{"id":3512,"date":"2026-05-05T12:03:57","date_gmt":"2026-05-05T11:03:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hosting2.northumbria.ac.uk\/reason-religion-ottoman-syria\/?page_id=3512"},"modified":"2026-05-05T12:03:57","modified_gmt":"2026-05-05T11:03:57","slug":"prophet-of-reason","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/hosting2.northumbria.ac.uk\/reason-religion-ottoman-syria\/?page_id=3512","title":{"rendered":"Prophet of Reason"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Prophet of Reason<\/h1>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Prophet of Reason: Science, Religion and the Origins of the Modern Middle East<\/span><\/i><\/p>

Peter Hill<\/span><\/p>

Publisher: Oneworld Academic, May 2024<\/span><\/p><\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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A portrait of Enlightenment science, religious identity and empire in the making of the modern Middle Eastern world<\/span><\/p><\/h4>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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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?\u00a0Mikha\u2019il Mishaqa\u2019s lifelong search for truth starts here. Soon he\u2019s reading Newtonian science and\u00a0the radical ideas of Voltaire and Volney: he\u00a0loses his religion, turning away from the Catholic Church.\u00a0Thirty years later, as civil war rages in Syria, he finds a new faith \u2013 Evangelical Protestantism. His obstinate polemics scandalise his community. Then, in 1860, Mishaqa barely escapes death\u00a0in 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\u2019s 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\u2019s a world where one man could be a Jew, an Orthodox Christian and\u00a0a Sunni Muslim\u00a0in turn, and a German missionary might walk naked in the streets of Valletta.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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  • Publisher: Oneworld Academic (May 2024)
    Number of pages: 368 pages
    ISBN13: 9780861547364<\/li><\/ul>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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    Praise for Prophet of Reason<\/i>:<\/h3>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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    ‘A masterful and captivating book that rescues one of the greatest thinkers of nineteenth-century Syria from obscurity.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 An outstanding intellectual biography.’\u00a0<\/p>

    Eugene Rogan, author of The Arabs<\/i><\/b><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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    ‘Deeply researched and engagingly written, Prophet of Reason gives us the turbulent life of a remarkable individual… Peter Hill\u2019s 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 networks\u2014contentious and affectionate\u2014were fluid shapers of a history we too often view as set in stone.’\u00a0<\/p>

    Marilyn Booth, Khalid bin Abdullah Al Saud Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World<\/b><\/p>

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    ‘It has taken over 150 years for Mikha\u2019il Mishaqa to find his historian, and it is Peter Hill.\u00a0 Hill paints a riveting and transformative view of religion and its discontents in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire\u2026 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\u2026 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.’\u00a0<\/p>

    John-Paul Ghobrial, author of The Whispers of Cities<\/i><\/b><\/p>

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    ‘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 novelist\u2019s 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.’ <\/div>
    Andrew Arsan, author of Interlopers of Empire<\/i><\/b><\/div>

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    ‘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 testimony to the social and intellectual dynamics of the early Nahda.’\u00a0<\/p>

    Bernard Heyberger, author of <\/span>Hindiyya, Mystic and Criminal, 1720-1798<\/i><\/b><\/p>

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    ‘Prophet of Reason is an enthralling and impeccably researched account of the life of Mikha\u2019il Mishaqa, a man at the centre of the shifting religious and political movements of nineteenth-century Levant.\u00a0 Peter Hill has produced a milestone of a book, laying bare Mishaqa\u2019s only too human journey from faith to doubt and back again, all the while showing how the beast of modernity in Ottoman Syria encompassed not just science and secularism but newly divisive religious identities.’\u00a0<\/p>

    Yorgos Dedes, author of The Ascensions of Felicity<\/i><\/b><\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Prophet of Reason Prophet of Reason: Science, Religion and the Origins of the Modern Middle East Peter Hill Publisher: Oneworld […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"no-sidebar","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"full-width-container","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"disabled","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"disabled","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-3512","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nProphet of Reason - 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