Description:
The complex relationship between America and the Arab world goes back further than most people realize. In Artillery of Heaven, Ussama Makdisi presents a foundational American encounter with the Arab world that occurred in the nineteenth century...
Brief description: Ussama Makdisi is Professor of History and first holder of the Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair of Arab Studies at Rice University. He is the author of The Culture of Sectarianism and coeditor of Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa.
Review Quotes:
Artillery of Heaven stands as a signal contribution to the growing body of North American and British scholarship that is remaking the history of missions and missionaries. Moving beyond the spent debates over weather western missionaries were saints or cultural imperialists, Makdisi and this company of likeminded scholars train their attention on those who were the objects of conversion and their agency in shaping colonial encounters. Readers will find much to admire in his eloquent and balanced book and much to ponder in its evocation of the earliest beginnings of the complex relationship between the United States and the Middle East.
--Christine Leigh Heyrman "Church History"