Prophet of Reason

'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 andthe radical ideas of Voltaire and Volney: heloses 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 deathin 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 anda Sunni Muslimin turn, and a German missionary might walk naked in the streets of Valletta.