{"product_id":"9780861547364","title":"Prophet of Reason : Science, Religion and the Origins of the Modern Middle East by Peter Hill","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.\u003cbr\u003eBinding: Paperback \/ softback","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56295431111029,"sku":"9780861547364","price":20.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780861547364.jpg?v=1762768014","url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/products\/9780861547364","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}