Research Paper On Ahmed Fahmy

Church Misiory 78:2 (June 2009), 309 326. I 2009, American Society orChurch History doi:10.I017/S000964070900050X Printed in the USA

An Egyptian in China: Ahmed Fahmy and the Making of 'World Christianities "
HEATHER J, SHARKEY

"In my early years in Changehow there were still some of Dr. Fahmy's students in practice in the town, and plenty of people, patients and church members, who remembered him with much gratitude and affection. 1 think you will be glad to know that ... there will also be people in Changehow who never knew Dr. Fahmy but who nevertheless will be giving thanks for the work which he started and from which they and many others have benelited over the years." —D. J. Harman to Mrs. Johnston {granddaughter of Ahmed Fahmy),
dated Eltham, London, November 14, 1987

I. A H M E D FAHMY IN THF. MISSIONARY CONTEXT

Ahmed Fahmy, who was bom in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1861 and died in Golders Green, London, in 1933,' was the most celebrated convert from Islam to Christianity in the history of the American Presbyterian mission in Egypt. American Presbyterians had started work in Egypt in 1854 and soon developed the largest Protestant mission in tbe country." They opened schools, hospitals, and orphanages; sponsored the development of Arabic Christian publishing and Bible distribution; and witli local Egyptians
'University of London, School of Oricnial and African Studies. Council for World Mission Archives (hencefonh SOAS CWM), Annotated Register of L.M.S. Missionaries. 1796-1923, Appendix A. p. 176 #854. "PAHMY, Ahmed." This LMS register states that he was bom in I8iiO. However, Edinburgh University records, completed in Ahmed Pahniy's own hand, declare that he was bom on AugusI 25, 1861: Edinburgh University Library, Special Collections (henceforth EUL). records of "Preliminary Examinütion and Course of Study [Medicine]" for Ahmed Pahmy. "Medical Graduates 1886," shelf mark Da 43. 'The American Presbyterian mission was suhstanti;illy larger than the mission of the Church Missionary Society. Moreover, after Britain invaded and occupied Egypl in 18S2. the Americans did not have lo stniggle as CMS missionaries did lo dissociale themselves from colonial authorities. On Ihe CMS in Egypt, see Matthew Rhodes, "Anglican Mission: Egypl, A Case Study." paper delivered at ihe Henry Martyn Centre, Westminster College, Cambridge University, May 2003, available al http://www.martynmission.cam.ac.uk/CMRhodes.htm.

Heather J. Sharkey is an associate professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies in the Departrnent of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania.

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organized evangelical work in towns and villages from Alexandria to Aswan. In an age when Anglo-American Protestant missions were expanding across the globe, they conceived of their mis.sion as a universal one and sought to draw Copts and Muslims alike toward their reformed (that is, Protestant) creed. In the long run, American efforts led to the ereation of an Egyptian Evangelical church (Kanisa injiliyya misriyya) even while stimulating a kind of "counterreformation" within Coptic Orthodoxy along with new forms of social outreach among Muslim activists and nationalists. The American Presbyterians in Egypt did not focus on Muslim evangelization until after the British Occupation of 1882 when Protestant missionaries, buoyed by the waves of British imperial expansion, entered their own period of rhetorical and tactical muscle flexing. Ahmed Fahmy's conversion, which occurred in 1877, therefore predated the British Occupation and the missionary tum toward Muslim evangelization by five years. Since there are no signs in missionary records that the Americans had actively tried to convert him, and since the missionaries appeared to greet his declaration of Christian failh with a degree of surprise, Ahmed Fahmy was in some sense an aeeidental convert. He was certainly one of a relatively small group: according to the missionary Andrew Watson, writing in 1906. the American Presbyterians in Egypt had reported just 140 converts from Islam in the mission's first half-century in Egypt, though some of these people, Watson noted vaguely, had reverted to Islam."* Judging from his papers surviving in London, Ahmed became a committed evangelical Christian and went on to pursue his own mission in southeastem China under the auspices of the British interdenominational London Missionary Society (LMS). Many Egyptian Protestants (and especially those who had come ñ'om Coptic backgrounds) became lay evangelists or evangelical church pastors over the years, but not until 1953 did another Egyptian evangelical attain the status of "missionary" in the ranks of Anglo-American counterparts." In this regard Ahmed Fahmy was decades ahead of his time, and his pursuit of a career with the British LMS mission explains why American Presbyterians celebrated his case for so long.*" Since the 1990s leading scholars have recognized the transnational dimensions of missionary encounters. They have traced, for example, the

"'Heather J. Sharkey, American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire (Princelon, N.J.: Princeton tJniversity Press, 2008). Andrew Watson, "Islam in Egypt." in S. M. Zwemer, E. M. Wherry, and James L. Barton, eds.. The Mohammedan World of To-Day {^cw York: F. H. Reveli, 1906). 23-29. ^Donald Black. "Board of Foreign Missions of the tJnited Presbyterian Church of North America. 1954-1958: Reflections of the Executive Secretary," unpublished typescript, n.d.; and Ralph McLaughlin. "Important Evenl in the Nile Valley," United Presbyterian. 30 November 1953. ''Wat.son, "Islam in Egypt." 36.

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social and historical links that connected nineteenth-century British missionaries in southem Afiiea and the Caribbean to churches and societies in Britain, or American missions in the Ottoman Levant to earlier missions to Native Americans.^ A few have scanned the history of single mission societies as they operated globally in places as far afield as India, Polynesia, and Australia, or have brought new attention to bear on the interrelated history of British imperial and Protestant missionary expansion.^ Still others have serutinized the loeal implieations of transnationalism. For example, one historian has considered how. in what is now Nigeria, Yoruba-speaking evangelists, who worked for a British mission society, seeded changes at the grass roots while establishing a new Yoruba culture of writing by means of the reports they prepared for and sent to London.'' The ambitious goal of all these works has been to east light on the presentation, transmission, and reception of Christianity, often while considering how, through churches and other social spaces, non-Westem peoples made Christianity, and Christian cultures, their own.'" Yet even relative to these richly detailed ease studies, the story of Ahmed Fahmy appears special because it illuminates transnationalism on so many fronts. His life and career linked three separate missions (the missions of the United Presbyterian Church of North America [LIPCNA] and the Reformed Church in America [RCA], as well as the LMS"), two mission fields (Egypt and China), two major missionsponsoring countries (the United States and Great Britain), and even two world religions (Islam and Christianity).

'Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination. 1H30/Ä(57 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2002); John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution. 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991 and 1997); Paul Stuart Landau, In the Realm of the Word: Language. Gender, and Christianity in a Southern Afriean Kingdom (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heineinann. 1995); Ussaina Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008). "On the LMS, for example, see Anna Johnston, Missionaiy Writing and Empiiv, IN0O-1H6O (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and an earlier work. Jon Bonk. '"All Things to All Men": Prolestant Missionary Identification in Theory and Practice, 1X60-1910: with special reference to the London Mis.sionary Stwiety in Central Africa and China," Ph.D. diss.. University ot" Aberdeen, 1982. A recent work on the British imperial aspect of missions is Andrew Porter, Religion versiLs Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion. 1700- ¡914 (New York: Manchester University Press, 20(M). J. D. Y. Peel, Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruha (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). '"Lamín Sanneh, Whose Religion Is Christianity? The Gospel beyond the West (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2003). "The UPCNA was an antecedent church of what is now the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and sponsored missions to Egypt, northern India (later Pakistan), Sudan, and Ethiopia. Ahmed Fahmy served as a doctor to missionaries ofthe RCA in the Amoy district of China; his second wife was also an RCA missionary.

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Ahmed Fahmy was both a one-man exemplar of Christian transnationalism and the product of our modem age of globalization. He did not, however, represent a unitary "global Christianity," if that term is meant to imply either some kind of religious homogenization across continents or regions, or some kind of non-Western religious bloc.'^ Just as cultural theorists recognize that modem globalization has not led to cultural uniformity but rather has made people "aware of new levels of diversity" even within worldwide webs of interdependeney,'"* so some historians of religion now argue for the existence of "world Christianities," with an emphasis on the plural, as a way of reeogtiizing the cultural diversity inherent in the world's Christian communities.'*^ Yet if Ahmed Fahmy's career does not support the idea of a blurring or converging global Christian culture, it does nevertheless illustrate the complex and at times intersecting paths of change that mis.sionaiy efforts pushed forward. On the more personal level, Ahmed Fahmy's experienees in Egypt also offer insights into the social (re)invention ofthe eonvert. His short career as a convert in Egypt, which lasted less than a year (1877-1878) before he fled to Britain, confirms the idea that conversion, across cultures and periods, is a process, and not a spiritual event or flashpoint.''' Conversion is, moreover, an intensely social process, involving not just the individual convert but also the convert's family and community. In Ahmed Fahmy's case, conversion led to his rupture from Egypt's Islamic society. Far from being a mere abstraction of belief, Ahmed Fahmy's conversion therefore demanded that he address his own "problems of self-identification in a shattered social world.""" This article first describes Ahmed Fahmy's experiences as a convert in Egypt and the implications of his conversion for the American Presbyterian mission in that eountry. It then considers his career in China by assessing his work, impact,
'^Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New Yoric: Oxford tJnivcrsily Press. 2002): Frans Wijsen and Robert Schreiter, eds.. Global Christianity: Contested Claims (Amsterdam: Rodopi. 2007). Mike FeatherKtone, Undoing Culture: Ghhalization, Postmodernism and Identity (London: Sage, t995), 13 14. See also Arjun Appadurai. "Di.sjuncturc and DilTorcnce in iht: Global Cultural Economy," in Mike Fealherstone. ed.. Global Culture: Nationalism. Ghhalization and Modernity (Lünáon: Sage, 1990), 295-3tO: and Arjun Appadurai, ed., Glohalizatinn (Durham, N.C: Duke University Press. 2001). '""Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley, eds.. World Christianities, c. 1815-1915 (Cambridge: Cambridge tJniversity Press, 2006). '^Lewis R. Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion (New Haven. Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993). On the idea of conversion as a "self-constitutive act." see also Simon Coleman, "Continuous Conversion? The Rhetoric. Practice, and Rhetorical Practice of Charismatic Protestant Conversion," in Andrew Buckser and Stephen D. Glazier, eds.. The Anthropology of Religious Conversion (Lanham, Md,: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). 15-27, ' Robert W. Hefner, "Of Faith and Commitment: Christian Conversion in Muslim Java." in Robert W. Hefner, ed.. Conversion lo Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation (Berketey: University of California Press, 1993), 9 9 - t25.

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and place within the British mission that originally deployed him. Ultimately, the career of Ahmed Fahmy was both unique and representative. His experience of converting from Islam to Christianity in Egypt and then of becoming a medical evangelist in China (where he appears to have been the only non-Anglo listed on the LMS roster of "English" missionaries''') made him a rare cultural hybrid, indeed, one of a kind. Yet., the trajectories of his emigration from Egypt, together with his participation in a global missionary movement, made him an embodiment of an Anglo-American Protestant movement that was fostering the plurality of "world Christianities."'"^

II. AHMED FAHMY IN EGYPT

What do we know about Ahmed Fahmy?
From American Presbyterian missionary sourees, ineluding the diaries of missionaries who described his eonversion as it unfolded, we can gather that he came from an upstanding and prosperous Muslim family ihat owned estates in Minya (Middle Bgypt) and a residenee in Cairo. Ahmed himself had studied for a time at al-Azhar, the venerable Sunni Muslim university mosque, and had some knowledge of English and French. His father held the respected post of ehief clerk in a Muslim court of appeal. Ahmed had two brothers, named Muhammad and Mahmud, and all three of them had attended the American mission boys' school in Cairo: this would have been in the 1870s, when wealthy Muslim students were beginning to attend missionary schools in greater numbers, encouraged by parents who wanted sons and daughters to icam European languages and gain exposure to Western ideas.''' One of Ahmed's brothers was even working for the American missionaries in Minya at the time Ahmed professed his Christian belief Aboul Ahmed's mother, the missionary sources only say that she grieved upon his baptism and pled with him to reeant.^" In 1875. when Ahmed was fifteen, the mission hired him to teach Arabic to one ofthe new female missionaries., Miss Margaret Smith (1847- 1932),
and
' 'SOAS CWM. Annotated Register of L.M.S. Missionaries. '"Gillcy and Stanley, eds.. H'orld Christianities. ' Elizabeth Kelsey Kinncar, She Sat Where They Sat: A Memoir of Anna Young Thompson of Egypt (Grand Rapids. Mich.: Eerdmans, 1971). See p. 36 regarding Muslim females allending Anieriean mission sehools in the 1870s. In 1878. on his matriculation papers for Edinburgh University, Ahmed wrote that he had attended the American mission school in Cairo for nine years: EUL. Records for Ahmed Fahmy, "First Matrics 1878," shelf mark Da 34. "^"The three most Imporlanl sources are: Andrew Watson. The American Mission in ¿Cçiy". 1854 to ¡896. 2nd ed. (Pittsburgh: United Presbyterian Board of Publication. 1904). 305-311; Presbyterian Historical Society. Philadelphia (hencefonh PUS). R(i 58-1-10: Anna Young Thompstin Papers, Diary, 1S72 -1880; PHS RG 210-3-6: Andrew Watson. Diaries. July 1877Deeembcr 1877.

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they read various devotional books together, including a daily chapter from the Bible. "After several months with Miss Smith," the senior missionary Andrew Watson wrote, "he began to a,sk questions., and finally he became satisfied as to the truth of Christianity." When Ahmed professed faith and underwent baptism in 1877, Watson added, "news of his defection from the religion of his fathers spread rapidly through the city.'"'' Thus Ahmed became an apostate, violating the Muslim doctrine and popular belief that conversion into Islam was permitted but conversion out was not. Theoretically, scholars point out, the Islamic legal tradition provided apostates with opportunities to recant but failing that cited death as the ultimate sanction for renouncing Islam;""' in practice, in the Egypt of Ahmed Fahmy, the first line of sanction was pressure—intense pressure to recant under threat of assault and possible death." The goal for Muslim society-—and indeed more specifically for Ahmed's family—was to return the apostate, alive and whole, to the fold. American missionaries described the pressures that Ahmed faced after his baptism., along with his efforts to take sanctuary in the mission house. Missionaries reported that Ahmed's brothers and friends came to plead with him after his baptism. When that failed, they reported, some friends and relatives dressed up as peasants, waited outside the mission house, and kidnapped him by hauling him away in a horse-drawn wagon. Thereupon they confined him in his father's house. The missionaries appealed to American and British consuls, who interceded with the Khedive Isma'il (ruler of Egypt. 1863-1879) and his government to extract infonnation and guarantees for Ahmed's safety. Yet Egyptian authorities reportedly said that Ahmed's father had "a right to retain him" while the consuls declared it "a very delicate case." Andrew Watson, the primary missionary source on this issue, concluded that the Egyptian government "would rather have the name of religious intolerance than do justice.""" The missionary Anna Young Thompson (who had also studied Arabic with Ahmed Fahmy) wrote in her diary at the time that a certain "Sharif Pasha" sought help against the missionaries fi'om the Khedive, who ambiguously declared, "There is freedom of religion; nothing can be done." Sharif Pasha also appealed to the rector of al-Azhar, who reportedly said that Ahmed should be burned.^* n, 7Äe American Mission in Egypt. 305-307. '"See chapter 4, "Apostasy." in Yohanan Friedmann, Tolerance and Coercion in Islam: ¡nteifaith Relations in the Muslim Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 121-159. ^'Heather J. Sharkey. "'Muslim Aposiasy. Chrislian Conversion, and Religious Freedom iti Egypt: A Study of Ameriean Missiotiaries, Western Ittiperialism, and Human Rights .Agendas," in Rosalind I. J. Hackett. ed., Proselytization Revisited: Rights. Eree Markets, and Culture Wars (London: Equinox. 300fil, 139- 166.' "•"PHS RG 210-3-6: Andrew Watson, diary entries for December 22 and December 25, 1877. "PHS RG 210-3-6: Andrew Watson, diary entry for December 24, 1877. -"^PHS RG 58-MO: Anna Young Thompson, diary entry for November 19, 1877.

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Meanwhile, Andrew Watson claimed, the family variously threatened to kill Ahmed (according to one version, by hiring Greek thugs to do him in, and later hy threatening to poison him), hired a sheikh to write amulets to restore his Muslim faith, and foreed him to sign a document of recantation in the ofîiee of the ehief of police. Eventually he got word to the missionaries that his Christian faith was intact and escaped to one of their houses.^^ News of Ahmed Fahmy reached the young Lord Aberdeen, who happened to he in Egypt on his honeymoon. This was the seventh Lord Aberdeen, also known as John Campbell Hamilton-Gordon, who went on to serve as governor-general of Canada from 1893 to 1898.-** His father, the fifth Lord Aberdeen, had been a devout evangelical Christian who was passionate about ministering to the British poor and who was inspired hy the Ragged Schools Movement."*" The elder Aberdeen had gone to Egypt in the early 1860s in an attempt to recover from what was probably tuberculosis. There he developed friendships with American Presbyterian missionaries and wilh them launched an initiative to distribute Arabic Bibles in Upper Egypt.^^ This fifth Lord Aberdeen had died in 1864, thirteen years before Ahmed Fahmy's conversion. Yet when his son, the seventh Aberdeen, arrived in Egypt as a honeymooner in 1877, he sought out his father's old friends among the American Presbyterians and heard about Ahmed Fahmy's travails. Aberdeen decided to take the young man under his wing and arranged his escape from Egypt—claiming in his memoirs that he found an English sea captain to collude with them, smuggled Ahmed Fahmy on board, and foiled an Egyptian search party. Lord Aberdeen then arranged for Ahmed Fahmy to study medicine in Scotland and supported him for the decade that followed. Lord Aberdeen's memoirs, written in 1925 and reflecting primarily on his career in Canada, constitute a valuable source about Ahmed Fahmy and his career as an émigré.""
* Watson. The American Mission in Egypt, 305 - 3 1 1 . •

**The fourth Lord Aberdeen served as prime minister of Britain from IS52 to 1H55. and along with Lord Elgin (of Elgin Marbles fame) also excavated and shipped Greek antiquilies lo the U.K. The fifth Lord Aberdeen was an evangelical Chrisiian interested in poor relief and Bible distribulion. The sixth Lord Aberdeen, eldest son of the evangelist, died off" the coast of Galveston, Texas, while working incognito as a sailor. " C. i. Montague. Sixty Years in Wai/dom. or The Ragged School Movement in English History (1904). reprinted with an introduction by Katharine R Lenroot (Montclair, N.J.: Patterson Smith. 1970). This movement strongly influenced the British missionary Mary Whatcly in Egypt: M. L. Whately, Ragged Lili- in Egypt, and More About Ragged Life in Egypt, new cd. (London: Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday, 1870). "The Rev. E. B. EWiolt. ed.. Memoir of Lord Haddo, in His Latter Years. Fifth Earl of Aberdeen. 5th rev. ed. (London: Seeley. Jackson and Halliday. 1869); und Heather J. Sharkey. "American Missionaries, the Arabic Bible, and Coptic Reform in Late Nineteenth-Century EgypC unpublished paper. 'John Campbell (iordon. Marquess of Aberdeen and Temair, and Ishbel Gordon, Marchioness of Aberdeen and Temair, "We Twa": Reminiscences of Lord and Lady Aberdeen, 2 vols. (London: W. Collins Sons & Co., 1925).

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Four points regarding Ahmed Fahmy's experience in Egypt deserve eloser attention; First, as part of the effort to persuade Ahmed Fahmy to recant, Ahmed's family enlisted help from Jamal al-Din a!-Afghani (1838-1897), the most famous Muslim activist of the late nineteenth-century Islamic world, and a man who became closely identified with the pan-Islamic, Muslim anticolonial, and Muslim modernist movements.'^ (Afghani still has many supporters today; for example, the Swiss Muslim thinker Tariq Ramadan [b. 1962] cites him as a major inspiration.-*^) Strikingly, the American missionaries held Afghani in contempt because they regarded him, in Andrew Watson's words, as "more of an infidel than a Muhammadan."''' Nearly a century later, one Middle East historian wrote in a similar vein that Afghani practiced a "false but shadowy devotion" for the sake of his activism.^^'^ Anna Young Thompson, a young missionary who overheard the discussion that occurred in the mission house, described in her diary the appearance of this "learned Moslim man known as 'The Philosopher' for his much & overwhelming talk & arguments, [a man] from Persia or Afghanistan ... who can argue that there is a God or that there is none." She heard them discussing Christ, Muhammad, the Bible, and Voltaire and added, "Our friends said these men had no religion, that they were nearly infidels. But Ahmed's father had sent them to talk and he Ahmed was not afraid to answer them."""' Afghani's cameo appearance in the story of Ahmed Fahmy offers a neat illustration of the intersecting global histories of islam and Christianity, on Egyptian soil, in this period. Second, American missionaries lost touch with Ahmed Fahmy after his departure from Egypt and were only dimly aware of his subsequent eareer as a missionary in China. Nevertheless, American Presbyterians continued to cite the case of Ahmed Fahmy in subsequent histories of the mission, to view his experience as a case study in the trials facing Egyptian converts from Islam, and to connect his experiences to the struggle for what they called religious liberty in Egypt. In important ways he embodied both the missionaries' hopes and disappointments in Egypt. For example, in 1907, thirteen years before he inaugurated the American University in Cairo, Charles R. Watson (the son of the mission leader Andrew Watson)
"'Nikki R. Keddie. An Islamic Response to Imperialism: Political and Religious Writings of Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-.4fghani (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). "'"'lan Bunima, "Tatiq Ramadan Has an Identity Issue," The New York Times Magazine. Febniary 4. 2007; Tariq Ramadan. Western Muslims and the Future of ¡slam (Oxford: Oxford Universily Press, 2004). Watson, The American Mission in Egypt, 308. FJie Kedourie, Afghani and Ahdiih: An Essay on Religious Unhelitfand Political Activism in Modern Islam (New York: The Hutnanities Press, 1966). 45. -*''PHS RG 58-1-10: Anna Young Thompson, diary entry for November \5. 1X77.

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concluded that the case of Ahtîied Fahtny "showed that the day had passed when a Moslem eould be legally put to death in Egypt for becoming a Christian, but it also revealed the power of Islam and its relentless hostility toward Christianity."^'' Ameriean missionaries continued to celebrate Ahmed Fahmy's conversion for years to come, describing his case even in the mission's centennial history published in 1958.'^^ Yet they appear to have believed that, as the son of a well-to-do and well-connected Muslim family, Ahmed Fahmy was able to persist in being a Christian and to go on to a missionary eareer because he left Egypt. Ahmed Fahmy certainly gained, through emigration, the freedom to reinvent himself as an English-speaking evangelical Christian. Third, the idea of Egyptian emigration to North America appears to have been in the air when Ahmed Fahmy's baptism occurred. This idea gained momentum so that, by the late twentieth century, encounters with American mission-founded institutions, and above all with inission schools, eased the path of emigration for Egyptians, both Muslim and Christian, to the United States, The tnissionary Anna Young Thompson confided to her diary on November 17, 1877, that Ahmed's brothers accused hirn of converting merely so that he could "many an American wife, & go to America & get an education.'""' And indeed, his relationship with Margaret Smith— officially just a relationship between tutor and student—may have contributed to his evangelical turn. According to Thompson., Ahmed's own family believed that physical or romantic attraction was at play, and suggested marriage to a suitable Egyptian woman as a possible cure for his malaise.*' As it happened, Ahmed went to Scotland, not the U.S., for an education. But twenty-eight years later, following the death of his first, Scottish wife in a cholera epidemic, Ahmed did marry an American—in a Protestant union church in Hong Kong—and only then made bis way to America,''^ Finally, among indigenous Egyptian Christians (that is, Copts) in the nineteenth century, hybrid identities were becoming more common^and more accepted^as missionary activities inspired some Egyptian Christians to leave Coptic Orthodoxy for Protestant or Catholic churches. In the late nineteenth eentury, Copts of all sectarian backgrounds were also increasingly
•"charles R. Watson. Egypt and the Christian CnisadeiNcw York: Young People's Missionary Movement. li)07), 174-177. ^"Earl E. Elder, ¡-Indicating a Fisión: The Story ofthe American Mission in Egypt. IH54-I954 (Philadelphia: The United Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions. 1958). Ib-ll. '''Sharkey. American Evangelicals in Eg\pt. 3, 7, 229 - 2311. *1'HS RG 58-1-10: Anna Young Thompson, diary entry for November 17, 1877. •"PHS RG 58-1-10: Anna Young Thompson, diary entry for December 24. 1877. ""^SOAS CWM. Annotated Register of L.M.S. Missionaries, 1796-1923, Appendix A. p. 176 #854, "FAHMY, Ahmed."

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intermarrying, producing hybrid Catholic-Orthodox, Protestant-Catholic, and Protestant-Orthodox households. Chureh authorities (Orthodox, Protestant, and Catholic alike) were often unhappy about these "mixed marriages" but had no legal power to prevent them. ' By contrast. Egyptian Muslim authorities and families, often backed up on the ground by local police forces, did have eonsiderable legal and social power to prevent Muslim apostates from retaining or gaining their social footings and from establishing hybrid Muslim-Christian households.'''^ In short, there was no culture of live-and-let-live that would have allowed a Muslim-bom (and high-bom) man like Ahmed Fahmy to carve out a Christian existence in Cairo. When he jumped on the ship in Alexandria harbor, Ahmed Fahmy may have believed that slaying Christian would mean leaving Egypt and creating a career, family, and community anew.

III. A H M E D FAHMY IN CHINA

Information about Ahmed is scanty for the ten years after his departure fVom Egypt. An LMS register of missionaries records that after reaching Britain early in 1878 he began to study medieine and liberal arts in Edinburgh. Edinburgh University records eonfirm that he matriculated in 1878 and completed his qualifying medical examinations in 1886.'*^ On January 20, 1887, he married Mary Auchterlonie Chalmers in Edinburgh; twenty days later, he and his bride sailed for China.'*'' On April K 1887, the couple arrived in Amoy, Fukien (Fujian) province, and set out to open a new mission station in the nearby city of "Chiang Chiu" (also known as Changehew, or Zhangzhou), thereby beeoming, according to the LMS sources, the "first foreigners" in that locale. Missionaries described Zhangzhou at the time as a prosperous, but still very provineial, small city located in southeast China; it had a strong agrieultural base and centuries-old eonnections to the silk trade. Its residents, whom an LMS chronicler described as "proud and haughty," and as having "the most supreme contempt for foreigners," greeted the arrival of Ahmed and Mary Falimy,
•'Mbid. 73- 76.

"^Islamic law stipulates that Muslim men can marry Christian women, but that Christian men cannot marry or remain married to Muslim women. If a married Muslim man conven.s to Christianity and persists in his apostasy, then an Islamic court can unilaterally divoree him from his Muslim wife. •'^EUL. Records for Ahmed Fahmy, "Preliminary Examination and Course of Study [Medicine]," in "Medical Graduates 1886." shelf mark Da 43. *"'SOAS CWM, Annotated Register of L.M.S. Missionaries. 1796-1923, Appendix A, p. 176 ÍÍ854. "FAHMY, Ahmed" *^The Chronicle ofthe London Missionary Society, vol. XI, 1902, pp. 160 and 204, announcing the death of Mary Fahmy of "Chiang Chiu."

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and of missionaries in general, with some hostility. ^ In 1987, one hundred years after the couple's arrival in Zhangzhou. one of their missionary successors in the city looked back on the missionary enterprise and remarked. "Foreigners, then in the 1880s, were not welcomed generally [in Zhangzhou], and Dr. Fahmy was stoned on oecasion.''^^ Information on Ahmed Fahmy grows richer after 1887, when he began to send letters and reports from China to the LMS headquarters in London. In Zhangzhou. Ahmed opened the town's first Western hospital, which he called in colloquial Chinese the "Hokim I-Kuan" or the "Gospel Heating House." Papers show that he was the driving force and organizational dynamo behind this venture until his retirement in 1919, Ahmed Fahmy wrote so much like an English evangelical missionary of this period and, indeed, he signed all his papers "A. Fahmy" {thereby reducing his quintessentially Muslim given name, Ahmed, to an initial) that one might never have known that he began his life in Egypt.''" Judging from his writings, his cultural conversion from Egyptian-Muslim to Anglo-Christian was, by the time he reached China, substantial. "The Hospital work is divided into two distinct, though naturally and intrinsically intermingling, departments," he wrote in an 1888 report, "... the evangelistic and the medical. While the former is doubtless the main and grand object of the Institution, the latter is nevertheless the practical expression of God's 'good will toward men,' and men's fraternal love toward one another; and is also the Door thro' which we usher in these long-benighted heathen within hearing of the "Glad news of Salvation."'^^' He wrote in an 1891 report, meanwhile. From the outset 1 have kept it steadily before me that, while the object of the hospital is to relieve sufTering, its chief end is the salvation of souls. To attain this object services are held, in the hospital Chapel, morning and evening;
"""Richard Lovett, The History of the London Missionary Society. ¡795-1895. vol. 2 (London: Henry Frowde, 1899), 4S7-488. ^''SOAS, papers of Dr- Dougla.s Harman and Mrs. Gladys Hamian, MS 380815/1/1: "A History of Mission Medical Work in Changehow Fukien. China II": A Letter from Gladys Busby, 18 February 1987. ^*'An isolated reference lo his Muslim origins did appear in his first year as an LMS missionary: this was in the society's Chronicle for 1 )í8íi—the same volume Ihat reported his estüblishnieni of the Zhangzhou hospiial. Ahmed Fahmy disputed the claim of a church canon who had suggested that conversion lo Islam (apparenlly among practitioners of local religions) could be a stepping-stone lo Christianity, and who had claimed that slavery and polygamy had little foundation in Islamic religion: Ahmed Pahmy, "South China, Work for the Medical Missionary" and "Mohammedanism as it Is" in the Rev. (ieorgc Cousins, ed.. The Chronicle of Ihe London Missionary Society for the Year I8SH (London: London Missionary Society, 1889), 175-176, 326-327.' " A . Fahtny to the Rev. Wardlaw Thompson, London Mission, Foreign Secretary, dated Chiangchiu, S. China, London Mission Hospital, 31 January 1889. in SOAS CWM China—Fukien, reports, box I, file 96, 1888.

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THIRTY YEARS I CHANGCHOW N
"Thirty Years in Changchow: A Beloved Physician," by C. G. Sparham. photograph taken al Ahmed Fahmy's retirement party in Zhangzhou, south Fukien, China, on December 12. 1918. Reproduced from the London Missionary Society/Cotinci! for World Mission Archives.

and daily the inpatients are taught to read and to commit to memory hymns and passages of Scripture. Again, on outpatients' days, special evangelistic serviees are held; and as many of the outpatients as possible are conversed with individually. I always lay much stress on dealing with individual souls, and, while I do not deny the value of preaching from Platfonns, [ can never be persuaded that it can ever equal, in China at least, where people are so spiritually dull and utterly indifferent to all that concerns the higher life, conversational teaching." With his comments on the spiritual "dullness" of the Chinese, Ahmed Fahmy sounded the tone of cultural imperiousness that was common among so many British and American missionaries of this era.^'' What impact did Ahmed Fahmy have on the Zhangzhou community, and how did his work relate to the LMS mission that sponsored him? Here, too, a few points are salient.
" A. Falimy to the Rev. R. Wardlaw Tbompson, dated Chiang-chiu Hospital,10 January 1891, SOAS CWM China—Fukien, reports, box 1, lile 98, 1890. "See, for example, accounts in Jane Hunter. The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Centuty China (New Haven, Conn.: Ya!e University Press. 1984).

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First, Ahmed Fahmy influenced the culture, practice, and business of local medicine, and judging from his reports and from the assessment of one of his successors, he did so with little help from the LMS.^** He performed appendectomies, removed tumors and gallstones, operated on eyes, amputated limbs, treated fractures, did plastic surgery on faces, and more. He carried out and promoted smallpox vaccinations and—at a time when Protestant missionaries were speaking out loudly against the British opium trade —^trcated recovering opium addicts. Perhaps most significantly, he trained young Chinese men as his medical assistants, and by 1896 several of these had become Christians and had gone on to establish their own "medicine shops" in the town. {This missionary practice of training local assistants may help to explain why, by 1900, Chinese Protestants throughout the country were disproportionately represented in professions like medicine.^'') Ahmed Fahmy claimed that he had to keep training new assistants because these local medicine shops, which he likened in 1902 to "branch dispensaries" of his hospital, were so lucrative.''^ By 1908, Ahmed reported, thirteen medical shops were being operated in Zhangzhou, all of them by his own former assistants or by those who had trained with other missions.^** By 1913, all five of his new trainees were secondgeneration Chinese Christians, and one of these was the son of a woman who had recovered from an opium addiction and had then embraced Christianity.'^'' Judging from Ahmed Fahmy's letters and reports, his hospital treated mainly poor and humble people and had a clientele that was mainly illiterate. On occasions when a high-ranking "mandarin" sought treatment, it eamed special mention in his reports."^"^ Most of his patients were male: out of 2,885 new patients treated in 1896 (out of 12,349 total cases), only 528, or 18

^SOAS, papers of Dr. Douglas Harman and Mrs. Gladys Harman, MS 380815/1/1: "A History of Mission Medical Work in Changchow Fukien, China I!"; A Letter from Gladys Busby, 18 February 1987. Kalhleen L. Lodwick, Crusaders against Opium: Protestant Missionaries in China. 187479/7 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995). "•Ryan Dunch. Fuzhoii Protestants and the Making of a Modern China, IH57-I927 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Universily Press, 2001), xvii, 36. " A . Fahmy. "Repon of the Chiang-Chiu Hospital for 1902," in SOAS CWM China—Fukien. reports, box 3, file 110, 1902. '*'A. Fahmy to the Rev. G, Cousins, dated L.M.S. Chiang-Chiu. Amoy. IS April 190X. in SOAS. CWM South China—Fukien -incoming Correspondence, box 9, folder 1, 1908. "'''A. Fahmy. "Report of the Changchowfn I lospilal for 191 .V in .SOAS CWM Chin;i —Fukien. reports, box 4. file I2L 19L'i; and letter from Ahmed Fahmy to the Rev. Frank Lenwood, London Mission. C hanchowfu [sic], Amoy. 13 January 1913. in SOAS CWM China—Fukien—Incoming Correspondence, box 11, folder I. 1913. "^A. Fahmy to the Rev. R. Wardlaw Thompson, dated London Mission. Chiangchiu. Amoy. 30 December 1893, in SOAS CWM China—Fukien, reports, box 2, file 101, 1893.

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percent, were women.*' In the long run, Ahmed Fahmy's hospital became the foundation for a joint Protestant hospital in Zhangzhou, operated by the LMS, the English Presbyterians, and the RCA, though Japanese bombs destroyed this hospital during World War 11.^^ His American widow, Susan Rankin Duryee Fahmy (1864-^1961), provided a bequest that enabled missionaries to build a new hospital in Zhangzhou, though the Communist Chinese govemment eventually nationalized it.^"* In the 1980s a small group of retired American and British tnissionaries went to Zhangzhou and visited the government hospital that had evolved from Ahmed Fahmy's efforts.'''* It is much harder to assess the impact that Ahmed Fahmy had on the propagation of Christianity in Zhangzhou and its environs. In 1893 he reported that just twenty-four people, out of 13,145 patients treated during the previous year, had registered a tum to Christianity.^"^ He acknowledged that his medical work was just one part ofthe process by writing, in 1917, Actual conversions in the wards is a veritable rarity [sic], notwithstanding the oft repeated assent of the hearers to all you say to them on tnatters of faith and belief And so I for one, at any rate, do not believe in hospital conversion, in the sense of sudden awakening to spiritual verities, and giving up of old beliefs long ingrained into their very being and forming as it were an essential part of their nature. Those who know the Chinese as 1 do can scarcely believe that eonversion, as we understand it, is possible within the short time such patients usually remain with us in the hospital. And so I always look to the ehurches, to which such cases are entrusted, to lead such adherents on to the goal we all have in view. The time needed is inevitably long, and the effort required undoubtedly great before the lost sheep is brought back to the fold.^ His papers suggest that he devised his own system for evangelical outreaeh. Thus he required each patient who came to his hospital to attend daily hymn-singing and worship services, and he made sure that illiterate patients
'''"Report ofthe Chiangchiu Hospital for the year ending December 31st, 1896," in SOAS CWM China—Fukien, reports, box 2. tile 104, 18%, '•'SOAS, Papers ofDr. Douglas Harman and Mrs. Gladys Hannan. MS 380815/1/1: "A History of Mission Medical Work in Changchnw Fukien. China III," description of events from 1941 to 1951 and from 1985, See also Norman Goodall, .] Histoiy of the London Missionar}' Society, IH95-1945 (London: Oxford Universily Press, 1954), 189- 190. 518-519. •••^SOAS. papers of Dr. Douglas Harman and Mrs. Gladys Harman, MS 380815/1/2: D. J. Harman to Mrs. Johnslon, dated Eltham. London. 14 November 1987. "*SOAS. papers of Dr. Douglas Hannan and Mrs. Gladys Hannan, MS 380815/Ul : "A History of Mission Medical Work in Changchow Fukien. China III," description of events from 1941 lo 1951 and from 1985, '•'A. Fahmy to the Rev, R, W. Thompson, dated London Mission, Chiangchiu. Amoy, China, 19 January 189.1, in SOAS CWM China-Fukien. reports, box 2, file 100. 1892. '•''A, Fahmy, "Report ofthe Changchow Hospital for ihe year ending December 31, 19t7." in SOAS CWM China—Fukien. reports, box 4, file 125. 1917.

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were taught to memorize colloquial Chinese hymns. In a 1900 report he explained further that "every inpatient when discharged is given a letter of introduction to the preaeher ofthe ehureh nearest his home. By this means we are enabled to follow up many of the eases who wd [sic] otherwise be lost as possible fhiits of our labours."*"^ Like missionaries around the world, Ahmed Fahmy sometimes despaired over the paucity or slow rate of conversions, even as he noted in reports to London speeial eases of people who. feeling miraculously cured, embraced Christianity and in his words renounced or destroyed their "idols" and "ancestral Tablets."**** Eventually a small Christian community took root in the town, elustered around churches that missionaries founded. Douglas Harmaii, who regarded himself as Ahmed Fahmy's successor and who worked as a medical missionary in the town from 1939 to 1950 (when missionaries were foreed to leave China), recalled the presence of a thriving and elose-knit Chinese Protestant community in Zhangzhou. Hannan's papers show that in the 1980s—after a gulf of silenee that had extended some thirty years—he and his missionary eolleagues were able to reestablish contact with the children and grandchildren of Chinese Christians they had known. (Harman elaimed, too, that many of the elderly Chinese Christians he had known during his own missionary career had remembered Ahmed Fahmy with particular fondness).*''* The situation that Ryan Duneh described, vis-à-vis Chinese Protestants in Fuzhou (another eity in Fujian province) before and after the Nationalist Revolution of 1926-1927, sounds potentially applieable to Zhangzhou; the Chinese public's openness to a Protestant eivie vision may have ended in the late 1920s, but Chinese Protestantism persisted. "There were twice as many Protestants in China in 1949 as in 1927," Dunch observed, "and there were at least ten times as many at the end ofthe 1990s as there were in 1949."™ Ahmed Fahmy's relationship to the British LMS mission and to British society at large was fascinating but also sad. He became increasingly detached from the LMS, which struggled with problems of finances. LMS contributions to Ahmed's hospital declined until, by 1902. Ahmed had devised a sealed system of fee-paying among patients that enabled him to make his hospital wholly self-supporting.^' Even then, he noted in 1903,
" A . Fahmy. Chiang-chiu Hospital report for the year ending 31 December 1900. in SOAS CWM China—Fukien. reports. ho\ 2. file 108. 1900. '^A. Fahmy. Report ofthe Chiang-chiu Hospital for 1901, SOAS CWM China—Fukien. reports, box 2. file 109, 1901. ^^SOAS. Papers of Dr. Douglas Harman and Mrs. Gladys Hannan, MS 380815. including correspondence from Jessie Platz. ^^Dunch. Fuzhou Protestants and the Making of a Modern China. 194 • !95. ^'A. Fahmy. Report oflhe Chiang-Chiu Hospital for 1902. SOAS CWM China—Fukien, reports, box 3, file 110, 1902.

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only half the hospital's funding came from patient fees (which he waived for about the 6 percent of patients who were deemed poorest); Ahmed raised the other funds by serving as a physician to missionaries of the RCA. " Thus the missionary experience as he knew it, in Egypt as later in China, was intrinsically ecumenical and Anglo-American. Ahmed Fahmy's hospital operated on the margins of the LMS mission while Ahmed himself lived, in some ways, on the margins of British society. Clearly there were those who registered his origins in Egypt. Consider the fate of his Scottish wife., Mary, who had worked as a schoolteacher for the mission (but without being recognized and salaried as a "missionary") ever since reaching China in 1887. According to Lord Aberdeen, when Mary Fahmy died in a cholera epidemic in 1902, the British consul "prevented her burial in the British cemetery" on the grounds that her husband, Ahmed, was not a British subject himself Ahmed had to bury her instead on a piece of land on the city fringes, on a plot over which buildings and roads were eventually built.^ Similarly, Ahmed had registered his eldest son as a British national during a furlough in Scotland but had not done the same for his younger children, so that British consular officials in China later refused to register them as British subjects in the opening years of the twentieth century. Lord Aberdeen, by this time retired as governor-general of Canada, stepped in to help, claiming in his memoirs that he "had much correspondenee with the Foreign Office, whose offieials were quite friendly, but could not find means to over-ride the action of the British Consul [in China], which was technically correct." Aberdeen also wrote that, "When the Boxer riots arose, fresh difficulties presented themselves, for Dr. Ahmed Fahmy and his family and hospital had no right to British protection." Aberdeen managed to persuade the Foreign Office "to send a letter to the British Consul requesting him [.víí]"—as opposed to requiring him^—"to give protection to Dr. Fahmy and his mission [hospital]." Aberdeen added. "Ultimately the question of his nationality was solved through his marriage to an American lady as his second wife, and subsequently he became an American citizen."^* His second wife, née Susan Rankin Duryee, had been an RCA missionary in Amoy. and they met at interdenominational Protestant missionary meetings in the district.

^A. Fahmy, "Decennial report of the Changehow Hospital. 1900-1910." in CWM China— Fukien, reports, box 4. hie 118. 1910. '^Gordon and Gordon, "fVe TVa," vol. I. 182- 184. A later reference lo the built-over burial site appears in D, J. Harman lo Mrs. Johnston (granddaughter of Ahmed Fahmy), dated Ellham. London. 14 November 1987, SOAS. papers of Dr. Douglas Harman and Mrs. Gladys Harman, MS 380815. ^•"Gordon and Gordon, We Twa." vol. 1. 182-184.

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Ahmed Fahmy's children, all bom in China, tared differently. His younger son, Erie Fahmy, was deemed British enough to fight with British troops in World War I, where he died in France.^^ His elder son, Ernest Chalmers Fahmy, whom he had managed to register as British during a furlough, played on the Scottish national rugby team and went on to become a distinguished obstetrician and gynecologist in Edinburgh, at one time serving as president of the Edinburgh Obstetric Society.^^ His daughter, Alice Duryee Fahmy. was Ameriean, and settled in her mother's home state. New Jersey.^^ His family, like much of the Protestant missionary movement itself. was Anglo-American.

IV. CONCLUSION: AHMED FAHMY AND THE MAKING OF W O R L D CHRISTIANITIES

The best most historians can usually do in tracing the global diffusion of Christian cultures through missions is to study individual organizations like the London Missionary Society, which operated in places as diverse as China, Botswana, and Samoa. Ahmed Fahmy offers us a one-man tracing of the Anglo-American missionary movement in this seminal period: we can approach the study of the global diffusion of Christianity through his life and career. He plaees Egypt at the center of a world that had Britain and North America on one side and China on the other. As the protege of American missionaries who found a place among British evangelists, he rationalizes the term "Anglo-American" with reference to the modem Protestant missionary movement and illustrates the import of the trans-Atlantic alliance. He shows how a missionary encounter in Egypt was able to have ramifications for a later missionary encounter in China and draws together, though his personal experienees, the modem histories of Islam and Christianity. For all these reasons. Ahmed Fahmy is an exemplar of "world Christianities," and of transnational linkages, in our current age of globalization. Yet his life and career also point to the ehallenges that faced
^^Tbe Chronicle of the London Missionary Society, vol. XXHl (New Scries), 1915: "Killed in action in France on September 25, 1915, Sergeant Eric P. Fahmy, Slh Battalion Seaforths. elder son of Dr. A. Fahmy, Changchowfli. Amoy. China, aged 24." '^Emesl Chalmers Fahmy (d. 1982) co-aulhored. with William Francis Theodore Haultain, AnteNatal Care: A Practical Hand-Book of Ante-Natal Care and the Abnonnalities .Associated with Pivgnancy (Edinburgh: E. & S. Livingstone, 1929). Also, see details by searching for "Emesl Fahmy" on the rugby website al http://www.scrum.com (accessed 6 January 2009). Detailed information on his career appeared in an obituary published in ihe Edinlniigh University Journal ^'Letter from Je.ssie Platz to Douglas and Gladys Harman. dated Hanover, Pa., 13 July 1988, in SOAS, papers of Dr. Douglas Harman and Mrs. Gladys Hannan, MS 380815/1/1.

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him as a convert who sought not only social acceptance, but social inclusion, within the British circles he entered upon fleeing Egypt. Ahmed Fahmy's Christianity, moreover, was the produet of an imperial age. The geographic sweep of his eareer crossed the length of the British Empire and moved within the orbit of the Anglo-American Protestant missionary movement that followed in ihe empire's footsteps. Even if, as one historian has claimed, many English-speaking missionaries regarded their "relationship with empire as deeply ambiguous at best" and were sometimes inclined to hold anti-colonial sentiments, ^ the experience of a convert like Ahmed Falimy serves as a reminder that British authorities^—or missionaries—abroad could be not only imperial, but imperious. The universalism of tlie missionaries' Christian message worked in tension with the cultural biases and social hierarchies that were inherent in colonial encounters. Ahmed Fahmy beeame a leader in the local missionary community of Zhangzhou, China, and distinguished himself in his medical work. LMS records never emphasized his Egyptianness or his non-Britishness, although an LMS historian, writing in 1954 (twenty-one years after Ahmed's death, and a few years after the lapse of the foreign missions in mainland China) did refer to Ahmed Fahmy's origins in a Muslim family while praising his medical enterprise.''' On paper, as "A. Fahmy," Ahmed looked and sounded as British as any other LMS missionary. Yet Lord Aberdeen attested that origin and nationality did matter. Officially Ahmed Fahmy became a Christian, a missionary, and an American, but he never managed to become English or British. His inability to secure British citizenship, despite his close identiftcation with Britain and with a British mission society, shows that his own cultural and social conversion had limits. In some sense, he remained to the end of his life on the margins, neither really Egyptian nor really English.

Porter, Religion versus Empire?, 13. Goodall. A History of the London Mi.