Prophet of Reason: Science, Religion and the Origins of the Modern Middle East

A portrait of Enlightenment science, religious identity and empire in the making of the modern Middle Eastern world ''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
• | Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• | Publication Date: May 02, 2024
• | Number of Pages:
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• | Binding: Paperback / softback
• | ISBN-13: 9780861547364
• | ISBN-10: 0861547365