THE Christian Bab Tuma quarter in Damascus was razed to the ground in July 1860, and something like 10,000 Christians were massacred. A similar terrifying number had been killed in the area of Mount Lebanon to the west and north-west, where fierce antagonism between Druze and Christian Maronites had erupted at the end of May. In Damascus, Muslims of various parties and clans joined Druze in the carnage.
The position of the Ottoman Empire or its local representatives was judged by Western powers — France, above all — to have been either passively or, at some levels, actively hostile to the Christians. A large expeditionary force was dispatched to make sure that Fuad Pasha, the reform-minded Ottoman statesman, later Grand Vizier, restored order.
The most personal account of those events was written in Arabic by one of the most intriguing Near Eastern figures of the 19th century, Mikha’il Mishaqa (1800-88). Born a Greek Catholic, he went through a long period of scepticism and doubt about his Church and about faith itself as he navigated a determined course of self-education in mathematics, science, and religious and philosophical inquiry. Above all, he pursued and committed himself to the idea of reason, and unwaveringly and, in some ways, surprisingly held to it when he returned to full-strength Christian belief in the shape of Evangelical Protestantism.
Peter Hill, assistant professor at Northumbria University and a specialist in the 19th-century Arab world, has written an intellectual biography of Mishaqa which is not only a rewardingly well-written account of a striking Arab personality, but a way into documenting changing patterns of community, sectarianism, revivalism, secularity, and the impact of scientific inquiry across the region known variously as the Levant, the Near East, and the Middle East.
alamyMikha’il Mishaqa, Greek Catholic who became an Evangelical
Mishaqa was the son of a father in the administrative and financial service of the Emir of Mount Lebanon. Through an uncle, he was able to travel to Damietta in Egypt and there encountered its Christian community of merchants and others who delighted in getting to grips with luminaries of the Enlightenment, both scientific and philosophical. His early interest in astrology and astronomy was overtaken by fascination with the sceptics and deists Voltaire and the Comte de Volnay. Reason, it seemed, was the polar opposite of religion. He ended up, in his own words, “despising all religions”, though culturally continuing as a Greek Catholic Christian.
He would be a silk merchant, a chancellor to emirs, a banker and moneylender, and a medical practitioner. In 1835, now living in Damascus, he married. In 1842, he obtained a position as dragoman at the British consulate. But it was contact with the writings and ministry of Protestant missionaries, notably the Revd Eli Smith, late of Yale and Andover, that led in 1848 to his outright profession of Evangelical faith, which he pugnaciously asserted in tracts, as well as in polemical correspondence, not least with his Greek Catholic Patriarch, Maximus III Mazlum, whose bête noire he thenceforward became.
Hill uses Mishaqa’s remarkable trajectory, with its many surprises and ambiguities, as a stimulus to see the Near or Middle East of his long lifetime in all its evolving complexity. That complexity, he argues, needs to be weighed if the region today, as full of puzzles and tragedies now as then, is to be truly understood.
The Rt Revd Michael Lewis is a former Bishop in Cyprus & the Gulf and Primate of the Province of the Episcopal Church in Jerusalem and the Middle East.
Prophet of Reason: Science, religion and the origins of the modern Middle East
Peter Hill
One World Academic £20
(978-0-86154-736-4)
Church Times Bookshop £18