Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

by Suzy Hansen

The first missionaries, Pliny Fisk and Levi Parsons, left Boston in 1819 for the Ottoman Empire, or Palestine, “to attempt to evangelize the lands of the Bible” and reclaim them from “a withering infidel grasp,” writes the historian Ussama Makdisi (who is himself a descendant of Arab Protestants). But the Americans would not have an easy time converting the infidels of Palestine. They had a faulty belief that the entire religion of Islam would soon collapse. Other successful military conquests in the East—the British conquest of India, for example—had convinced them that Christians could convert the entire world. At that time, the Ottomans sometimes called the Americans “aliens,” or müsteminler, and some Arabs referred to Americans as “the English.” That they were American meant very little; no one knew anything about the United States. The Americans didn’t know anything about the Ottoman Empire either.