Prophet of Reason

Reviews / Votes

'This accomplished study of religious change in 19th-century Syria... Hill includes illuminating excerpts from Mishaqa's own religious tracts and the texts he was influenced by. Historians of the Middle East have plenty to gain from this.' Publishers Weekly 'An intellectual biography of Mishaqa which is not only a rewardingly well-written account of a striking Arab personality, but a way into documenting changing patterns of community, sectarianism, revivalism, secularity, and the impact of scientific inquiry across the region known variously as the Levant, the Near East, and the Middle East.' Church Times '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 novelist's 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 Hill's 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-contentious and affectionate-were 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 testimony to the social and intellectual dynamics of the early Nahda.' Bernard Heyberger, author of Hindiyya, Mystic and Criminal, 1720-1798 'It has taken over 150 years for Mikha'il 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 of The Whispers of Cities 'Prophet of Reason is an enthralling and impeccably researched account of the life of Mikha'il Mishaqa, a man at the centre of the shifting religious and political movements of nineteenth-century Levant. Peter Hill has produced a milestone of a book, laying bare Mishaqa's 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.' Yorgos Dedes, author of The Ascensions of Felicity