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The thesis looks at Protestant missions to the Ottoman Empire and the countries which emerged from it through Bosch's "Enlightenment missionary" (2003) and Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" (1996) paradigms. It argues that Muslim resistance to Christianity is rooted in innate Muslim intransigence and in specific historical events in which missionaries played important roles. The work utilizes a simple formula: it contrasts the socio-political and cultural framework missionaries imbibed at home with that of their host environment, outlines the goals and strategies they formulated and implemented, looks at the results, and notes the missiological implications. The formula is applied to four successive periods. We begin with the pre-World War I missionaries of the late Ottoman Empire. We look at their faith in reason, their conviction in the cultural superiority of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, their attitude towards Islam, their idea of reaching the Muslim majority by reviving the Orthodox churches, and the evolution of their theology and missiology. World War I changed the landscape. The Empire's demise led to a struggle for Turkish and Arab national self-determination leading to the establishment of the Turkish Republic and various Arab entities, notably French and British mandates. Protestant missions almost disappeared in Turkey, while a small number of "veterans" kept the enterprise alive in the Arab world. While the Arabs struggled to liberate themselves from the Mandatory Powers, these veterans analyzed past failures, recognized the importance of reaching Muslims directly and began experimenting with more contextualized approaches. The post-World War II era saw the retreat of colonialism, the creation of Israel, a succession of wars with that country, and the formation of a Palestinian identity. Oil enabled the Arabian Peninsula to emerge as a major economic and political force. The missionary enterprise, on the other hand, virtually collapsed. Unlike their veteran predecessors, the pre-Boomer generation, with a few notable exceptions, was bereft of fresh ideas. During the 1970s the evangelical Baby Boomers launched a new enterprise. They tended not to perceive themselves as heirs of a heritage going back to the 1800s, though the people they "targeted" did. Their successors, the GenXers, products of post-modernism and inheritors of Boomer structures, face a region experiencing both increased political frustration and the re-emergence of Islam as a socio-political power. In closing we look at Church-centered New Testament spirituality as a foundational paradigm for further missions to the region. / Christian Spirituality, Church History and Missiology / D. Th. (Missiology)

Approved for public release, distribution is unlimited / This thesis compares the Western response to two radical challenges in eras considerably removed in time: the 1900-1901 Boxer rebellion in China and today's Islamic terror. It brings a much-needed historical perspective to bear in assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the contemporary Western conceptualization of the al-Qaeda and Taliban threat as a "clash of civilizations." It demonstrates that the current struggle against Islamic fundamentalism is not an altogether new challenge to Western interest and values. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are in the end an expression of the same forces of resistance that also led to the origination of the Boxers in 19th century China. The cultural pressure that the West unavoidably developed by its imperialistic policy in the 19th and early 20th centuries was replaced by the penetration of the world with values, standards and symbols of the Western way of life and civilization in the course of globalization. The West ought to understand that the current terrorist threat is not "the next stage of history," as some scholars erroneously puts it, but a known historical phenomenon in a new form, for which neither the West nor other cultures bear the blame. / Major (GS), German Army

Comprendre les présupposés qui fondent les rapports au monde des individus selon leur appartenance civilisationnelle nécessite des outils et une méthode permettant de répondre à trois questions principales. D’abord, comment aborder le rapport que des individus et leurs collectivités entretiennent avec le monde et avec l’Autre selon leur propre système d’interprétations et d’explications de ces réalités? Ensuite, comment penser la diversité des collectivités humaines qui établissent de tels rapports? Finalement, comment aborder les dimensions collectives à travers les discours limités d’individus? Deux outils m’ont permis de prendre du recul face à ma subjectivité et d’accéder à un certain niveau de réalité et de validité quant aux faits rapportés et aux résultats atteints. Dans un premier temps, le réseau notionnel articulant les conceptions du monde (Ikenga-Metuh, 1987) comme phénomènes de civilisations (Mauss, 1929) accessibles par l’analyse des représentations sociales (Jodelet, 1997) permet de définir et d’étudier l’interface entre l’individuel et le collectif. Dans un deuxième temps, l’opérationnalisation de la recherche permet de cerner le XVIe siècle comme moment de rencontre propice à l’étude des civilisations andines et occidentales à travers les représentations du Soi espagnol et de l’Autre inca du chroniqueur Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa. Finalement, la méthode d’analyse de discours (Sabourin, 2009) lève le voile sur une grammaire sociale polarisante entre le Soi et l’Autre, laquelle traverse les trois univers de sens (religieux, intellectuel et politique) observés dans le discours de Sarmiento. La mise à jour des positions théologiques, intellectuelles et politiques de l’auteur ouvre à son tour sur les récits et discours collectifs propres aux civilisations occidentales et andines de son époque, et permet un questionnement nouveau : cette polarisation est-elle unique à la localisation sociale de Sarmiento ou constitue-t-elle un phénomène civilisationnel proprement occidental ? / Understanding the assumptions underlying the relationships between individuals and the world according to their civilizational affiliation requires tools and a method to address three main questions. First, how to approach the relationship individuals and their collectivities maintain with the world and with the Other according to their own set of interpretations and meanings of these realities? Second, how to envision the diversity of human collectivities which establish such relations? Finally, how to approach the collective dimensions through limited individual discourse? Two tools enabled me to distance myself from my own subjectiveness and to attain a certain degree of reality and validity as to the stated facts and the achieved results. First, the notional network linking worldviews (Ikenga-Metuh, 1987) as a civilizational phenomenon (Mauss, 1929) accessible through the analysis of social representations (Jodelet, 1997), enables the identification of an interface which can be studied between the individual and the collective. Secondly, research operationalization makes it possible to identify the sixteenth century as a significant crossroad for the study of Western and Andean civilizations through Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa’s representations of the Spanish Self and the Inca Other. Finally, discourse analysis (Sabourin, 2009) unveils a polarizing social grammar between the Self and the Other which involves the three realms of meaning (religious, intellectual and political) observed in Sarmiento’s discourse. The author’s theological, intellectual and political positions thus revealed lead, in turn, to the collective stories and discourses which prevailed in Western and Andean civilizations at the time, and invites a further question: Is this polarization unique to Sarmiento’s social location or does it constitute a truly Western civilizational phenomenon?