HOW TO RECOGNIZE A MUSLIMbe distinguished from religious expansion in medieval times both by the fact that for the
first time its intentions were literally universal—seeking to extend a religion’s reach with-
out reference to extant geo-political borders—even as it operated quasi-independently of
political and material conquest.^43 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came the first
wave of modern missionary activity, as the Roman Catholic Church’s Counter-Reforma-
tion sought to reconsolidate its fragmented power within Europe to become a universal
authority once again, while translating this vision into an independent global mission,
complete with new religious orders that extended themselves to Japan, China, and India.
The collapse of the papacy’s European venture by the end of the eighteenth century,
ruptured by the growing effectiveness of territorialist power structures, however, meant
the dissolution of its missionary endeavors as well.
At the same time, the dramatic transformations of Western society through industri-
alization, revolution, and economic expansion likewise disrupted Protestant ecclesiastical
authority to such an extent—in the United States and Britain to begin with—that space
opened up for the development of new evangelical churches, along with new forms of
voluntary, interdenominational religious association. The crucial thing to note is that it
was precisely the shared, new conception of religion as located in the sphere of the private
that enabled these groups to imagine themselves as ‘‘missionary bodies, existing in a free
social sphere, apart from the structures of public and national authority.’’^44 This founda-
tional understanding of themselves in terms of private religiosity, while reinforcing insti-
tutional churches’ actual separation from the secular world of politics, at the same time
spurred increased socio-political involvement by individuals in the name of religious con-
viction and consciousness. Not only did the new religious groups become the first exam-
ples of modern, professional, and sophisticated mass organizations, but their work to
convert their fellow citizens, along with colonized subjects, entailed an explicitly political
concern for reforming their nation in the name of a moral citizenship, expressed in such
movements as Christian Republicanism and Abolition. In other words, it was precisely
the location of religion in the sphere of the private that freed up new critical energies and
political spaces in the realm of the public—even as conversion became the privileged
discourse under modernity for conceptualizing both personal religious practice and
worldly, political intent, national(ist) commitment, and transnational collectivity.^45
Interesting in this regard is the attempt by the internationally influential orientalist
Snouck Hurgronje to elaborate a new—‘‘ethical’’ rather than crudely ‘‘exploitative’’—
Dutch approach to expanding control of the Dutch Indies (Indonesia) in the early twenti-
eth century. More than all others, Hurgronje asserts, the missionaries in the field
sympathize with his recognition of ‘‘the duty that our people must fulfill toward Island
society,’’ consisting in the need to develop a unified position regarding ‘‘our national
pedagogical task toward the Mohammedan subjects of the Dutch state’’ and the need to
address the ‘‘great questions of ‘East and West’ that our people have had put before
them.’’^46 In Hurgronje’s writing, ‘‘national mission work’’ and ‘‘Christian mission work’’
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