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

Hill, Peter

 
9780861547364: Prophet of Reason: Science, Religion and the Origins of the Modern Middle East
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0861547365 ISBN 13: 9780861547364
Verlag: Oneworld Academic, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

'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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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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 (2020) and has published articles in Past & Present, the Journal of Arabic Literature, and Journal of Global History.

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Verlag
Oneworld Academic
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0861547365
ISBN 13 
9780861547364
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
345
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