Passionnant : As‘ad Abukhalil sur les fondements missionnaires de l’AUB : The Unwritten History of Henry Jessup and the Early Founders of the American University of Beirut
▻http://english.al-akhbar.com/blogs/angry-corner/unwritten-history-henry-jessup-and-early-founders-american-univer
But AUB literature still offers glowing profiles of the early founders of AUB without bothering to reveal anything – not even in passing – about the missionary impulses and activities of the founder. New historians, like Ussama Makdisi and Betty Anderson, have shed new light on the early founding of AUB and on the role of American missionaries. AUB does not want to bring up that part of its history. The glowing profile of Henry Jessup is a good example. What is it about Jessup that has not been mentioned by the magazine?
Those American missionaries did not travel in the 19th century to the Syrian lands in order to help the natives. Far from that, the missionaries – and AUB – sprung from the urge to make the Bible available to the natives in Arabic in order to drive them away from Islam. But the natives were not dumb: They were aware of the motives of the American missionaries in Lebanon, and Muslims largely stayed away from AUB. The Druze were the first non-Christians to join AUB. Jessup himself shed light on his mission in his own writings, if only Main Gate would have bothered.
The missionary work of AUB founders (and later leaders) has to be exposed at last and the student and faculty community need to be educated that the motto of AUB, “That they have life and have it more abundantly,” is one of many deceptive slogans used by AUB to dupe the natives – who are assumed to be both evil and fools – unless they see the light and convert to Christianity.
Plus généralement, cet article signé Jeremy Salt : American Missionaries in Anatolia and Ottoman Syria in the Nineteenth Century
▻http://mbarchives.blogspot.fr/2007/04/american-missionaries-in-anatolia-and.html
It was in this charged atmosphere that the American missionaries began seeking converts to the Protestant faith. Their activities generated not only the opposition of the Eastern churches but the suspicion of the Ottoman government. Yet they radiated confidence even in the most difficult and dangerous circumstances. Their mission was to carry Gospel truth to the ’nominal’ Christians of the Eastern churches and they would do it come what may: they also hoped to influence Muslims through their teaching and good example and perhaps one day approach them directly (which some of the missionaries did anyway). Their principal enemies were the priests and higher ecclesiastics of the Eastern churches who tried to check their advances by repeatedly anathematizing any of their flock who had dealings with the Protestants. In the abstract, the great enemy was ’untruth’; not just the ’untruth’ of the churches of the Eastern rites but of the whole edifice of Islam. Whatever they might declare about their good intentions, they freely expressed their hostility to the Eastern churches and to Islam in their private correspondence and in missionary journals published in the United States.
Il n’est pas rare de rencontrer une nette défiance envers le protestantisme au Liban de la part, notamment, des maronites. Le rôle historique des missionnaires américains, rappelé ici, en est certainement la cause.
Ces histoires rappellent également que, lorsque les Occidentaux prétendent s’intéresser au sort des « minorités » chrétiennes d’Orient, les chrétiens locaux savent assez bien à quoi s’en tenir quant aux réels sentiments de « fraternité » qu’ont longtemps entretenu les églises catholiques européennes et les églises protestantes américaines envers leurs versions du christianisme.
