Reason and religion in Ottoman Syria

The project is centred around a close microhistorical study of one remarkable individual, Mikha’il Mishaqa (1800-1888). He was raised as a Catholic in Mount Lebanon, but in his youth became a deist and sceptic. After playing important roles in the rapidly changing politics of Ottoman Syria, Mishaqa converted to Protestantism in 1848, 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 the changing religious politics of Ottoman Syria, and wider debates around the roles of religion and reason in the Middle East.

Another strand of the project moves out from Mishaqa to examine the transformation of the role and status of religion in the Arab-Ottoman world over the long nineteenth century. This period saw the beginnings of a secular tradition of critical thinking in Arabic, often associated with the ‘Nahda’ or cultural ‘revival’. Yet it also saw the origins of modern sectarian politics – which Mishaqa himself, notably, experienced in the Damascus violence of 1860 – and of religious revivalist movements, Christian and Muslim. The project examines the intertwined roots of these two apparently opposed phenomena.

A further strand aims to bring these historical investigations into dialogue with contemporary debates over religion and critical thinking in the Arab world. Polarities between religious identity and secularism continue to shape Arab politics, society, and culture. The project aims to stimulate a conversation between such debates and a reconsideration of the entangled historical origins of the secular and religious revivalist traditions.