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The Journey of Hovannes Avetaranian: A Quest for Self-Determination at the End of Empire (1861-1919)

Mehmed Şükrü, an Ottoman subject, born into a Muslim family in a small village near Erzurum in 1861, trained as a man of religion chose to convert into Protestant Christianity at the age of 24, adopting a rather ambitious name Hovannes Avetaranian,  – John the Harbinger – transgressed almost all fundamental socio-cultural and political boundaries, that became the norms of a world of nation-states that emerged during his lifetime. From his birth until his death at a hospital in Wiesbaden in 1919, Avetaranian crossed many borders either to save his own life, or the ‘souls of others’ His journey took him from Erzurum to Tbilisi and Yerevan to places across Asia and Europe, to Kashgar, Berlin, Plovdiv and Potsdam among many others. Yet, more significantly, he crossed borders that are thought to be legally sanctioned and primordially conditioned, thus deemed undisputable, let alone challengeable.  Not only did Avetaranian take the rare and dangerous decision to convert out of Islam, breaching the deadly Apostasy law as an Imam, but he also became a prominent missionary, leading the “Mission to the Muslims,” for the German Orient-Missions with the support and encouragement of his friend, the legendary Johannes Lepsius. Taking Avetaranian’s life and works into the focus of my second book project, I want to investigate the intellectual, socio-political and religious mobilities that emerged in the late Ottoman Empire since the second half of nineteenth century. I argue that the encounters between local communities, evangelical missionaries and the modernizing Ottoman state created webs of connections that not only became conducive to creation of new subjectivities with identity, social, and political demands within their own locality, but also enabled them to imagine, experience and even transform socio-political spaces beyond their immediate environment. The dual workings of these encounters have either been forgotten like Avetaranian himself, or overlooked; and when remembered, reduced to binary categories of native versus foreign, ‘European’ versus ‘Oriental’, proselytizer versus proselytized, Muslim versus Christian, colonizer versus colonized, and successful versus failed. In so doing, such binaries fail to capture the agency of actors, the fluidity of ideas, the changing character of identities and the porosity of structures that made such engagements mutually cognizant, vibrant, and transformative. In my project I will study Avetaranian’s journey through his views on the world, his curiosity and soul-searching, self-proselytization and conversion, his missionary life from the Kashgar Mountains in China to Potsdam in Germany as a of the trajectory of a critical, dissenting and emancipatory man of the modern world that emerged during his life time.