Eugene Rogan and Peter Hill

Historians of the Middle East Professor Eugene Rogan and Dr Peter Hill discuss the momentous outbreak of disorder in the Middle East in 1860 and the life of the Evangelical Protestant Mikha’il Mishaqa, who barely escaped death in the ensuing massacres.

Rogan, professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the University of Oxford and author of The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914-1920, describes the 1860 massacre and destruction of the old Ottoman world in his new book The Damascus Events. The outbreak of disorder led to the massacre of thousands of Christians in Damascus. Rogan describes how reforms and the influence of the caravan trade had made Damascus a tolerant place until reforms began to advantage minority Christians at the expense of the Muslim majority.

Hill studied at the University of Oxford before going on to teach at Northumbria University Newcastle. In Prophet of Reason: Science, Religion and the Origins of the Modern Middle East, he traces the life of Mikha’il Mishaqa, who studied Newtonian science and the writings of Voltaire and Volney, first turning away from his Catholic religion before discovering Evangelical Protestantism. Hill says his polemics scandalised the community and he explains how he barely escaped death in the 1860s massacres. Hill looks at what people really believed in the 19th-century Middle East.