Peter Hill - Prophet of Reason: Science, Religion and the Origins of the Modern Middle East

This lecture will be hosted on Thursday, 14 November 2024 at 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm.

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 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.

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 and a Sunni Muslim in turn, and a German missionary might walk naked in the streets of Valletta.

About the speaker:

Peter Hill is associate professor of history at Northumbria University in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, and a historian of the Arab world in the long nineteenth century. He is the author of Utopia and Civilisation in the Arab Nahda (2020) and of a study of Mikha’il Mishaqa, Prophet of Reason: Science, Religion and the Origins of the Modern Middle East (2024).

Attention!

The lecture starts at 6 pm. We work on a first-come, first-served basis as the number of seats is limited. We open our doors at 5:30 and close them at 6:15 or earlier when the lecture room reaches its full capacity. This talk will not be recorded nor livestreamed.