Coping with Continuous Crises: The Case of Turkish Inbound Tourism

In 1889 the pioneers of the Arabian Mission – a mission under the direction of the Reformed Church in America – arrived in Arabia with the aim of Christianizing Muslims of the Najd and Arabian Peninsula. By the turn of the century, the missionaries were using medical knowledge and service as an interface for dialogue and evangelism. This article's aim is two-fold. First, it examines the history of the Arabian Mission and the history of medicine in the Gulf. Second, it explores the impact of the Americans on the Muslim communities from 1920 to 1960 by examining the experience of missionaries as well as the discourses missionaries constructed about Arabs and Arabia. It investigates how the missionaries transcend the label of cultural imperialist, and how both the function and language of the missionaries evolved as oil wealth transformed the Gulf nations of Bahrain and Kuwait. The impact the missionaries made in later years (1939–60) will be examined in the next publication of Middle Eastern Studies as a continuation of this article.