Samuel Lyde

Samuel Lyde (1825–1860) was an English writer and Church of England missionary who worked in Syria in the 1850s and wrote a pioneering book on the Alawite sect. In 1856, he sparked months of anti-Christian rioting in Ottoman Palestine when, during a visit there, he killed a beggar.

Lyde was born in 1825. He obtained a degree in 1848 after studying at Jesus College, Cambridge and in 1851 he was awarded an M.A, took holy orders as a clergyman of the Church of England and became employed as a fellow of Jesus College. Poor health, according to Lyde, prevented him from "exercising the duties of his profession in England, at least during the winter months" and, therefore, in the winter of 1850/1851 he made "the usual tour" of Egypt and Syria. While on the "tour", he decided, because of his health, to settle permanently in Syria, then a part of the Ottoman Empire. The British consul in Beirut suggested to him that he could occupy his time by working as a missionary to the Alawites, also known as Nusayris, a secretive mountain sect who later provided two of modern Syria's leaders: Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez al-Assad.

Lyde was persuaded by the idea. From 1853 to 1859, he lived among the Alawite community of the Kalbiyya district, and established a mission and school in Bhamra, a village overlooking the Mediterranean port of Latakia. However, he later wrote that living among them convinced him that the Alawites fulfilled St Paul's description of the heathen: "filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness".

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