Religion, Science, and an Arab Renaissance Man

with Peter Hill

hosted by Matthew Ghazarian

| Across the 19th century Arab East, or Mashriq, there were two simultaneous but seemingly contradictory trends afoot. On the one hand, new ways of understanding religion, science, and community, often associated with the intellectual 'revival' of the Arab Nahda, ushered in new forms of thought and more fluid subjectivities. On the other hand, movements emerged to reinscribe, intensify, and uphold stricter communal boundaries between religious groups. How did these two trends coexist? The life and thought of Mikha'il Mishaqa (1800-1888) offer some answers. Mishaqa was a doctor, merchant, moneylender, and writer who was raised in Greek Catholicism, lost his faith, regained it, and then converted to Protestantism. Through his many-sided life, his voluminous writings, and his obstinate commitment to 'reason', Mishaqa offers an example of how a single life could integrate these seemingly contradictory trends of 19th century Arab East.   

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Across the 19th century Arab East, or Mashriq, there were two simultaneous but seemingly contradictory trends afoot. On the one hand, new ways of understanding religion, science, and community, often associated with the intellectual 'revival' of the Arab Nahda, ushered in new forms of thought and more fluid subjectivities. On the other hand, movements emerged to reinscribe, intensify, and uphold stricter communal boundaries between religious groups. How did these two trends coexist? The life and thought of Mikha'il Mishaqa (1800-1888) offer some answers. Mishaqa was a doctor, merchant, moneylender, and writer who was raised in Greek Catholicism, lost his faith, regained it, and then converted to Protestantism. Through his many-sided life, his voluminous writings, and his obstinate commitment to 'reason', Mishaqa offers an example of how a single life could integrate these seemingly contradictory trends of 19th century Arab East.    

Contributor Bios

Peter Hill is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanites in Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne in the UK. He works on the modern Middle East, specialising in the Arab world in the long nineteenth century. His research focuses on political thought and practice, the politics of religion, and translation and intercultural exchanges. He also has a strong interest in comparative and global history.

Matthew Ghazarian is a postdoctoral associate in the Program on Agrarian Studies at Yale University. His research and teaching focus on environmental history, political economy, and communal conflict in the Ottoman Empire and the South Caucasus. Ghazarian’s current project examines the links between material conditions - like debt, drought, and hunger - and widening communal divides in the late Ottoman Empire.

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Credits

Episode No. 568

Release Date: 16 September 2024
Recording location: Tekke Yokuşu Studio in Istanbul

Sound production by Matthew Ghazarian

Music: Lili Labassi, "Mazal Haye Mazal"

Images, bibliography, and captions courtesy of Peter Hill.

Special thanks to Ozan Karakaş for use of the Tekke Yokuşu Studio

Further Listening

	Ussama Makdisi	200 9/12/2015	Rethinking Sectarianism in the Middle East
	Peter Hill	310 3/31/17	The Nahda and the Translators of Damietta
	Ellen Fleischmann & Christine Lindner	404 3/1/19	WWI in the Syrian and Lebanese Diaspora
	Rana Issa	347 2/16/18	The Bible and Modern Standard Arabic
	Lily Pearl Balloffet	352 3/16/18	The Argentine Mahjar

Images

Mikha'il Mishaqa, 1800-1888.



A Muslim prayer against plague, c. 1600 CE from Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Ms. Gabelentz 44, ff65v-66r.





The cover of one of Mishaqa's letters to Eli Smith. from the Presbyterian Historical Society.



Interior of a house in Damascus, c. 1900. Library of Congress, Photochrom Print Collection from the Library of Congress.

Select Bibliography

Selim Deringil, Conversion and Apostasy in the Late Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Marwa Elshakry, Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

James Grehan, Twilight of the Saints: Everyday Religion in Ottoman Syria and Palestine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

Bernard Heyberger, Hindiyya, Mystic and Criminal, 1720-1798: A Political and Religious Crisis in Lebanon, trans. Renée Champion (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2013).

Ussama Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).

Ussama Makdisi, Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019).

Anais Massot, ‘Ottoman Damascus during the Tanzimat: The New Visibility of Religious Distinctions’, in Modernity, Minority, and the Public Sphere: Jews and Christians in the Middle East (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 155–84.

Eugene Rogan, The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East (New York: Basic Books, 2024).

Heather J. Sharkey, A History of Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
See also The Plague Barber for more sources on the plague in Damietta.