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

'An outstanding intellectual biography.' Eugene RoganWINNER OF THE BRITISH-KUWAIT FRIENDSHIP SOCIETY BOOK PRIZEIn 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.