Description
By (author) Hill Peter
Short /annotation:
A portrait of Enlightenment science, religious identity and empire in the making of the modern Middle Eastern world
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”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.
Review quote:
”This accomplished study of religious change in 19th-century Syria… Hill includes illuminating excerpts from Mishaqa’s own religious tracts and the texts he was influenced by. Historians of the Middle East have plenty to gain from this.” Publishers Weekly
Review quote:
”An intellectual biography of Mishaqa which is not only a rewardingly well-written account of a striking Arab personality, but a way into documenting changing patterns of community, sectarianism, revivalism, secularity, and the impact of scientific inquiry across the region known variously as the Levant, the Near East, and the Middle East.” Church Times
Review quote:
”A masterful and captivating book that rescues one of the greatest thinkers of nineteenth-century Syria from obscurity. Mikha”il Mishaqa bursts from the pages as a three-dimensional character and a pioneer in the debates on secularism and religious freedom in the modern Arab world. An outstanding intellectual biography.” Eugene Rogan, author of The Arabs
Review quote:
”In this gripping new exploration of religion, reason, and cultural transformation, Peter Hill brilliantly recreates the many lives and worlds of an Arab renaissance man. Combining meticulous research with original, nuanced insight and a novelist’s eye for detail, Hill brings to life the nineteenth-century Middle East in all its richness. In the process, he reminds us that modernity has many origins and takes many forms.” Andrew Arsan, author of Interlopers of Empire
Review quote:
”Deeply researched and engagingly written, Prophet of Reason gives us the turbulent life of a remarkable individual… Peter Hill’s sympathetic and beautifully contextualised study is at once a gripping biography and an intellectual history of how religious faith and doubt, legacies of rational thinking both local and far-flung, and human networks—contentious and affectionate—were fluid shapers of a history we too often view as set in stone.” Marilyn Booth, Khalid bin Abdullah Al Saud Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World
Review quote:
”While most of the scholars writing about Syria in the nineteenth century speak about “sectarianism”, they barely take the religious beliefs and the communitarian belonging of individual actors
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