American Sheikhs.

AuthorJones, Curtis
PositionBook review

American Sheikhs: Two Families, Four Generations, and the Story of America's Influence in the Middle East, By Brian VanDeMark, Prometheus Books: New York, ISBN- 978-1616144760, 2012, pp. 252, $25.00

In 1866 American missionaries founded the Syrian Protestant College--later renamed the American University of Beirut (AUB). It has long been the most influential institution of higher education in the Middle East, and a lonely symbol of America's secularism and objectivity in a region that has suffered from a grave deficit of these perspectives.

From 1866 to 1984, the institution was steadfastly led by a dedicated family chain of American educators: Founder Daniel Bliss, his son Howard, Howard's son-in-law Bayard Dodge, Bayard's son David, and family friend Malcolm Kerr. Until 1945, AUB's leaders had considerable success in insulating their school from the turmoil that was bound to well up in a region condemned to make the excruciating transit from the indigenous imperialism of the Ottomans and the Safavids, to the alien imperialism of England, France, and Russia, to the alien imperialism of the United States and Israel, to the tortured emergence of an autonomous Middle East.

Perhaps the stewards of AUB could have continued to isolate their invaluable center of learning from politics, if not for Washington's decision to inflict America's self-serving compulsions onto the region. The avatar of Americanism, beneficiary of Washington's prewar policy of benign inattention, could not avoid the battering generated from the postwar policy of blatant intrusion--as in Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, and Iraq.

The cogency and readability of American Sheikhs are enhanced by the author's description of the lives and personalities of the protagonists--of Daniel Bliss's modest origins, his education in the devout confines of Amherst College of the mid-1800's, his ordination as a Congregationalist minister by Andover Theological Seminary, and his good fortune in finding a wife well-suited to dealing with the challenges of those formative years in Lebanon.

Arriving in 1856 as a missionary--a champion of conversion to his own faith--Daniel Bliss had the adaptability and insight to come to recognize that most Middle Easterners were bonded to their own traditional affiliations--Muslims most rigidly of all. The guidance they desperately needed was not spiritual but intellectual. So Bliss became an educator, and AUB an enlightened, nonpartisan purveyor of modern learning.

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