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Deanna Ferree Womack, "Re-Inventing Islam: Gender and the Protestant Roots of American Islamophobia" (Oxford UP, 2025)
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Byung Ho Choi
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Byung Ho Choi
Hello everyone and welcome to World Christianity and New Books Network. This podcast is for those who would like to explore the expansive discourse on world Christianity as a global phenomenon and as an emerging field that examines Christianity's cross cultural, diasporic and transnational manifestations by paying close attention to the underrepresented and marginalized expressions of the Christian faith in the global South. Thank you for joining me today. I'm very excited to share this interview with everyone. I'm your host, Byung Ho Choi from Princeton Theological Seminary. Reinventing Gender and the Protestant Roots of American Islamophobia, written by Deanna Free Womack and published by Oxford University Press in 2025, examines a largely overlooked genealogy history of American Islamophobia by tracing it back to the history of Protestant missionary movement. The book argues that Protestant missions to Muslims cultivated the ideas, images, and assumptions that would shape American perceptions of Islam. Taking a historical and interdisciplinary approach, Womack asks what missionaries working in Islamic context passed on to later generations of American Protestants, how those ideas were rooted in much older Protestant discourses about Muslims and gender dating back to the Reformation, and what this history means for the emergence of Islamophobia and contemporary Christian Muslim relations in the United States. Central to the book is an analysis of gender how Protestant constructions of Muslim women and men function theologically, politically, and culturally within missionary thought and practice. What sets Reinventing Islam apart is its close attention to the vast archive of missionary texts, images, and material objects, many of them produced and circulated by missionary women and also men, that shaped popular Protestant imaginations of Islam. Womack shows how Anglo Protestants continually reinvented Islam through gendered stereotypes in order to justify evangelism, reinforce Protestant theological claims, express humanitarian concern alongside Eurocentric assumptions, and support British and American imperial expansion. By revisiting this entangled history, Reinventing Islam invites readers to reckon with the inherited legacies of Protestant missions and to imagine more just and constructive futures for Christian Muslim engagement today. So during our interview we will delve deeper into Dr. Womack's groundbreaking work and how this book sets out to make a significant contribution to not only scholars and students of world Christianity, but also history of Christianity and missions, American religious history, mission studies, and also Christian Muslim relations. To learn more about these issues and more, please stay tuned and we hope that you enjoy the book and also our conversation today. Today we are privileged to talk with Dr. Womack, the author of Reinventing Gender and the Protestant Roots of American Diana Faree Womack is the Associate professor of History of Religions and Interfaith Studies at Emory University Candler School of Theology. The Reverend Dr. Deanna Womack teaches courses on Christian Muslim relations, interreligious dialogue, and Middle Eastern Christianity. From 2022 to 2025, she directed Candler's Master's of Arts in Religion and Leadership program, and she served from 2015 to 2020 as the director of Leadership at the Multi Faith Program established with Yvonne Allen College of Liberal Arts at Georgia Tech. Dr. Womack's academic research combines commitments to interreligious understanding, Christian Muslim dialogue, and world Christianity. Her first book, Protestants, Gender and the Arab Renaissance in Late Ottoman Syria, published by Edinburgh University Press in 2019, which also can be found on our New Books Network, explores encounters between American missionaries and Arab residents of Syria and Lebanon in the Pre World War I period. In particular, it uncovers the history of Syrian women writers and preachers who navigated cultural and religious boundaries in their experience experiences with missionaries. Her second book, Neighbors, Christians and Muslims Building Community, published by Westminster Knox Press in 2020, examines the history of Christian Muslim relations and the practices of inter religious dialogue in the United States today. Dr. Womack has also co edited a volume with Dr. Raimunda Barreto titled Authority and Evasion of Justice Explorations of the Other in World Christianity, published by Fortress Press in 2023. She has also been awarded by the Louisville Institute Grant for Researchers for Middle Eastern Christianity in the Americas for the 20252026 year. Dr. Womack is also an ordained Minister in the Presbyterian Church, USA. So Dr. Womack, welcome back to New Books in Will Christianity. And thank you so much for returning to our podcast to discuss about your new newly published book.
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Deanna Faree Womack
Thank you. Byung Ho, I'm delighted to be back with you again on New Books Network.
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Byung Ho Choi
Again, congratulations Dr. Womack on publishing your third single authored monograph. This is actually as we talked about your second time joining us in this podcast. Last we talked about your first book, Protestants, Gender, and the Arab Renaissance in the Late Ottoman Syria. Through that podcast, we had an opportunity to, you know, have a good conversation and also to get to know more about you. But for those that might be first, you know, tuning in for the first time and might not be familiar with your work, I was wondering if you could briefly introduce yourself, maybe tell us a little bit about your academic background, where you completed your Ph.D. you first became interested in this field of study.
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Deanna Faree Womack
Absolutely. Thanks so much. I grew up in the Midwest and I studied religion and International Studies in Minnesota at McAllister College. Then I did my MDIV and a THM at Princeton Theological Seminary. And after that, I spent a couple of years working with the Presbyterian Church in Lebanon before returning to Princeton for a PhD in World Christianity that focused on the history of American missions in the Middle east and the first Arab Protestant church founded in the Ottoman Empire. As early as high school, I became interested in the Middle east as a place where the three monotheistic faiths converged and a place whose religious and cultural and political history needed to be better understood. When I was in seminary, I discovered the field of World Christianity as a field where my interest in mission history and Middle Eastern Christianity and. And Christian Muslim relations converged. And with my experiences living in Lebanon and traveling to several other Middle Eastern countries, this region became important to me both personally and as a scholar.
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Byung Ho Choi
Well, thank you so much for that brief introduction. One of the things that I really appreciate about these podcast conversations is that we get that, is that they give our listeners a chance to go beyond the pages of the book, you know, into the stories and the questions and the ideas that shaped it. So with that in mind, Dr. Womack, I'd love to hear more about, you know, reinventing Islam, gender, and the Protestant roots of American Islamophobia. How this book came to be, how did this project, this journey, begin, and what led you to writing this monograph?
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Deanna Faree Womack
So my studies at PTS and my first book focused on American Presbyterians and Arab Christians in Syria and Lebanon during the Ottoman Empire. But Reinventing Islam focuses more broadly on Protestants and Christian Muslim relations, with an emphasis on the ideas about Islam and gender that Anglo Protestant missionaries specifically transmitted. My research for this book began with my concern about the rising Islamophobia in the United States in recent decades, and really with the questions that my students, as well as church members were asking me about women in Islam whenever I spoke to them about Christian Muslim relations. So firstly, I wanted to gain a better understanding and ultimately to challenge the anti Muslim prejudices pervading Protestant culture and the unconscious bias that hinders the work of Christian Muslim relations, especially here in the United States. So in the book, I ask this question, what are some of the thought patterns that laid the groundwork or tilled the soil on which Islamophobia would later grow? Because Islamophobia, at least the term, emerges much later than the than the period of research that I'm focusing on. It came about in the we began to speak about Islamophobia in the late 20th century, in the 1990s. So most of the period that I cover in my book, I'm not specifically talking about naming it as Islamophobia, but rather looking at anti Muslim sentiment. And then I also ask what predisposed American Protestant culture toward a particular sort of discourse about Islam? The second thing that motivated me was that as a historian of mission, I knew that missionaries were one of the primary disseminators of information about Islam to American constituents in the 19th and early 20th century. This was before widespread forms of media and blockbuster movies and all sorts of things that now influence us today. So I wanted to understand in particular how missionaries shaped discourses about Islam and gender and how this compared to narratives that had been passed down to these missionaries by earlier generations of Protestants writing about Islam since the Reformation. So then a third aim was to see what insights I could gain on Protestant views of Islam by applying the lens of gender. And surprisingly, gender has not been a key category of analysis in most existing studies on Christian Muslim relations, whether those studies have focused on missions or on more theological questions. There, there's a huge body of literature on women and Islam, but. But that subject hasn't been covered within the topic of Christian Muslim relations or Protestant Muslim engagement specifically.
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Byung Ho Choi
Well, thank you for that introduction and, you know, sharing us about your journey and your interest and the questions that you asked in a way, knowing your work, having read not only this book, but your two previous books, it's all interconnected and I see how, in a way, it builds up to this project as well. So thank you for that. And as a quick follow up, you know, I always want to give an opportunity to, for the authors to share about, you know, their journey of doing research. As somebody digging through the archives or going through the various materials, I wanted to take this time to ask, you know, what kind of archives or sources did you draw on, you know, while working on this book? Because I remember either reading in the beginning pages of your book that you spent numerous years, you know, going into various archives and libraries and Also, you know, this was pre Covid and post Covid times as well. So please, yeah, if you could share with us.
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Deanna Faree Womack
Thanks for that question. As you know, historical research really depends on the sources, so this is important to discuss. My research for this book draws significantly from mission and church archives, as you mentioned, including unpublished materials, as well as publications by missionaries that were widely disseminated in the 19th and 20th centuries. And I tend to focus more on the widely disseminated material because that's what reached wide audiences. So the book required extensive travel to Presbyterian, Congregational, Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran, Anglican, and other independent Protestant mission archives both across the US and in England and Scotland. And so I do want to take a moment to recognize the report I received for some of this research and travel from the Gerda Henkel foundation in Germany, as well as from the Louisville Institute that supported my previous sabbatical. So in my studies, I found that a lot of mission histories have relied on missionary texts and especially on the writing of missionary men. And in this book, I wanted to help readers see the wider variety of formats through which Protestants have cultivated ideas about Muslims. So not just through theological and more scholarly text, but through other creative and tangible mediums like fictional stories, images, collections of material culture, and stage performances in so called native costumes. Similarly, when I looked at the earliest Protestant engagements with Islam during the Reformation, I considered not only the writings of the reformers, but also the sorts of printed images of Muslims, which were usually Ottoman Turks at that time, that were circulating, and the way that Islam, for example, appeared in songs or on the stage, like in Elizabethan theater. And so I tried in this book to beyond looking at sort of a pan Protestant and pan Anglo Protestant approach, at least the mainline Protestant congregations and some evangelical missions, to expand the variety of source materials that I used to think more about material culture and material religion.
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Byung Ho Choi
Thank you, Dr. Womack. Now at this time, we want to take a deeper dive into the book, to the contents of your book and may I say your monograph is truly groundbreaking. You take on the, quote, overt and covert forms of Islamophobia that permeate US Society today and that are often tied to centuries old tropes about violence, violent Muslim men and oppressed Muslim women, end quote. And you approach this challenge historically going back to a period long before, as you said, the word Islamophobia even existed. So, you know, readers can see how Protestants cultivated ideas about Muslims not only through, you know, theological writings or comparative studies, but through a wide range of cultural expressions. You also make a point to highlight the crucial role that women played in shaping this perceptions. And I really appreciated that about your book. One thing that I was struck was by how your own positionality too, as an ordained minister, a scholar and a historian and a theological educator comes through in meaningful ways throughout your book. Your goal, as you say, is to help, quote, American Christians, Muslims and others better understand and challenge the anti Muslim prejudices pervading American Protestant culture and the unconscious bias that hinders the work of Christian Muslim relations. End quote. Well, it truly does feel like it is a very important agenda, especially given our current social, political and religious climate. Now turning to the structure of your book, Dr. Womag, you guide readers through seven chapters, which includes your introductory and concluding chapters. And you incorporate a rich collection of photographs, illustrations and visual materials that really help readers connect the dots as you move through different historical moments and themes. And it is in your opening chapter that you laid the historical foundations for the book by tracing Protestant ideas about Islam from the Reformation through the rise of modern missions. You show how missionaries inherited medieval polemics, reworked them, and then transmitted gendered images of Muslims to American audiences. So for our listeners today, could you expand on the title of your book, this idea of Reinventing Islam? How were Protestants repeatedly reshaping older concepts of Islam for new theological, cultural or political purposes? And why is the history essential for understanding the roots of American Islamophobia?
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Deanna Faree Womack
Islam as a process of adopting, adapting and recycling inherited ideas about Muslims and that Protestants inherited from previous generations and reused for new purposes. Now, Anglo Protestants were certainly not the only ones to be engaged in reconfiguring ideas about Islam for their own purposes. Catholics did it too, as well as countless Muslim reform movements in different ways. It's also important to note that although many missionary discourses were recycled from earlier and sometimes completely inaccurate Christian sources, others were based on Islamic texts and missionaries personal encounters with Muslims. So why do I categorize such discourses as reinventions? This is because throughout their history of engagement with Islam, Protestants have continually reshaped existing ideas about Muslims, inventing them in new context again and again in order to sway their audiences toward particular Protestant theological or even political purposes, including missionary aims. So for example, in my second chapter, I look at ways that the Protestant reformers reshaped existing Catholic ideas about Islam in order to uphold the ideals of the Reformation.
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Byung Ho Choi
Well, thank you for that answer. One of the striking contributions of your book is the way you show that Protestant portrayals of Islam were not only theological, but as you know, we repeatedly discussed, it's very deeply gendered. And we look into chapter two as you track how early Protestant thinkers, from Luther and Calvin through Enlightenment writers, used ideas about Muslim men and women to articulate their own religious critiques. Dr. Womack, could you talk about the specific gendered assumptions Protestants were making during this period? How did images of this violent Muslim man or oppressed Muslim woman begin to criticize, crystallize, and how did these images serve, you know, Protestant theological or political agendas?
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Deanna Faree Womack
Yes, that's a, that's really a great question. So looking at the period of the Protestant Reformation, the first period when Protestants began writing about Islam, we need to bear in mind the wider sociopolitical setting that in that time, the Ottoman Empire, the Muslim Ottoman Empire, with its center in what's present day Turkey, was the, the preeminent political and military power and also, I would say civilizational power. Europe paled in comparison to the Ottomans and especially Protestant parts of Europe. And if we think about the British Isles, had really no political power. Britain hadn't become a naval power at that point. And so, so it wasn't as if there was a competition between civilizations and religions. It was that there was a huge imbalance of power. And Western Christians generally feared the Ottomans, but they also admired them because of their military might and all of their cultural and civilizational sort of flourishing and that influence. And so something changes from the time of the Reformation into the Enlightenment, where European countries began to develop their Military power and their colonial expansion and the British navy makes a huge difference for Protestants in that area. And so it's important to understand, though, at the time when Protestants first began writing about Islam, they were motivated by this imbalance of power, and it was important for them to distinguish themselves in contrast to the Ottoman Turks, who were, you know, at the point when Luther was ready to nail those 95 these days, right on the. On the cathedral door, he was not certain and his colleagues were not certain that, you know, in the coming years, they would be. Whether they would be living in a Christian nation or they would be living under Ottoman control, because the Ottomans were expanding into. Into southwestern Europe. They were trying to take Vienna, for example. And so the Ottomans in many. In many Western Protestants accounts, including, or in many Western Christian accounts generally as tyrannical because of their military might. The sultan himself was depicted as being a tyrant at home with this huge harem of women that he kept locked in his palace. And this dates back to earlier Christian ideas about Islam and even the Prophet Muhammad and his relationship with women. And so was there. There's one strain of Protestant thought that comes from that longer history, as well as from the context of the Ottoman Empire, in which Muslim men are depicted as threatening and tyrannical. And that pattern of thought exists still today. It changes some depending on the context, but over time, it has been very persistent. The last thing I'll say about this period that I think is so interesting is that when Luther and other reformers wrote about Muslim women, they depicted them as being modest and pious. Their. Their head coverings were favorable than the ways that Christian women in Europe presented themselves in public, for example. So this is very different than the discourse of the veil that arises during the Enlightenment period when Westerners start thinking about. Really, they're not thinking about Islam so much as they're thinking about changing changing roles of women in Western Christian societies. And they start talking about the veil as a symbol of oppress and of imprisonment in harems and women's seclusion in Islam. And they compare that either favorably or unfavorably to what's happening to women in Europe, depending on where they fall in terms of roles for Christian women during that period. And so we'll see, as I explain later in the book, this image of women, of Muslim women, changes more rapidly over time, and it continues to change up until the present.
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Byung Ho Choi
Right. Well, thank you for your answer. Kind of going deeper now into this conversations about gender and also women. In chapter three, you show how missionary literature, the text produced and Circulated by missionaries played a crucial role in shaping how, you know, adult British and American readers understood Islam. And here in the midst of all this, as you, as you know, you've highlighted multiple times, gender discourse served as a key element. One point that stood out to me, Dr. Womack, is that men weren't the only ones writing about Islam during this time. While the major 19th century texts about Islam were largely authored by missionary men, women missionaries were also contributing a substantial and influential body of literature. So here, this is where I would like to turn to the next question. Dr. Womack, I was wondering if you could help situate us in the early 20th century moment. What was happening among Protestant women in the mission field that led so many of them to write so extensively and more broadly, what kinds of themes or concerns were these women, these women missionaries, addressing in their writings?
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Deanna Faree Womack
Yes, so it's important to understand first that writing was a regular part of missionary work across the board, both for men and for women. Although the formats and arenas for publication often differed according to gender, by the early 20th century, the missionary in the missionary movement, there were many women's missionary boards, for example, and women's missionary magazines. And these offered women an arena for publishing. And there were more book publishers and developed networks in the early 20th century for advertising for publishing and advertising missionary texts, including books for children, which were often written by women, since that arena matched the woman's presumed role as a teacher of children. Children. But I wouldn't necessarily say that it was only by the early 20th century that Protestant women began to write extensively. Rather, it was during this period that they began to write extensively about Islam and about Muslim women. So they were already writing about all sorts of things in the 19th century. But this writing about Islam occurred through the concerted effort of certain missionaries like Samuel Swamer, who felt that the missionary movement had been neglected in the Islamic world specifically. And women were able to take the opportunity to write on this topic as authorities on the plight of Muslim women because of the separate spheres ideology that guided both Protestant and Muslim cultures in slightly different ways. So women missionaries were understood to have an important role in working amongst the women in Islamic societies, as well as in other cultures where it was not customary for women to interact with men outside of their families families. So although missionary men held the most power and authority as evangelists in the mission field, as preachers, ordained ministers, they could not go into Muslim homes to teach or preach to the women and the girls, for example. But missionary women could do this, and it gave them a unique area of expertise about which they could also write. And so I think that's the reason that you see more women's missionary writing about Islam in the early 20th century here.
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Byung Ho Choi
A quick follow up question, Dr. Muma, we see here specifically figures such as Annie Von Sommer, an English missionary, appear frequently within this chapter. And you specifically refer to her two co edited volumes, Our Muslim Sisters and Daylight in the Harem. I was wondering if you could briefly share the significance of these two volumes and what were these narratives doing for Protestant audiences? And how did women missionaries writings shape broader understandings of Islam and Muslim identity?
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Deanna Faree Womack
Effy I really appreciate this question because Annie Van Sommer was one of those missionary women who really contributed a lot to this movement for missions to Muslims and whose contributions or work has generally been neglected in studies on mission history and Islam. So the two volumes that you mentioned were the first two major works written primarily by Anglo Protestant missionary women about Muslim women. And they were collaborative text edited volumes. Coming in the early 20th century period when multiple mission societies on both sides of the Atlantic were coordinating literature campaigns in order to encourage more support for missions to Muslims. Both of these books gained a lot of attention, especially through women's mission magazines. Now, although Annie Van Somers co edited these books with Samuel Zwimmer, whose name was widely known, Van Sommer is the one who actually spearheaded these projects. I think that she stepped in and filled in a gap because when there were a series of Protestant missionary conferences talking about evangelizing the Muslim world, at first only men were invited to speak at these conferences. And they realized that we left out a whole, you know, a whole population. And so there were no conference volumes at first in the Cairo Conference of 1906 related to women. And then this first volume came out the year afterwards based on some of the work that women who attended that conference had been doing. Both of the books were also published in New York City by Fleming H. Revelle Company, which is the largest and the most successful evangelical printing house of that period. So that tells you something also about its reach. And this publishing house had a growing list of books focusing on Islam. And these were constantly advertised in other missionary publications. So the two books as I interpreted them, do two somewhat contradictory things simultaneously. And I think that this is actually characteristic of the missionary movement at large. First, especially through the opening chapters written by the editors and their evocative titles, these books directly stated that the lives of Muslim women everywhere were all all the same and that essentially Muslim women were living in darkness and degradation with no hope except through the help of Protestant women specifically. And I think it's worth noting that the full title of the first book was Our Muslim Sisters, A Cry of need from the Lands of Darkness Interpreted by those who heard it. Those who heard it are the Protestant women of the world. Right. The Anglo Protestant women. And so then the second thing that they're doing, because these were edited volumes with multiple missionary authors working in diverse Islamic societies from Africa to Turkey to Palestine to India to China, they actually captured a diversity of Muslim women's experiences and proved that the lives of Muslim women everywhere actually were not the same. Now, a few of the authors even had decidedly different views on the status of women in Islam that diverged from the standard negative missionary discourse about oppressed, veiled and secluded women. So there's a diversity of views as well. Well, but discerning readers could certainly pick. Pick up on this and see the diversity of experiences of Muslim women in different cultures and different. Different nations, different societies. Yet I found that in most periodicals that advertise such books, the typical discourse prevailed. So you have, you have, you had these kind of contradictory streams, but there is a standardized discourse about women in Islam that streamlined across anglopodu Protestant. The Anglo Protestant missionary movement. And these two books contributed to that.
- [35:50]
Byung Ho Choi
Well, thank you for that in depth description and content about those two important volumes. They really help, you know, help us see, you know, what kind of writings were going on during this specific time and by whom as well. The next chapter, chapter four, is titled Islam Reinvented for Young Children's Work for Mother Muslim Children. And it was, to be honest, one of my favorite chapters. It was quite fascinating to see how children's literature, you know, missionary storybooks and even paper dolls played a significant role in shaping American Protestant images of Muslims. And something I want to highlight for our listeners is that this subject has received very little attention in mission histories. So your work here, Dr. Omag, really makes an important contribution to a discourse that is only beginning to be explored in this chapter. I noticed how these materials often portrayed Muslim boys and girls in stereotypes, sentimental, or even exoticized ways. Could you share more about this world of missionary children's literature? How were Muslims Muslim children depicted in these materials? And what kind of ideas about Islam were young Protestant readers absorbing, you know, through these stories, images, and objects? And do feel free to highlight some of the specific examples that you also mentioned in this chapter, Dr. Mohman.
- [37:28]
Deanna Faree Womack
Thank you. I'm glad to hear that you enjoyed this chapter in particular. So missionary literature for children often reinforced the persistent tropes about Islam that we've been discussing, seen while moderating the more severe critiques. So, for example, the magazines and fictional stories I discuss in the book didn't generally depict Muslim men as being sexually licentious and driven by lust. That was too, you know, too harsh for children. And these were common tropes in broader Protestant discourses, especially when explaining Muslim practices of polygamy. So instead, stories for children might depict Muslim fathers as domineering. This was the case, for instance, instance, in a British Syrian mission story from the 1920s about a girl in Damascus named Fatima. The story concludes as Fatima's father discovers that a Bible woman, so a female evangelist, but a local Syrian evangelist woman, is visiting their home and teaching Fatima and her sister about Christianity. And the book concludes saying this, strong words were spoken, hard blows were struck. Struck. Fatima never went back to school. The Bible woman was never again permitted to cross the threshold. And in due course, both girls were married to the Muslim husbands selected by the family. So the author depicts the father here as an authoritarian, making him a prototype for the violent Muslim patriarch. Other stories published around the same time might indicate that Muslim men and boys show no respect for women or they fear year they feature Muslim girls who want to go to Christian schools, or who complain about the possibility of becoming one of many wives and a harem, or who give up the old ways of their families and embrace modern Western dress styles. And literature for American and British children also frequently assured them that not only is their Protestant faith superior, but that their Western culture and social practices are better, especially for women and girls. Girls. So Protestant children are then urged to do their part in fundraising or other work on behalf of Muslim children. And I think this is here where, you know, playing with the Muslim paper doll. It's educational, but it also reminds these children that they need to be thinking and praying for their, you know, other Muslim children and perhaps even raising money for missions. Although it's clear that missionaries transmitted stereotypical gender tropes to children, I also do want to note that there's another side to children's missionary literature culture. It was often educational. It exposed young Anglo Protestants to the history and the culture of various Muslim societies without necessarily judging all of the cultural or religious practices that it described. And I'd also say that Muslims were exoticized, I think, more in literature for adults, whereas in children's literature, things were simplified. And so missionaries tended to depict Muslim children as very similar to American or British Protestant children in terms of the way that they felt and engaged with, with their friends or family in These stories, when Muslim children were the main characters of missionary stories, they were relatable. They were good children who were seeking the truth. They usually converted to Christianity in the end, but this also meant that they were humanized. So children's stories, for the most part, I think, actually bridged some distance that Western audiences felt between themselves and the Muslim communities whom they had never met. So much so that some young readers might begin to see the Muslim characters as role models. And in the book, I note that this was the case for at least one 11 year old reader of Congregationalist missionary Dorothy Blatter's book titled Cap and Candle, which was about a young Turkish nurse named Felice. The author or the reader wrote to the author saying that she wanted to follow Felice's footsteps to become a nurse. So she's not writing that she wants to follow the footsteps of the missionary in Felice's story, but she actually wants to follow in the footsteps of, of this Turkish Muslim young woman. Notably, Blatter's book was published in the mid 20th century and it exhibits some of the changes in missionary thinking in that period. So Felice is presented as a modern liberated woman in Turkey who was educated in the mission school and has her own career in nursing. But she does not convert from Islam to Christianity and Blatter never suggests that she should. So here's a shift in terms of, of the the themes that appear in missionary literature for young readers. So all this is to say that it's important to recognize that there is a diversity within missionary messaging for children. And the very same text even might reinforce stereotypical tropes for the purposes of encouraging fundraising and at the same time accurately depict intricate facets of a particular Muslim society, while also suggesting to maybe more discerning reasons readers, that Muslim lives might not actually be that different from children lives, Christian lives. So you see the, the complexity when you really delve into what these, these stories are conveying.
- [42:30]
Byung Ho Choi
Well, thank you so much for that insight, Dr. Womack. We're almost heading towards the end of the book, heading into chapters five, six and seven. But first, in chapters five and six, you shift our attention from written texts to the visual and performative dimensions of missionary culture, such as photographs, postcards, costumes, curated objects, and even staged demonstrations of Eastern dress or Islamic prayer. I don't know if you remember, but I was reminded of our conversation we had earlier this year about how even in our Princeton Theological Seminary library, there are collections of material objects donated by American missionaries, including items from figures like Samuel Zweimer Items such as prayer beads and shoes collected during, you know, the missionaries time in Middle East. And in these two chapters you show how images and, you know, performances also helped construct what you call the Protestant gaze, shaping the way American and British Protestants imagined Islam, Muslim piety and everyday Muslim life life. So Dr. Womack, could you talk more about how these visual and performative practices functioned within the missionary movement? And what kind of images or staged experiences were missionaries bringing back to their audiences? And how did these materials shape Protestant understandings of Islam, gender and the broader idea of the Muslim world?
- [44:06]
Deanna Faree Womack
I think it's helpful to think about missionaries as having two primary tasks in terms of where their time and efforts effort was focused. So first was the work that they did on the mission field, whether evangelistic, educational or medical. And then second, it was the work of representing that labor to their constituents at home who supported the mission with funds, prayers and new missionary recruits. When it came to presenting their work to British and American audiences, missionaries were really innovative and they did not rely only on written reports or other publications. As developments in photography came about, missionaries had access first to the images of colonial photography studios. And later many of them took their own photographs on their own cameras. One popular genre of colonial photography at that time, late 19th and early 20th century, featured scenes and types purporting to portray typical ways of life or landscapes or people and people groups with certain ways of dress and physical features. And such practices are related to really problematic late 19th century ideas about racial hierarchies and biological types that could be used to categorize and understand global cultures and religions. Missionaries made use of these colonial photographs to portray various Muslim peoples. And especially in the early 20th century, across Europe and the US mission supporters were among those who collected postcards, postcards of what they saw as exotic people and places, including postcards of Muslims and Muslim societies. So for one example, in Algeria, the independent evangelical British missionary Lilius Trotter collected hundreds of postcards from tourist shops and she would paste them into handwritten journals that were circulated amongst her supporters in the UK and the US. These are held in SOAS at the University of, of London. On the one hand, these postcards that were usually, they were usually staged in studios and they sometimes falsely represented particular tribes or cultures. And in some cases the models weren't even Muslim or the same model would, would be, would appear under the label of three different, you know, Muslim groups or tribes, for example, so, so on the other hand, Trotter spent a lot of time picking out images of individual models whom she thought bore resemblance to specific Algerian women and children who were served by her Algiers mission band. And she used the images to introduce her her supporters to Muslims whom they would otherwise never meet. So I think that such steps toward human humanization of the other are noteworthy. There is a difference between the colonial colonial photography industry and people, random people collecting these exotic photographs and individual mission supporters who received these photographs from missionaries who told their names and their stories. Also, Trotter was an artist. She saw beauty in much of the North African life even as she was critiquing Islam. And she sometimes affixed her own sketches or colorful paintings to mission reports because she wanted her her. Her constituents to see a glimpse of this beauty too, but nevertheless with strong links to biological racism and the categorization of national and ethnic groups according to type. During this period, missionaries like Trotter often treated the anonymous individuals in these photos as specimens and even frequently used the term specimen in her image captions to talk about the people she was working with. So such wording suggested practice of categorizing and showcasing cultural and national natural history objects in cabinets of curiosity and museums. And as you mentioned, Byeong Ho missionaries were also avid collectors of objects of material culture, and they often used these to represent Muslim cultures, either in photographs that they sent home or in museum like displays that they might set up in a church when they returned on furlough, for example. Example. And some Protestant institutions, as you mentioned, as well as mission societies, opened their own museums showcasing these various religious religions and cultures. In countless archives and mission publications, I found that clothing was one of the most common things that missionaries used to portray the societies in which they work. So they might send photographs home of themselves in what purported to be local Muslim community garb, or they would perform in costume when speaking in person to mission supporters. And in Islamic societies, most missionaries, I need to note, they did not usually dawn local clothing styles on a regular basis. They wore their own Western clothing. So such practices were often a form of gender pageantry that helped reinforce ideas about Islam as a rigid religion that required women to dress in a certain way. And when the gaze is focused on the other other, then it's easy to forget that Western Protestant culture also had its own very particular expectations about women's dress norms at that time, as it also still does today. So images, material objects, and missionary costumes could be used to reinforce stereotypes and particularly to reinforce the need for more funds and missionaries to save Muslim women. But these visual and material collections could also be used to teach and to humanize. So I'D like to to finish answering your question with one final example. In the book, I discuss a series of photographs that a female missionary doctor in Kuwait named Eleanor Calverly took of herself in the flowing robes and head coverings of Kuwaiti women. These photos were sent directly to mission supporters and they also appeared published in various periodicals. So was Calverly who asserted her right to wear only Western clothing in Kuwait as she worked as a doctor. Was she merely impersonating Muslim women to reinforce her own ideas about their need for liberation? In reading the memoir that she published decades after she retired from the Arabian mission, I found that her depictions of the status of women actually changed over time in comparison to the articles that she wrote in the early 20th century. And I found clues that even in the early years when she photographed herself in Islamic garb, she was actually trying to let her constituents view the indoor attire attire of Kuwaiti women that she saw when she treated them in her clinic. So they would come in and they would take off their outer garb. And that she also saw when she visited them in their homes where, interestingly enough, these Kuwaiti women invited and encouraged Calverly to dress up in their own clothing and jewelry. I think as a nudge to her to say, we think the attire that you're wearing is not appropriate for this society, you might try other ours. And one time it seems that Calverly actually took their advice and their urging and she even borrowed the clothing of a Kuwaiti friend in order to attend a Muslim wedding in appropriate attire. And I think that this shows an openness even early on, to be led by local people. And so the images then that she sent out also offered mission supporters a more nuanced view of Muslim women's lives beyond the stereotypical images of Gulf women covered in all black when walking the streets.
- [51:32]
Byung Ho Choi
Thank you, Dr. Womack, for that detailed answer. And time has flown by. We are already at the final chapter of your book, excited to talk about this section as well titled the Ongoing Effects of American Islamophobia and Openings for a Christian Muslim Dialogue. And this brings the conversation into the present by connecting the aforementioned historical reinventions to contemporary American Islamophobia phobia. You also highlight surprising moments of interfaith appreciation and the seeds of Christian Muslim dialogue found within missionary archive. So, Dr. Womack, for our listeners today, many of whom think about, you know, interfaith relations, public discourse, or the role of a religion in the American life, what do you see as the most important takeaway from this history? How should understanding These Protestant roots of Islamophobia shape the way Christians, Muslims and the others approach interfaith work today.
- [52:39]
Deanna Faree Womack
Thanks for the question. There are several takeaways that I might mention, but to be brief, I'll just mention two. So one is that we really need to deal with our presuppositions around gender and religion. There has been fantastical, practical and theological work done over the past 75 years or so on Christian Muslim relations. But as we can readily see in our society, prejudices against Muslim men and misperceptions about Muslim women remain significant barriers to American Christian Muslim relations today. And these gendered ideas are really very similar to the ideas that missionaries disseminated 100 years ago. This is therefore a more difficult subject to address in Christian Muslim relations than theological commonalities, for example, example. But it's really necessary if we want to improve relationships on the ground and break the power of Islamophobia. And I think for American Christians specifically, that begins with self reflection on our own roots. Where do our thought patterns of Islam, about Islam and Muslims come from? And what are some of the unconscious biases that we might need to address in ourselves and in our own communities before we reach out and engage further with our Muslim neighbors? And then the second thing I'll say which, which really gives me hope is that images of Islam and gender have changed over time. So it hasn't been ecstatic and we haven't, there haven't always been cases of Protestants and Muslims or Christians and Muslims being in, in conflict or even of gender ideas being, being the negative aspect of Christian Muslim relations. So as I mentioned before, in the Reformation, Protestant theologians, theologians saw, were very approving of Muslim women's attire, including head scarves and face veils. During the Enlightenment and into the 19th century missionary movement, the face veil in particular became a symbol of oppression. And, and when veiling was critiqued, it was the idea that Muslim women needed to unveil their faces, not their heads. Because of course at this time, you know, and for centuries, Western Christian women also covered their heads in different ways. So it wasn't about the heads scarf. Somehow today it's become about the hijab or the head scarf, which is very common for, for many but not all Muslim women to wear, whereas the face veil is, is not as common. And so just recognizing how these things have changed over time I think helps us to reflect on our own presuppositions about Islam. But it also tells us that because such images and presuppositions have changed over time, time they can change again. And today we can play a role in changing these ideas for the better.
- [55:17]
Byung Ho Choi
Yeah. Wow. Thank you so much, Dr. Omec. We are already heading towards the end of our interview today, and there are two final questions I would like to ask you. The first set of questions is what do you hope scholars working on world Christianity, mission history, and even Christian Muslim relations will take away from your work work? What new doors of research would you say your book opens up to?
- [55:43]
Deanna Faree Womack
Thanks for the question. I'd like to mention a few things. First, I'd like scholars to more seriously consider the reality that women's missionary history is mission history, or the reverse, that mission history is women's history. And by this I mean that we should not need to have a separate set of literature focusing on women and missions in order to highlight their full participation in the Protestant missionary movement. That movement would not have existed without Western Protestant women or without local Christian women. I wish that mission historians automatically thought about gender specifically as a category of inquiry. So not just women, but gender broadly, because that affects every single person who was involved in the missionary movement. And so this is a category that should be considered in order to accurately represent the historical history of a particular mission society or denomination or movement, even if that study is not specifically focused on the roles of missionary women. So I wish that we didn't even need to have the word gender or the word women in the titles of our books. Right. But we would open the book and expect that scholars of mission would be talking about the roles of women and their contributions and would be talking about gender dynamics on the mission field. And the same is true for world Christianity, which Dana Robert has helped us understand can accurately be and only accurately be described as a woman's movement. So what does it really mean to take these things that we know and to take them to heart in our research? The second thing I'd love for more people to ask in their research, what can be learned? What more can be learned from looking beyond the typical texts that we've studied studied, to material religion, with some rare exceptions, like Joseph Ho's book Developing Mission, that looks at photography and films of missionaries in China, the fields of mission history as well as world Christianity, I would say haven't taken a material turn, and there's really a lot of source material there that could be the focus of really fascinating studies on material culture and material religion. And then the third thing, the third question I would ask us to ponder is how can historical studies guide us today beyond the realm of scholarship? What bearing does our research have on the way that we choose to live now? What can we learn from history that will help us cultivate better relationships with our neighbors at the present moment? Those are some of the questions that come up in my final chapter. And so there's a move from the historical work to thinking about practical applications, and I hope that more scholars would open themselves up to answering similar questions.
- [58:24]
Byung Ho Choi
The final question before we end today and I would like to ask you is do you mind sharing with us your current and future projects and what do you hope to work on in the coming time?
- [58:36]
Deanna Faree Womack
Yeah, thanks so much for this question because the research always continues. I'm currently on sabbatical researching for a new book on the history of of Middle Eastern Christian migration to the Americas and the growth and development of churches from diverse Middle Eastern traditions in both north and South America. So this project has recently taken me to Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, as well as some key hubs for Middle Eastern migration in the U.S. like Detroit, Chicago, Boston, and Southern California. The book is going to explore the histories and the contemporary realities of churches from all five Middle Eastern Christian families families. So for those who aren't familiar, that's the Oriental Orthodox, the Eastern Orthodox, the Church of the East, a wide variety of Catholic traditions, as well as Protestant churches. And each of these five families contains considerable liturgical and ethnocultural diversity within them, which is something that I'm hoping to bring to light as I also look at the histories of migration from the Middle east of these communities and the establishment of their church churches. And one thing that's been really exciting for this project is that besides my typical archival research, I visited countless churches and I've conducted hundreds of interviews with really incredible people whose personal reflections and family histories I think are important both for understanding Middle Eastern migration, but also for contemplating the fullness of global Christianity.
- [60:10]
Byung Ho Choi
Well, thank you, Dr. Womack. I have a lot of questions regarding this new project, but I will wait until until your new book comes out and ask about your experiences going through those interviews and your visits and so forth. But again, once again, thank you for sharing about this project and I eagerly anticipate exploring more of your work. And once again, thank you for joining me today on this podcast.
- [60:35]
Deanna Faree Womack
Thank you so much. It's been my pleasure.
- [60:38]
Byung Ho Choi
And thank you everyone, so much for listening to today's episode in which we explore reinventing gender and the Protestant roots of American Islamophobia, written by Deanna Faree Womack and published by Oxford University Press in 2025. This is your host, Byung Ho Choi. And please stay tuned for the next episode on the new books in World Christianity.
- [61:18]
Deanna Faree Womack
And Doug.
- [61:18]
Marshall Poe
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- [61:41]
Deanna Faree Womack
Liberty Savings.
- [61:43]
Marshall Poe
Very unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company affiliates excludes Massachusetts.