Interviewing Religion – A Chat With Deanna Ferree Womack

I’m excited to announce a new project, a series of interviews titled “Interviewing Religion: Bringing Scholars of Middle Eastern Religions to New Audiences.” Over the coming months, I’ll be interviewing scholars of religion about their research, discussing how their work connects to broader public issues, and asking for suggestions for further reading. [Update: You can read the other parts of this series here!] A huge thank you to the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the Luce Foundation, who supported my work with one of their Advancing Public Scholarship Grants. I couldn’t have launched this project without their assistance.

For my first interview, I’m honored to introduce Rev. Dr. Deanna Ferree Womack. Womack is Associate Professor of History of Religions and Interfaith Studies at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, Georgia, where she teaches on Christian-Muslim relations and directs the Master of Religious Leadership program. Womack’s research focuses on Middle Eastern history, World Christianity, Protestant missions in the Islamic world, and the role of gender norms in Christian-Muslim relations. Her publications explore Arab Protestants in Syria, how to build stronger relationships between Christians and Muslims, and a new book project titled Inventing Islam: Gender and the Protestant Roots of American Islamophobia.

I recently spoke to Womack, who graciously answered a few questions about her background, research, publications, and upcoming projects. I encourage you to get a copy of her books and check out the great resources she mentions here.

1) How did you first get interested in studying Arab Protestants?

Womack: My doctoral dissertation on the first Arab Protestant community in Ottoman Syria was a way for me to bring together three subjects of research interest: World Christianity, Middle Eastern religious history, and Islamic societies. In college and during my master’s degrees I spent time in various Arab contexts and started learning Arabic. My PhD program at Princeton Theological Seminary was housed in a church history department with a sub-specialization in Mission, Ecumenics, and History of Religions (which would now fall under the rubric of World Christianity). I was trained to study the historical movement of religion across geographical, cultural, linguistic, and social boundaries. I am especially fascinated by the way people, practices, and institutions change as the result of cross-cultural or interreligious encounters. 

Arab Protestantism emerged as a consequence of such an encounter, or entanglement, between Middle Eastern Christians and American Protestant missionaries in an Ottoman Islamic context. Beyond the religious change (or conversion) and the creation of new churches, this encounter produced various cultural, economic, and social changes too. For example, Protestants in Ottoman Syria contributed to major educational developments – especially for women – and helped ignite the Arab literary renaissance (or Nahda) of the late nineteenth century. I wanted to know how Arab Protestants’ religious convictions and practices were connected to these other “secular” outcomes. I also wanted to know how Arab Protestant women in particular experienced these changes. 

On a more personal level, I had lived in Lebanon for two years prior to starting my doctoral studies, working in some of the schools and churches whose roots can be traced back to the first Syrian Protestant community. That connection, along with the importance of Syria/Lebanon for the birth of Arab Protestantism, drew me to study Ottoman Syria rather than some other region of the Arab world.

2) You’ve been asked to present your work at a local community center. How would you describe your research on Protestants in Late Ottoman Syria?

Womack: The Ottoman Empire and Syria/Lebanon may seem far removed from our lives here in the US, but my research on Protestants in nineteenth and early twentieth century Syria may help correct some misperceptions we have about the Middle East.

My research focuses on the first Arab Protestant church, known as the Syrian Evangelical Church, which was established in Beirut in 1848. I study this Protestant community during the Arab Renaissance between 1860-1915, a transformative period of cultural production and literary development. Although Americans often think about missions as something that Christians in the West go out and do for people in other parts of the world, the Syrian Evangelical Church emerged in partnership between American missionaries (mostly Presbyterians and Congregationalists) and Syrians (of both Arab and Armenian backgrounds). The Ottoman Arab provinces had a Muslim majority, so you might be surprised to know that most of the Syrians who joined the Protestant church were already Christian. They came from diverse Middle Eastern Christian communities that included Maronites, Greek Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, and others. 

One of the most important discoveries I made while writing my dissertation and first book was that Syrian Protestant women were major contributors both to the survival of the Syrian Evangelical Church and to the developments of the Arab Renaissance. These and other Arab Christian women in the Islamic Middle East were intellectuals, authors, activists, teachers, and public speakers in the second half of the nineteenth century, about the same time that the women’s movement in the US was building momentum. This defies the presumptions that some of us might have about Middle Eastern women being oppressed and lacking the agency to shape their own lives and societies.

3) Tell me about your recent projects and publications. Which works are your favorites and why?

Womack: My first book, Protestants, Gender and the Arab Renaissance in Ottoman Syria was based on my dissertation focusing on Arab Protestants in Ottoman Syria. Next, I published a book aimed at American Christians and others interested in interfaith relations, titled Neighbors: Christians and Muslims Building Community. I wanted to help people to consider how their own religious values might lead them to be more intentional about building interfaith relationships. I also wanted to give readers more historical knowledge about Islam in America and practical guidelines for Christian-Muslim dialogue. My research on the Middle East came into play because of the legacy of Christian-Muslim and Jewish-Christian-Muslim coexistence, particularly during the nineteenth-century Arab Renaissance. The book was released in mid-March 2020, right at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic when everything shut down. So it appeared at a time when we needed more thoughtful and creative ways to interact with our neighbors. 

I don’t necessarily have a favorite amongst the projects I have worked on, but Neighbors excited me because of its contemporary relevance. More recently, the Edinburgh Studies in Middle Eastern Christianity series I started with Phil Forness published its first book, a collection of essays by Bernard Heyberger: Middle Eastern and European Christianity, 16th-20th Century: Connected Histories. I also have a World Christianity book coming out this August that I edited with Raimundo Barreto: Alterity and the Evasion of Justice: Explorations of the “Other” in World Christianity. My chapter in that book is titled “American Muslims, Arab Christians, and Religio-Racial Misrecognition.” The book also approaches alterity from the perspective of gender and sexuality, making it a unique and important contribution to the literature on World Christianity, which has not often included LGBTQ+ perspectives. 

Currently, I am writing my third monograph, which will be published by Oxford University Press and is provisionally titled Inventing Islam: Gender and the Protestant Roots of American Islamophobia. In this study, I use gender as a lens to understand how Protestants have conveyed ideas about Islam through written texts, images, and collections of material objects. A significant part of the book is based on archival materials from American and British Protestant missionaries who worked in the Middle East.

4) Your neighbor wants to know more about your field. What books, websites, videos, or other resources would you recommend to them? (why?)

Womack: A 2021 interview in Christianity Today with the leader of the Middle Eastern Council of Churches provides some background both on the context of Middle Eastern Christianity today and the historical contributions of Middle Eastern Protestants.

On modern Middle Eastern Christian history up to the present, Mitri Raheb’s The Politics of Persecution: Middle Eastern Christians in an Age of Empire is an accessible text based on solid scholarship. For a deeper dive into the diversity of Middle Eastern Christianity, the following book may be of interest: Surviving Jewel: The Enduring Story of Christianity in the Middle East, edited by Mitri Raheb and Mark A. Lamport. I also wrote an introduction to contemporary Middle Eastern Christianity that briefly explains some of the history and highlights the unique variety of Middle Eastern Christian traditions: “Christian Communities in the Contemporary Middle East: An Introduction.”

On the history of Arab migrants in the US, the KalimahPress Blog has an interesting, although short, series of articles on the early Syrian immigrant experience. And the Ottoman History Podcast is a great resource that contains hundreds of accessible discussions with experts focusing on the Ottoman Empire, the modern Middle East, and the Islamic World.

5) How does your research connect to broader public issues?  What overlap do you see between the topics you study and contemporary issues around the world today?

Womack: I believe that historical research is incredibly relevant for our lives today. If we gain a better understanding of the thought patterns and discourses that have shaped our own worldviews and those of our society, then we might be able to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past and make more careful decisions when we confront current issues in the US like Islamophobia and Christian-Muslim relations.

My first two books both offer examples of Christians and Muslims in the Middle East coexisting and even collaborating in various periods of history. Although Christian-Muslim conflict does exist in the Middle East, it is not inevitable or even the historical norm, like many mistakenly assume. If we believe that religious differences predispose us to conflict, then we may think it is a waste of time to try building interfaith friendships. Yet if we recognize how shared cultural contexts and values have often brought Christians and Muslims together in the Middle East and in other religiously diverse parts of the world, this might inspire strategies for interfaith dialogue in an American context where religious diversity is growing.

Beyond Christian-Muslim relations, my current book project on gender in Protestant images of Islam sheds light on American Islamophobia and the kinds of anti-Muslim sentiment that we hear today across the US – and not just from Americans who identify as Christian. Anti-Muslim rhetoric became a prominent public discourse after 9/11 and skyrocketed again during recent presidential campaign cycles, but the tropes about violent Muslim men and oppressed Muslim women have a much longer history in the US, which can be traced in part to nineteenth and early twentieth-century Protestant missionaries in the Middle East. In that period, missionary literature was one of the primary ways Americans received information about Islam, and these gender discourses helped justify and raise funds for mission work. These discourses, however, tell us more about the perceptions and motivations of the missionaries of that period than about Islam or Muslim life. Similarly, stereotypes about Muslim women and men are used today to justify repressive political policies in the US or military operations in the Middle East. Such stereotypical, sweeping claims prey on the American public’s long-held fears while offering no real information about the actual lives of Muslims. 

6) What other scholars/writers do you think are doing the most interesting work on religion in the Middle East? 

Womack: I am most interested in scholarship that engages the Middle East interreligiously, considering how richly diverse religious communities have interacted with each other both across religious traditions or within one particular tradition. I would recommend Heather Sharkey’s A History of Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Middle East, Ussama Makdisi’s Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World, Akram Khater’s Embracing the Divine: Passion and Politics in the Christian Middle East, and Angie Heo’s The Political Lives of Saints: Christian-Muslim Mediation in Egypt.

7) How can people find out more about you and follow your work?

Womack: Currently, the best place to find out about my publications and research projects would be my Candler faculty website.

Thanks so much to Rev. Dr. Deanna Ferree Womack for speaking with me and sharing details about her background, her books and upcoming projects, and her research on Arab Protestants, among other topics. I urge you to check out her books and the many resources she mentioned here. For a complete list of the books, websites, and articles listed in this interview, you can also visit Interviewing Religion’s Books and Resources page.

And look for more interviews from the Interviewing Religion series to come soon! You can subscribe to the blog here to get new posts directly in your email inbox.