{"product_id":"prophet-of-reason","title":"Prophet Of Reason","description":"\u003cb\u003e''An outstanding intellectual biography.'' Eugene Rogan\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eIn 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.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eBy 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.","brand":"MediaPlace","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57401062687102,"sku":"NW9780861547364","price":19.04,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1379\/1261\/files\/9780861547364.jpg?v=1778632030","url":"https:\/\/mediaplace.com\/products\/prophet-of-reason","provider":"MediaPlace","version":"1.0","type":"link"}