Ottoman History Podcast - Religion, Science, and an Arab Renaissance Man

Episode Date: September 16, 2024

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.    « Click for More »

This is the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Matthew Gazarian, here to talk about science, faith, and community in Greater Syria and Lebanon across the 19th century during the era of cultural and intellectual enlightenment often called the Nahdta. To do that I'll be speaking with Peter Hill, Assistant Professor of History at Northumbria University in Newcastle in England. And we'll be talking today about these contradictory tendencies of the Nahda that at once opened up, but also foreclosed the possibility of new kinds of communal relations among faith groups in the region. Looking at the 19th century in the Arab world, at least, it can be read in two quite different and contradictory ways. On the one hand, there's, I suppose, the idea,

the possibility of a more secular kind of society. On the other hand, there's these movements which are really out to affirm religious identity and draw quite sharp boundaries around and between religious communities. How do these two tendencies interact? How do they manage to happen alongside each other? So we'll talk today about the life and thought of a single man, Mikhail Mishaka. The respected, wealthy man of reputation for learning, a medical doctor, but also a money lender and merchant,

US vice consul. Mishaka's born to relative wealth and privilege and he's able to seek an education and embrace the developing science and rationality of his time. For a while things don't change very much and he's kind of living his best life. But that certainty disappears quickly with the violence and changes of his lifetime. What he calls the taqallubat ad-dahr, the vicissitudes of time, the instabilities of the world. And those changes are not only intellectual and cultural, but also very viscerally felt by Mishaka himself.

He's beaten on the head with an axe. He loses his sense of taste and smell. So we'll talk today about Mishaka's life and thought and the changes in the world, Mount Lebanon of Greater Syria, the Middle East during his time. We'll also talk a little bit about the advantages and the drawbacks of trying to do such a study that focuses on an individual life. How can you take this, you know, wacky guy and make any general arguments on the basis of that about the society as such?

Could you set the stage for us a little bit? Who is this man and what is the world he inhabits? Right, so Michael Mishoka is born in 1800. He grows up at the court of the Emir of Mount Lebanon, Bashir Sheherbi, so in this mountainous, quite distinctive region of the Ottoman Empire. And he's from a wealthy Christian family. His father is the banker to the Emir, he's very closely connected to the court and basically his life then unfolds in response to a series of quite dramatic changes in that world through the rest of the 19th century. He lives through most of the century until 1888 when he dies. So the

Sheherbi Emirate that he grew up in is no longer there after 1842. It's replaced by a very different system of politics in Mount Lebanon and, you know, heavy involvement of European powers as well as of the kind of reforming Ottoman state. And his life changes through that process as well. He plays a lot of different roles in his life. He's a merchant, he's a banker, he's an advisor to the local rulers, he gets involved in diplomatic circles, he becomes a polymath and writes a whole range of different kind of disciplines of knowledge, mathematics, the music, he writes his autobiography. But the part of his life that I'm really interested in in the book principally is his changes of belief, so religion and wider kind of worldview.

So Mikhail Mishukha is the son of this Christian family in the emirate of the Shahabi emirs in Mount Lebanon. And he lives to see the ebb and flow of many overlapping political powers in this region, the Shahabi emirs, the Ottomans, Egyptians, European states and so on, but you're interested in following changes in his beliefs. So where does that story actually begin? So in a sense, the story starts not long before his 13th birthday in Deir el-Qamar, the capital of the Mount Lebanon Emirate, when there's a solar eclipse and this is followed a few days later by a big snowstorm which is very dramatic and isolates villages and the

snow and kills people and destroys crops and so on. And along with a lot of other people in the mountain he gives this an astrological interpretation. So the eclipse has predicted the snowstorm. And so that's his first way of trying to understand, I guess, the instabilities, the insecurities of the world around him. But he doesn't stop there. So, you know, a few years later, we find him in the port city of Damietta in the Dumyat, in the Nile Delta in Egypt. And here he encounters a group of people who've been translating European scientific works and enlightenment writings into Arabic for the first time. And through reading these, he comes to reject not only things like astrology and magic, but also religion as such. So as an adolescent

then, Mikhail Mishaka goes to this port city of Damietta in Egypt and he's learning about trade and parts of the family business but while he's there he also reads translations into Arabic of Enlightenment thought and he begins to question his religious beliefs and adopt a sort of scientific, rational worldview. He goes back to Mount Lebanon, and then what happens? Then again, he goes back to the court of Bashar al-Habib, and that's still there. And then he, you know, for a while,

things don't change very much, and he's kind of living his best life. I mean, you know, he's quite powerful, he's wealthy, he's still quite young, he's respected, he's learning a lot of different forms of knowledge and science and so on. But then what happens is the Egyptian army of Mehmed Ali, the governor of Egypt, invade and occupy Syria. And this starts off a whole series of quite rapid and dramatic changes through the 1830s

and 40s. And there's a number of rebellions against him, the Ottomans want to kick him out, but there's a whole set of sort of negotiations. And what it does is to draw European powers much more heavily into the internal politics of Syria, and particularly of Mount Lebanon. And in 1840, there's a military intervention by not only the Ottomans, but their European allies, the British and the Austrians, along with a rebellion in Mount Lebanon, and this kicks out the Egyptians, but it also leads quite quickly to the start of a power contest among different local groups, the most sort of famous consequences of which is sectarian violence

between Maronite and Druze communities in the mountain in 1841. And the Mount Lebanon Emirate of the Sheherbes goes in the process and is replaced by a different sort of setup based on power sharing between Maronite and Druze communities under the auspices of the Europeans as well as the Ottoman state. So there's this rather particular sort of set of changes. So do sort of set of changes. So do these particular set of changes affect his faith? Well this is one of the interesting questions. He doesn't explicitly say that it does. But I don't think it's a coincidence that it's at this point in the 1840s that he starts

being interested in religion again. I think he starts to view his deist, skeptical, science-based position as somewhat insufficient because these changes were unexpected and they're very shocking. One of his brothers is killed, another one is wounded, the family flee to him in Damascus and I think that through this process he's beginning to think, well I thought I had it sed, perhaps back in the 1820s, I understood the local politics, I understood the natural worlds, I had got a handle on these, what he calls the to call a better to the vicissitudes of time, the instabilities of the world, he

thought he understood them. Now suddenly, there's a new set of vicissitudes that he doesn't understand. And his response is to look for a different form of knowledge, a different form of truth. So he's on this quest to find a form of truth that he can sort of rely on. And how does this search for truth lead him to embrace Protestantism? Yeah. Mikhail Meshok at some point in the 1840s becomes intellectually interested in religion again through reading this book by Alexander Keith and also through conversations

with the American missionaries. He's becoming quite close friends from 1844 onwards with Eli Smith, who's the main American missionary in Beirut, a Protestant mission there. And one of the major sources for this period of his life is the very frequent correspondence that he wrote back and forth with Smith between Beirut and Damascus, which is in Harvard. So for these reasons, he's becoming interested in Protestantism specifically. And at some point, I think he's intellectually convinced for his own sort of inner self that Protestantism is the most defensible, rational form of religion. So there's this interesting intellectual and spiritual trajectory here from faith to reason and back again with a kind of synthesis of faith and

reason through Protestantism. But ultimately, this is coming from the writings of a single man who's relatively well off, born into a prosperous Christian family in Mount Lebanon. So to what extent can this one life of relative privilege tell us about broader trends and changes in the region and in the world at this time? Obviously, I'm going to argue that it does, that it is important for those questions, but it's true that Mishoka is quite an eccentric character. And this is, I suppose, the question of any sort of micro-historical attempt

to answer these kinds of problems, that how can you take this wacky guy and make any general arguments on the basis of that about the society as such. I mean, the problem in a sense that I think Meshoka's story speaks to is that looking at the 19th century in the Arab world, at least, it can be read in two quite different and contradictory ways. On the one hand, there's, I suppose, the idea, the possibility of a more

secular kind of society. On the other hand, there's these movements which are really out to affirm religious identity and draw quite sharp boundaries around and between religious communities. On the one hand, the beginnings of an interest in modern style science, the idea of a secular society, the whole sort of Arab Nathla movement, which I've worked on myself, the idea that you can discuss with people of different religions in terms of things like civilization and society, without making that dependent on religious belief necessarily.

So you can trace that sort of tradition back to 19th century origins. On the other hand, you can also, as people like Osama Mactasee have done, trace the origins of sectarian violence and sectarian conflict of the modern kind, to the 19th century, and specifically to Mount Lebanon and Damascus and the places that Meshach is living in. Or, you know, you can read histories the 19th century and specifically to Mount Lebanon and Damascus and the places that we shockers living or You know you can read histories that are tracing back things like the early Salafi movement religious Revivalism and we could also talk about Christian revivalist movements and the question then which is one that to some amateurs even

Has raised you know, it's not it's not necessarily original to me is how do these two tendencies interact? How do they manage to happen alongside each other if they're so contradictory? Or what's the relationship between them? So as I would see it, the idea of secularity, in a rather broad and fuzzy sense, and the idea of sort of religious identitarianism of bounded religious identities on the other. And I guess the interesting thing then about Meshoka is that he belongs to the history of both of these tendencies in a way that may kind of confound our expectations, because, you know, he takes science and reason in particular very seriously. On the other hand, he also takes religion and religious belief very seriously. And he's debating and arguing his way

between these things from quite an early stage in the 19th century, when it's not so common to do that. Could you give an example? There's a nice little sort of vignette in Jurgis Edan's book. So Jurgis Edan is one of the people who, I suppose, invent the idea of the Arab Nahda. Looking back from the early 20th century to the 19th century, saying there has been this great sort of revival of Arabic culture. And for him, it's all about things like science and progress. And he goes to meet Michal Meshokha in Damascus towards the very end of Michal Meshokha's life. And he sees him in some ways as someone to admire, I think. This is somebody who's, you know, intensely interested in things like science

and reason and has this great sort of faith in his own abilities to think his way to the end of any problem. But on the other hand, he's also a bit of a kind of old fashioned character, because he's there in his house in Damascus in the sort of, you you know old world turban and robes and so on and rather unlike the the forms of dress that are becoming fashionable in Beirut but also he's somebody that takes religion extremely seriously as Zayden writes in his book most of what he published in his lifetime was religious controversy it wasn't about science or rationalism without religion, the kinds of things that Zaydan himself is more interested in. So he doesn't quite fit in that version of the Nahtta, I suppose. He's a precursor, but a rather awkward one. And to make him

fit, you have to sort of disregard some of these other aspects of his identity. So in the context of the Arab Notta, Mikhail Mishaka occupies a sort of in-between position at the moment of transition and ideas about faith and reason. But a transition between what and what? What exactly is changing about ideas of religion at this time? Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, and I should preface this by saying, yeah, I'm very much drawing on the work that has been done on this, the work of people like James Green or L.A. de Belger or Heather Sharkey and so on. But that aside, the way that I think of it is if you take two different images, as it were, of how different religious traditions interact. And one of them is the religious processions that you used to get in a city like Damascus

when there was plague or a drought or another kind of great calamity. And you had in these processions, Muslims, Christians and Jews all setting off to do the procession together in order. Muslims went first. This is a hierarchical religious order, but it's also a shared one.

There is a sense in which people participate in the sacred in shared ways, rather than only as distinct religious groups and communities. And then you look at the kinds of religious classification that you're getting of different religions coming through in say writings of the missionaries or orientalists writing about Syria from the 1840s onwards but also in a sense in the kind of new style millet regime of the Ottoman state that

the tons of matters producing the idea that there are these separate modular religions that are the same kind of thing, and they're all distinct, and they all have a set of boundaries, and a rather similar kind of internal structure that they have a, you know, a holy book and a sort of religious hierarchy. And then that they relate individually and separately to the state or to each other or to other entities. Again, these are images. But if you can think about the distinction between those images as the kind of transition that is being operated, at least in some people's minds, as a project, it's not necessarily

successful. I mean, not all of these shared forms of, you know, religiosity are in fact unpicked. And the idea of hierarchy isn't unpicked either. But the idea of, you know, these religious communities as, as it were, separate, but equal, is something that a lot of people are invested in some Ottoman bureaucrats, some of the religious leaders themselves, some of the European diplomats who are trying to influence things like the conditions of religious conversion. And I think that you can see this in a slightly kind of fuzzier way than the stuff I was talking about earlier,

because we're now outside of the realm of simply, you know, intellectual debate about religion. But you can see this as relating to that sort of rationalistic way of thinking that these religions have to be understood in a way that prevents overlaps and prevents vagueness. So once Mishaka is officially a member of the Protestant Church, he comes to reckon with the consequences of this new order of more strictly bounded and often more antagonistic religious groups. He's present in Damascus in 1860 when serious violence erupts. Yeah, yeah. And he experiences this violence. I mean, he's quite lucky to escape alive. He's

badly beaten and, you know, is partially paralyzed for some time. And in fact, a detail that's that's not in many of the public accounts is he because he's beaten on the head with an axe, he loses his sense of taste and smell. He can't eat meat or spicy food for some time afterwards, because they taste disgusting. So that it really has a very, very kind of profound effect on him, you know, physically and personally. His family also survived, but again, some of them are attacked, they're in danger.

People come and attack his house in Damascus. The crowd of Muslims who were enraged against Christians, particularly wealthy ones like himself, he flees with two small children and other members of the family go off in different directions. It's this very kind of chaotic and traumatic moment. Does it shake his faith? Does he question his religion? Not really. I mean, what he tries to do after 1860 is to reconstitute what he had before.

So to rebuild his life on the pattern of what it was, which is as a respected, wealthy man of reputation as for learning, a medical doctor, but also a money lender and merchant, US vice consul, so diplomatic representative for the United States in Damascus, a man of influence and lots of different contacts. And you know, so he reconstitutes himself as that successfully. Afterwards, his house is rebuilt, he gets compensation from the Ottoman state. And he continues to live the rest of his life as a Protestant until he dies in 1888. But I mean, his account of 1860 is probably the the most detailed and eyewitness account that we have. And he tells the

story in different versions at different times. But there's a lot of it, for instance, in Eugene Rogan's book that also just came out recently, the Damascus events. I mean, a lot of this is told through Mashaka's relation of the 1860 events, because it's such a kind of vivid and compelling accounts of it. But one thing that it does affect to some extent is his views of sectarianism or the kinds of identification politically that one should have and how that relates to religion. And again, you know, Eugene Rogan has written about this in the moment of 1860 itself. He's appealing to the US authorities and other Christians to come and save the Christians of Damascus. So a sectarian identification of that kind. By the time he's writing his

memoirs in the 1870s, he's no longer viewing things quite that way. He's loyal to the Ottoman state as a kind of order that encompasses different religions. He doesn't think that Christians should be seeking those affiliations to outside powers that can make things dangerous for them. But again, those ideas were ones that he had kind of worked through already. Because in 1841, similarly, when he writes about 1841 in the East of the moment, his family's just been attacked as Christians by Druze in Deir el-Kamr. He writes in a very similar way to other Christian writers who are very much identifying with Christian defeats or victories over the Druze in the 1840s. But when he comes to write about those events later in his memoirs, and also when he's writing as a Protestant, he's very much

against the idea of the clergy meddling in politics and creating these allegiances outside of the shared community of other Syrians and Ottoman subjects, because that can endanger, you know, Christians. And that's part of the problem. And he lives the rest of his life, you know, some of it in semi retirement, which may well have been affected by the fact that he had, you know, he'd been badly injured in 1860. And around the time he writes his memoirs in 1873, he passes on most of his business to his sons. He writes his will, but he's still a Protestant and his children inherited that from him as well.

So we have this intellectual biography of Mikhail Mishaka, but biography and intellectual history are both fields that lend themselves to this illusion of the individual life being traceable at all, or at least traceable without accounting for the many lives around it that made it possible. So who's missing here from this story? There's rather little, and it's one of my regrets about the book, that there is so little about the women in the story that one could find from the sources that I was

able to find and therefore they're rather absent but there is a certain amount about Elizabeth or her name much of her his wife she remained a Catholic and this was a bit of a bone of contention I think and she doesn't like the idea of him converting and doesn't become a Protestant herself and there's a bit of contention over their son, the eldest son, Nassif, who, well, Micheal says to Eli Smith, the missionary, his Protestant friend, she's trying to kind of turn him

against me and against Protestantism. So I need to get him away from his mother and send him to the missionary school instead. But yeah, there's, I mean, there's other, a lot of this came from the family archival material, because you don't really find a lot of this came from the family archival material. Because you don't really find a lot of these sort of, you know, personal family references and particularly references to the women in the story and the more public facing accounts

that Michal Shokker left. But in these sort of private notes that he kept on the fly leaves of a book or in other things that are destined really for the family, you can find some of this sort of information. The names of the midwives who delivered their children, for instance, you don't find that kind of detail in his memoirs that were written for a wider group of people. Even the, you know, the Christian name of his wife, Elizabeth, a baptismal name, he doesn't mention it in any of these in any of these public facing accounts because

she was called Khernam Mashaka. I mean you know it's a sort of honorific meaning lady but it seemed to be the name that she had taken on within the family as well because it's on her tomb. Professor Peter Hill, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks very much. It's been a pleasure. For those of you who want to find out more, you can visit our website, OttomanHistoryPodcast.com, where we will post a bibliography on this and many other topics on Ottoman history. Until next time. The neighborhood still can't do anything to stop this killing