If George English was the first American to seriously attempt to understand the Ottoman, Arab, and Muslim-majority societies (as the previous article in this series presented), the first prominent person from the region to attempt to understand America was none other than the pioneering Egyptian educator and thinker, Rifaa al-Tahtawi.

After the five years he had spent in Paris as a guide to one of the early educational missions that Mohamed Ali Pasha had sent there, al-Tahtawi returned to Egypt to serve as, effectively, Mohamed Ali’s education and translation supremo. Al-Tahtawi noted the serious and rigorous work that several American missionaries were undertaking in the Levant and Egypt, and it’s highly likely that he had heard of similar work in Turkey. Such American presence was notably different from that of most Europeans in the Middle East at the time, for the Americans, in that early stage of interaction with the region, did not seem in any way interested in securing strategic interests, nor overly keen on economic privileges, nor did they seem to be adventurers drawn by imagined allures of orientalist fantasies. Across the region, the early Americans came across as serious scholars, often representing different religious groupings back home.

Al-Tahtawi was intrigued. After all, the man who had started his life as a scholar of al-Azhar (historically, the Sunni world’s most prestigious seat of learning) and who had developed himself in the mid nineteenth century into the orient’s most notable expert on French culture and society, must have found the mix of religious service and cultural immersion that those Americans seemed to embody, intriguing. We know that he penned an assessment of the American political and social experience, almost certainly after listening to some of those American missionaries in the region, and quite likely after correspondences with acquaintances who had interacted with others in Istanbul. Al-Tahtawi’s verdict was exceedingly positive. To his mind, America was “among the greatest civilised countries in the world”, not just because of its technological advancement, or the riches that that continent had bestowed on “the pilgrims” who had immigrated to it, but primarily because of the tolerance and open-mindedness that, to al-Tahtawi’s mind, had been at the core of the American experiment up to that point. He was particularly impressed by what he understood to be America’s guarantee of “free worship” for all religious communities irrespective of their faiths.

Al-Tahtawi was not alone in his regard. In Istanbul, at roughy the same time (in the mid nineteenth century), Sultan Abdel-Majeid had asked several of the American missionaries there to support in establishing an American school, primarily for his military cadets, to learn not merely from the American experience in the war of independence (from the British Empire), but also to get exposed to the intellectual foundations of the American experiment. This was one of the earliest attempts to introduce the socio-political thinking that was behind the founding of the American republic into the Middle East.

Whether in Cairo, in Istanbul, or in the Levant, there was a growing realisation that American Evangelical efforts in the region were, by design or accident, giving rise to a new infrastructure of knowledge. The press that American missionaries had established in Beirut, and new civil society organisations such as the Syrian Society of Arts and Sciences (whose key secretary was the leading educator, Butrus al-Bustani) were, by the mid nineteenth century, producing far more than tracts of Christian scripture and theology, and were putting in front of the educated classes in the region new books and translations into Arabic of scientific manuscripts, literary studies, cultural and travel journals, and even reflections on Arabic grammar. Naturally, new cultural and literary circles began to form round these American societies in the Levant and Egypt, and to a lesser extent in Turkey.

Many in the region were coming to the conclusion that al-Tahtawi had noted decades earlier, that these educational and cultural efforts were of a “greatly civilised” country. Of course, al-Tahtawi and all the cultural luminaries of Egypt, the Levant, and Turkey who had cooperated with the Americans in the region at the time, were not aware of the highly condescending views that leading Americans back in the States had had concerning the Ottoman, Arabic, and Islamic worlds (as the first article in this series presented). But even if they had seen some of such writings, all modernist forces in the region must, indeed, had realised that that cultural American presence was vastly different from that of Europe’s explicitly colonial imposition.

As the next article in this series will show, this period – in the last third of the nineteenth century - entailed inspiring episodes of cooperation and cross-cultural fertilisation between Americans in the Middle East and Ottomans, Egyptians, and Arabs.