This paper examines the role of medical knowledge in discussions of religious scepticism and materialism, by two medically trained Syrian Christian writers of the mid-nineteenth century. These writers’ professional medical knowledge was deployed to counter sceptical and materialist arguments and reaffirm their religious faith, but in ways which radically shifted the ground on which religious debate was conducted. The Damascene Mikha’il Mishaqa (1800-1888) was raised at the court of Emir Bashir Shihabi of Mount Lebanon and Greek Catholic circles, in which he received an informal education in medicine and began practising as a physician. He later received a newer style of medical training at the Egyptian government’s medical school in Cairo; read many of the medical translations made there; and had contact with American Protestant missionary doctors around the time of his conversion to Protestantism in 1849. In an 1853 tract directed against religious scepticism, he used medical examples as well as ones drawn from other natural sciences and mathematics to demonstrate the weakness of human reason and the necessity of a divine revelation. In his little-known, unpublished correspondence with American missionary Eli Smith, he explained the medical reasoning behind these arguments more fully, shedding light on his views on both the consistency of natural laws and the action of medicinal cures on the body. The Aleppine Greek Catholic Fransis Marrash (1836-1873) was apprenticed to the Protestant missionary doctor John Wortabet, and later studied medicine in Paris. In his 1865 utopian narrative and a posthumously published anti-Darwinist tract, he used his medical knowledge to draw analogies between the human and natural worlds, and to grapple with the problems posed by materialist doctrines. He ultimately arrived at a rejection of materialism in favour of religious faith, based partly on scientific reasoning. These arguments fit within a wider interest in medicine and the natural sciences in the Aleppine Christian circle to which Marrash belonged. Both Mishaqa and Marrash, while reaffirming their religious faith through their use of medical and scientific knowledge, took religious discourse into a very different terrain to that of earlier religious polemics, which focussed far more on issues of doctrine and revelation. The possibilities of religious scepticism and materialism as coherent positions were now acknowledged, and the relevance of medico-scientific evidence for judging religious truths was accepted. These debates thus form part of the prehistory of the better-known discussions of Darwinism and Büchnerian materialism in the later nineteenth century.

A disproportionate number of Arab litterateurs in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire during the long 19th century obtained medical training. These litterateurs wrote, not only on health issues, but also on a variety of socio-cultural topics such as women, urban planning, history and even the theatre. This blend between medical training and writing raises questions regarding these litterateurs’ perception of their role in society and on the relationship between education, society and culture during this period. The long 19th century was a period of highly accelerated literary production in Arabic, known as the Arabic nahda. The majority of this production, albeit not exclusively, took place in the urban centers of the regions of Egypt and greater Syria. New opportunities to learn, the introduction of new disciplines, a growing number of printing presses and the start of mass production of Arabic texts produced a new literate class with modernizing aspirations. This period also saw a growth in the medical profession and of steps taken towards a standardization of medical knowledge: with the first modern faculties of medicine established in 1827 in Cairo and Istanbul and then in 1867 and 1883 in Beirut. While not all who studied in these faculties graduated or practiced medicine, many published a variety of texts that include articles, books, essays and translations. This paper explores these texts and their writers. I argue that individuals during this time felt that medical training not only had the potential to benefit them personally but also perceived themselves and the medical discipline as an important component of the nahda and its modernizing project. As such, they had both a responsibility and the qualifications to cure not only the individual body but social body of Arab society. They were also viewed as holding this capacity by their readers. These medically trained literatures perceived themselves to be part of a new educated middle-class with a civilizing mission toward the lower classes and their society as a whole.