According to popular legend, the American College in Asiut started life from the deck of a houseboat moored on the Nile. From that deck a few American Presbyterians had, in the late 1850s, begun missionary operations, primarily aimed at Egyptian Coptic Christians. Not surprisingly, these efforts stirred the wrath of the Egyptian Church, which forbade the people of Asiut and its surrounding villages from any interactions with the mission. But while the missionary activities proved of limited success, the educational endeavours of the group of Americans who had based themselves in Asiut achieved astounding success. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the college became by far the most prestigious school in the whole of al-Saeid (upper or southern Egypt).

Success lied in the nature of the education the school offered. Arguably for the first time ever in Egypt – and by extension across the vast majority of what is today called the Arab world – a school’s system of instruction was anchored on cultivating critical reasoning, primarily through discussion classes that revolved round research, reasoning, and independent judgement. Morality was never far from the classes, though. The Americans preached the idea of not only producing skilled young men and women who had been prepared to become professionals in a modernising and increasingly industrialising society, but also individuals who were to become conscientious members of their communities and country. The Asiut college, indeed, graduated hundreds who went on to become luminaries in early twentieth century Egypt.

About a thousand five hundred kilometres to the north of Asiut, American missionaries in Beirut, also in the mid nineteenth century, embarked on a project to publish the Bible in modern, relatively simple Arabic. That stylistic choice of Arabic, highly likely, stemmed from a desire to make the sound of the verses of that new Arabic Bible distinct from any Quranic resonances. But adopting a style that the vast majority of Arabic speakers can understand proved to be an inspired choice. In two or three decades after the first edition appeared in 1865, it became by far the most popular Bible in the Levant, Egypt, and Iraq, which precipitated a rare unity amongst the largest denominations of Arabic-speaking Christians.

The cultural consequences, however, went farther. The colossal success of that Bible (whose translators and arabisers included an Egyptian Islamic scholar, Yousef al-Assir), and its widespread across the region, gradually gave rise to a new form of modern Arabic prose that was much more accessible to the newly educated Arabic-speaking graduates of secular schools across the region. This was particularly noticeable in the modern, far from ornate Arabic that Levantine entrepreneurs began to deploy in newspapers they were creating in the Levant and Egypt at the time (of which al-Ahram became the most prominent example).

The Syrian Protestant College – later the American University of Beirut - and the American University in Cairo were products of the same vein. Though founded on missionary ideas, the separation between education and evangelism came relatively early – in the 1880s in the case of the Beirut institution, when one of its leading theologians had refused to teach Darwinian concepts of evolution, prompting faculty and students (and secular funders in the United States) to evolve the institution into a liberal arts college, administered totally independently from the missionaries. Both universities developed secular milieus, detached from religious traditions, that brought students and scholars from all faiths and confessions in the region in an intellectually safe, open environment, which produced an outsized share of the Arab world’s leading thinkers and professionals in the past century.

The Asiut college, the translation completed in Beirut, and the two old American universities in Beirut and Cairo – and other examples in the wider Middle East, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – all were products of early American endeavours in the Middle East, that sought neither colonies nor capitulations, but that had set out to project American ideas on the Arab mind through instruction and inspiration.

But that approach proved to be only one dimension of America’s engagement with the Middle East. As the next article in this series will show, the end of the Second World War and the emergence of America as the pre-eminent superpower in the world, ushered in a second dimension of that engagement, one that proved to be defining of how America viewed the region and how the peoples of the region viewed America. That dimension was anchored on America’s projection of hard power and its readiness to use it when needed.