The story of the Arab Nahḍa (“Renaissance”) is dominated by the intellectual elite (Hourani 1962; Hill 2020). This paper, therefore, offers a microhistory of a relative nobody to shed light on the ordinary human experience and to illustrate how the commoner lived and learned, worked and worshiped during the long nineteenth century in late Ottoman Beirut. ʿAbdallah b. Qāsim Witwat was the oldest son of the first Druze convert to Protestantism. He received a missionary education, worked as a teacher and caster, expanded his intellectual horizons at learned societies, and practiced his Protestant faith until death. As a member of the American Protestant missionary circle and longtime congregant of the Syrian Ottoman Protestant community, Witwat was both a beneficiary of and contributor to the Arab Nahḍa. His life story echoes the experience of many men and women who navigated the transformational changes unfolding in Beirut. Religion, education, civil society, and culture are prevailing themes of the Nahḍa, and this deep history of an ordinary Protestant man illuminates how the prolonged moment of cultural revival, social reforms, and religious realignments played out at the ground level. This paper builds on recent scholarship of the early modern Middle East History that examines overlooked thinkers, the literate lives of the lower classes, and the foundational contributions of women to civil society (Zachs 2011; Lindner 2014; Sajdi 2013). Given then imbricated nature of socioeconomic and political relations during the Nahḍa between American Protestant missionaries and Ottoman Syrians (Lindner 2009; Womack 2019), it would be inaccurate to separate ʿAbdallah Witwat from the Protestant social and congregational landscape in Beirut. Missionary and church records constitute the extant archive and consequently inform this paper.