From “heathen Turks” to “cruel Turks”: religious and political roots of the changing American perception towards the Middle East

Abstract

In his 2010 book The Turk in America, Justin McCarthy asserts that "From start to finish, the American missionaries viewed the Turks as their enemy. They carried their feelings to American people". A closer look at the nineteenth century, suggests that the issue is more complex, that the century does not have a seamless, homogeneous, uninterrupted, and linear history with regards to the American perception of the Middle East. A good number of Americans moderated their views about the Turks and Muslims after encountering them as merchants, diplomats, and missionaries in person. As a result, the American image of heathen and "tyrannical" Turks was transformed into "pluralistic" and "tolerant" Turks by the mid-nineteenth century and into cruel and "bloodthirsty" Turks by turn of the twentieth century. While the former image had been shaped by European religious and political discourse, the latter image had been shaped by the increasing Protestant missionary activities in the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century.