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

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

Peter Hill
Our Price:  £13.99
List Price:  £20.00
Saving Of:  30%

Availability:  

  

In stock

Author:  Peter Hill
Condition:  New
Format:  Paperback
Pages:  368
Publisher:  Oneworld Publications
Year:  2024
ISBN:  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.

You may also like
The End of Modern History in the Middle East
Bernard Lewis
Condition: New
£16.95   £14.95

Discusses the future of the Middle East in our new, post-imperialist era. For each and every country and for the region as a whole, this explains, there is a range of alternative futures: at one end, cooperation and progress; at the other, a vicious circle of poverty and ignorance.


Connected in Cairo: Growing Up Cosmopolitan in the Modern Middle East
Condition: New
£16.95   £5.99

The Makers of the Modern Middle East - Second Edition
Robert McNamara, Andrew Mango, T. G. Fraser
Condition: New
£37.50   £12.99

A century ago, as World War I got underway, the Middle East was dominated, as it had been for centuries, by the Ottoman Empire. This revised edition traces those changes and the ensuing history of the region through the rest of the twentieth century. It helps readers to understand its history and the way it affects present-day events.