Christian Orientals in Conversation with Islam: Two Examples from German Mission History in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: The writer describes experiences of Oriental Christians belonging to German missions dealing with Syriac-speaking Muslims in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using the example of two prime Missions in the Urmia-region of Iran—the German Mission to the Orient and the Hermannsburger Mission—he establishes the difference between formally schooled, European-trained Christian rhetoricians, whose forum for debate was public and published, and the less flamboyant, native-born Christians in unpublished discussion with their fellow countrymen. Focus is on two types of encounter: a several-weeks-long published controversy, backed by Turkish political editor Edhem Ruhi but centred on the preaching and writing of Turkish Christian convert John Awetaranian; and the on-the-ground lessons learned by Pera Johannes and his associates at the Hermannsburg Mission in Wasirabad, as they engaged in tentative, non-inflammatory discussion with Muslims of a common cultural background. Both examples show the significance of political involvement, since, on the one hand, Ruhi's newspaper was a forum for his views and thus set into motion as well as called a halt to the Awetaranian-Islam debate, and on the other, the horror stories of the Hermannsburg Mission ultimately showed up the futility and perhaps foolhardiness of combatting culture, even as members of a tolerated minority. On the surface, Awetarian represents the product of self-assured literary activity engaging in open controversy in mission work; and Pera Johannes with the Hermannsburger demonstrates the relatively unlettered, despised native group of Christians in a tenuous situation. The two examples meet, historically, in their encountering realities of politics that could make or break their project.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".