Prophet of Reason: Science, Religion and the Origins of the Modern Middle East (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780861547364)

'An outstanding intellectual biography.' Eugene Rogan

In 1813, high in the Lebanese mountains, a thirteen-year-old boy watches a solar eclipse. Will it foretell a war, a plague, the death of a prince? Mikha'il Mishaqa's lifelong search for truth starts here. Soon he's reading Newtonian science and the radical ideas of Voltaire and Volney: he loses his religion, turning away from the Catholic Church. Thirty years later, as civil war rages in Syria, he finds a new faith - Evangelical Protestantism. His obstinate polemics scandalise his community. Then, in 1860, Mishaqa barely escapes death in the most notorious event in Damascus: a massacre of several thousand Christians. We are presented with a paradox: rational secularism and violent religious sectarianism grew up together.

By tracing Mishaqa's life through this tumultuous era, when empires jostled for control, Peter Hill answers the question: What did people in the Middle East actually believe? It's a world where one man could be a Jew, an Orthodox Christian and a Sunni Muslim in turn, and a German missionary might walk naked in the streets of Valletta.

Author: Peter Hill
ISBN-10: 0861547365
ISBN-13: 9780861547364
Publisher: Oneworld Academic
Language: English
Published: 06/11/2024
Pages: 368
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 9.22h x 6.08w x 1.12d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 05/27/2024