Reason and Religion in Ottoman Syria

The polarity between secularism and religious identities is often seen as defining the modern Middle East. But where did it come from? My project traces the intertwined roots of both secular and religious revivalist currents back into the Arab-Ottoman world of the first half of the nineteenth century. Through a close microhistorical study of one remarkable individual, it will reveal long-neglected debates over the proper relationship between religious faith and 'reason', or critical thought, as well as the little-known communities and networks of Arab literati who took part in them. These debates later went on to shape both the secular-leaning Arab 'revival' or Nahda, and the emergence of both Salafist and Christian revivalisms in the Middle East.

Mikha'il Mishaqa was raised as a Catholic at the court of the ruler of Mount Lebanon. But at the age of eighteen he lost faith in all revealed religion after encountering the first ever Arabic translations of writings of the European Enlightenment. He would spend the next quarter-century as a deist and sceptic, during which time he educated himself in a polymathic range of knowledge and played a major, behind-the-scenes role in the complex, often violent local political scene. In his forties, however, he read Protestant tracts translated into Arabic by American missionaries: initially sceptical, he became persuaded of their truth, and re-emerged as a pamphleteering defender of his newly-adopted Evangelical faith. His personal trajectory, and the voluminous archive of manuscripts, printed tracts, and correspondence he left behind, provides a unique entry-point into a wider set of Arabic-speaking networks who were avidly debating the relationship between faith and reason.

Through a detailed, microhistorical account of Mishaqa's own conversions and the varied social milieux through which he moved, my study will uncover both the issues at stake in such debates and the social and political factors which shaped them, in a period of growing European influence and Ottoman state centralisation. Taking inspiration from the work of microhistorians of faith and doubt in early modern Europe, this project will combine the archival methods of social and cultural history with a focus on textual close reading and the resonances of 'keywords'. Poised between manuscript and print cultures, clerical and lay authority, the early modern and colonial modernity, Mikha'il Mishaqa and his interlocutors partook of a shift towards the rationalisation of religious belief which would ultimately underpin both secularist and religious revivalist traditions in the Arab world. An account of their history has the potential to inform, not just historians, but those thinking through the respective roles of religion and critical thought in the Arab world of today.