Pictures Worth a Thousand Words: American Missionary Depictions of “Oriental” Ottomans and “Terrible” Turks at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

The furor in 2006 over the publication of cartoons portraying the Prophet Mohammed confirmed the power that images have to incite emotions, illumine international tensions, and even influence domestic and foreign policy.  Visual representations have in fact inspired the imaginations and informed the opinions of Americans concerning Muslims for over two centuries.  Missionaries from the United States, who dedicated their lives to living and working with people in Islamic countries, were some of the first to produce depictions of Muslim people and disseminate them in America.  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, volunteers with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) took photographs and published them with detailed captions describing the people they evangelized in the Ottoman Empire, which then comprised the greater part of the Muslim world.  These images were then circulated in the United States through personal letters, missionary magazines, newspaper articles, books, and – in the aftermath of World War I – through a nationwide publicity campaign to raise relief for the war’s survivors.  Although scholars have acknowledged that such material served as a basis for American knowledge and public opinion about Ottoman Turks, Kurds, and Armenian Christians, little systematic analysis exists of these illustrations and photographs.

This poster presentation thus identifies and analyses some of the most striking images that American missionaries presented to both their religious supporters and to the nation as whole.  Based on research at the ABCFM archives located in the Houghton Library of Harvard University and the Near East Foundation in New York, it examines a century-old lantern slide show and published photographs from the turn of the twentieth century.  This study also compares these images with the exotic portrayals by American artists of the same period that today are best known for their Oriental stereotypes.  It argues that while less prone to the romanticizing found in American fine art and popular culture, Protestant missionaries portrayed Turks, Kurds, and Armenians to U.S. audiences with an equally stylized look and narrative that suited their own agenda.  In other words, missionaries depicted Ottoman people in ways that made an effective case for their continued missionary endeavor.