invites scholars and students of Religions, Renewal Studies, and Pentecostalism around the world to discover a new arena of research. Due to the sociocultural perspective of this study on Pentecostalism in Egypt, the book also invites sociologists and scholars who study sociocultural and religious context of the Middle East and North Africa to add new trajectories to their studies. No doubt that this study reveals what was concealed for decades regarding movements and revivals that broke out in Egyptian cities and villages! A must-read!

"From a mission field to a missions sender." These words capture the story of the Brazilian evangelical church, which has gone from receiving missionaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to becoming a movement that presently sends out more global laborers than the churches of England or Canada do. After narrating Brazil's missional shift, in this volume Smither addresses one fascinating element of the story--Brazilian evangelical efforts in the Arab world. How have Brazilians adapted culturally among Arabs, how have they approached ministry, and how have they cultivated a theology of mission in the process? Brazilian Evangelical Missions in the Arab World gives the reader insights from one emerging missions movement with an eye toward a more comprehensive view of the global church.

The voices of Americans have long been absent from studies of modern Egypt. Most scholars assume that Americans were either not in Egypt in significant numbers during the nineteenth century or had little of importance to say. This volume shows that neither was the case by introducing and relating the experiences and attitudes of 15 American personalities who worked, lived, or traveled in Egypt from the 1770s to the commencement of World War I. Often in their own words, explorers, consuls, tourists, soldiers, missionaries, artists, scientists, and scholars offer a rare American perspective on everyday Egyptian life and provide a new perspective on many historically significant events. The stories of these individuals and their sojourns not only recount the culture and history of Egypt but also convey the domination of the country by European powers and the support for Egypt by a young American nation.

Conflict, Conquest, and Conversion surveys two thousand years of the Christian missionary enterprise in the Middle East within the context of the region's political evolution. Its broad, rich narrative follows Christian missions as they interacted with imperial powers and as the momentum of religious change shifted from Christianity to Islam and back, adding new dimensions to the history of the region and the nature of the relationship between the Middle East and the West. Historians and political scientists increasingly recognize the importance of integrating religion into political analysis, and this volume, using long-neglected sources, uniquely advances this effort. It surveys Christian missions from the earliest days of Christianity to the present, paying particular attention to the role of Christian missions, both Protestant and Catholic, in shaping the political and economic imperialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Eleanor H. Tejirian and Reeva Spector Simon delineate the ongoing tensions between conversion and the focus on witness and "good works" within the missionary movement, which contributed to the development and spread of nongovernmental organizations. Through its conscientious, systematic study, this volume offers an unparalleled encounter with the social, political, and economic consequences of such trends.