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

(Paperback)

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An eighteen-year-old reads Voltaire and Volney and loses his religion. Its 1818 in Ottoman Damietta and Muslims and Christians are questioning everything. Mikhail Mishaqa walks away from the Catholic Church. Thirty years later, in 1848, he announces his new faith: Evangelical Protestantism, scandalising his community and kicking off a battle of polemics. The world darkens. 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 came of age at the same time. By tracing Mishaqas life through this tumultuous era, where empires jostled for control, Peter Hill answers the question: What did people in the Middle East actually believe Its a world where one man could be a Sunni, Jew and Orthodox Christian in the span of his life and German missionaries walked naked in the streets of Valletta.

Reviews

'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

'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 novelists 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

'Deeply researched and engagingly written, Prophet of Reason gives us the turbulent life of a remarkable individual... Peter Hills 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 networkscontentious and affectionatewere 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

'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 as seriously as Peter Hill does with this original and emphatic biography of Mikha'il Mishaqa. Through Hill's approach, the life of this well-known figure of Ottoman Syria appears as an extraordinary and exemplary testimonyto the social and intellectual dynamics of the early Nahda.'Bernard Heyberger, author ofHindiyya, Mystic and Criminal, 1720-1798

'It has taken over 150 years for Mikhail Mishaqa to find his historian, and it is Peter Hill. Hill paints a riveting and transformative view of religion and its discontents in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire This much-needed study breathes new life into the field, and it offers a compelling and human account of the life and times of an Ottoman thinker who has remained thus far elusive to scholars This book will make readers think in completely new ways about Christianity, Islam and indeed the history of religion itself in the making of the modern Middle East.' John-Paul Ghobrial, author ofThe Whispers of Cities

'Prophet of Reason is an enthralling and impeccably researched account of the life of Mikhail Mishaqa, a man at the centre of the shifting religious and political movements of nineteenth-century Levant. PeterHill has produced a milestone of a book, laying bare Mishaqas only too human journey from faith to doubt and back again, all the while showing howthe beast ofmodernity in Ottoman Syria encompassed not just science and secularism but newly divisive religious identities.'Yorgos Dedes, author of The Ascensions of Felicity

Author Bio

Peter Hill is a historian of the modern Middle East, specialising in the Arab world in the long nineteenth century. He is the author of Utopia and Civilisation in the Arab Nahda and has published articles in Past & Present, the Journal of Arabic Literature, and Journal of Global History.