Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
Prophet of Reason : Science, Religion and the Origins of the Modern Middle East, Paperback / softback Book

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

Paperback / softback

Pre-Order

Description

'An outstanding intellectual biography.' Eugene RoganIn 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.

Information

£20.00

Pre-Order
Pre-Order
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information