Prophet of Reason

An eighteen-year-old reads Voltaire and Volney and loses his religion. It’s 1818 in Ottoman Damietta, and Muslims and Christians are questioning everything. Mikha’il Mishaqa walks away from the Catholic Church. Thirty years later, in 1848, he announces his new faith: Evangelical Protestantism, scandalising his community and kicking off a battle of polemics.

The world darkens. 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 came of age at the same time.

By tracing Mishaqa’s life through this tumultuous era, where 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 Sunni, Jew, and Orthodox Christian in the span of his life, and German missionaries walked naked in the streets of Valletta.

Prophet of Reason by Peter Hill offers a captivating exploration of faith and identity during a time of great upheaval, shedding light on the complex tapestry of beliefs that shaped the Middle Eastern landscape.