Western missionaries and their educational activities in the emergence of Arab nationalism: The case of Syria and the Syrian Protestant College

The most important difference of this study from the academic and political studies describing the missionary processes carried out in the Ottoman lands in particular, especially in Syria, especially in Lebanon and Egypt, is the historical importance of the process that westerners and western missionaries tried to express through the educational institutions in the birth and development of Arab nationalism. As a process, the birth of Arab nationalism, its defense as a thought and its next stages are tried to be expressed together with the projection of both Arab intellectuals and a number of different formations in the country. Artificial inventing the idea of the nation in the Arab society through educational institutions based on the Syrian Protestant College was tried to be explained with primary sources. In addition, by addressing the eastern targets of western origin Catholic and Protestant missionaries, the interventionist effects of the Ottoman Empire, called Levant in the Middle East history, have been tried to be explained. These findings have been revealed as a result of a literature review in which elite missionary archives and primary sources are dominant.