D EANNA F ERREE W OMACK Images of Islam: American Missionary and Arab Perspectives ABSTRACT This article examines the story of Protestant missions in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ottoman Syria, a region of the Ottoman Empire that included present day Syria and Lebanon. It moves the study of the American Syria Mission away from Euro-centric modes of historiography, first, by adding to the small body of recent scholarship on Arab Protestantism and mission schools in Syria. Second, it focuses on Islam and Christian–Muslim relations in Syrian missionary history, a topic that has received little scholarly attention. Arguing that Muslims played an active part in this history even when they resisted missionary overtures, the article considers the perspectives of Syrian Muslims alongside images of Islam in American and Syrian Protestant publications. By pointing to the interreligious collaboration between Syrian Christian and Muslim intellectuals and the respect many Syrian Protestant writers exhibited for the Islamic tradition, this article questions assumptions of innate conflict between Muslims and Christians in the Middle East. Keywords: Islam, Protestant missions, Arab Christians, Syria, Lebanon, Ottoman Empire, Arabic literary renaissance INTRODUCTION Mission history is a story of contact, encounter and interaction – not simply between a sending and a receiving society, but between multiple actors whose aims, struggles and achievements play out Studies in World Christianity 22.1 (2016): 22–36 DOI: 10.3366/swc.2016.0135 # Edinburgh University Press www.euppublishing.com/journal/swc