eBook - ePub

Prophet of Reason

Name: Prophet of Reason
ISBN: 9780861547371

Science, Religion and the Origins of the Modern Middle East

Peter Hill,

368 pages
English
ePUB (mobile friendly)
Available on iOS & Android

eBook - ePub

Prophet of Reason

Science, Religion and the Origins of the Modern Middle East

Peter Hill,

About this book

'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.

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Yes, you can access Prophet of Reason by Peter Hill in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Theology & Religion & Middle Eastern History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.