Destiny Disrupted a History of the World Through Islamic Eyes Published Review

The history of Islam told as a narrative, not as an apologetic, an indictment, or a treatise.

Public Affairs, 2009, 416 pages

Until about 1800, the West and the Islamic realm were like two adjacent, parallel universes, each assuming itself to be the center of the earth while ignoring the other. Equally Europeans colonized the globe, the two world histories intersected and the Western narrative drove the other 1 under. The Due west hardly noticed, just the Islamic world constitute the encounter profoundly disrupting.

This book reveals the parallel "other" narrative of globe history to aid united states brand sense of today's earth conflicts. Ansary traces the history of the Muslim world from pre-Mohammedan days through ix/11, introducing people, events, empires, legends, and religious disputes, both in terms of what happened and how information technology was understood and interpreted.

Given Islam'south current... fraught relationship with the West, whatever history of the religion and its people is inevitably probable to be seen through a political lens. On one side you have people screaming "Islamophobe!" to shut down word, on the other y'all have people making serious arguments to the upshot that

Orcs

Muslims are incapable of living in civilized society and that every single Muslim in the Due west is a collaborator with their radical brethren who want to make u.s. all dhimmis.

Destiny Disrupted is not a political volume, except inasmuch as it touches this fraught human relationship from a historical altitude. Tamim Ansary is an Afghan-American who is probably most famous for his response, after ix/xi, to all the folks who were calling for Afghanistan to be "bombed back to the Stone Historic period." ("New bombs would simply stir the rubble of earlier bombs.") The wisdom, weariness, and wit evidenced in that brief letter of the alphabet are all credible in this book, which covers Islam from the birth of the religion to the mod 24-hour interval, ending with the electric current post-nine/11 phase of Western/Islamic relations.

Ansary'southward thesis is that while today, both Muslims and Westerners speak of "the Westward" and "Islam" as two opposing global forces that take been at odds throughout history, in fact they take until recently existed in well-nigh completely separate worlds. Fifty-fifty during the top of the Crusades, Muslims mostly regarded Europeans every bit annoying barbarians chewing at the edges of the Holy Land. Then Ansary tells the story of world history from the perspective of the Muslim earth, a perspective in which Europeans and Christendom were only small players until recently.

Kickoff of all, in that location is a lot of history here. If you are a history buff, this is a meaty book by an author who delivers data in the manner of a storyteller.

Which is not to deny that the Muslim stories are allegorical, nor that some were invented, nor that many or fifty-fifty all were modified by tellers along the style to accommodate agendas of the person or moment. It is only to say that the Muslims have transmitted their foundational narrative in the same spirit as historical accounts, and we know almost these people and events in much the same style that we know what happened betwixt Sulla and Marius in aboriginal Rome. These tales prevarication somewhere between history and myth, and telling them stripped of human drama falsifies the meaning they accept had for Muslims, rendering less intelligible the things Muslims accept done over the centuries. This then is how I plan to tell the story, and if you're on board with me, buckle in and let'southward begin.

The showtime few chapters encompass the Muslim (meaning Arab, at that time) world immediately prior to Mohammad, and then the years of Mohammad's life and how Islam came to be while its founder was alive. Beingness a historian, Ansary never attempts to address the theological validity of Mohammad'south revelations or Islam itself, only what Muslims believed and how that guided the class of history.

Islam schismed nigh immediately later on Mohammad's expiry; the story of Mohammad'southward son-in-law Ali, whom Shia regard as the rightful successor to the prophet, should be familiar to anyone with even a cursory cognition of Islamic history since it'south the basis of the Shia/Sunni split, but Ansary relates the story with both known and speculated observations virtually all the personalities involved, turning this disquisitional slice of early Muslim history into an extended family unit and political drama that was essentially an epic soap opera.

And then it goes, through the Ummayads and the Abbasids, the early on Caliphates, and the Seljuks (the first of several invaders to shatter a hitherto peaceful Muslim globe and so be captivated into it). The ascent of successive Muslim dynasties, each a piddling more than distant than the last from their roots, is a typical story in any religion, but the theme of believers yearning for the purity of a improve, more golden bygone age is ane that will recur throughout Islam'southward history.

When the first crusaders came trickling into the Muslim world, the locals had no idea who they were dealing with. Early on, they causeless the interlopers to exist Balkan mercenaries working for the emperor in Constantinople. The first Muslim ruler to encounter them was a Seljuk prince, Kiliji Arslan, who ruled eastern Anatolia from the urban center of Nicaea, almost three days' journey from Constantinople. One 24-hour interval in the summer of 1096, Prince Arslan received data that a crowd of odd-looking warriors had entered his territory, odd because they were so poorly outfitted: a few did await like warriors, but the balance seemed like army camp followers of some kind. Nearly all wore a cross-shaped patch of red cloth sewn to their garments. Arslan had them followed and watched. He learned that these people called themselves Franks; local Turks and Arabs called them al-Ifranj ("the Franj"). The interlopers openly proclaimed that they had come up from a distant western state to kill Muslims and conquer Jerusalem, but kickoff they intended to take possession of Nicaea. Arslan plotted out the route they seemed to be taking, laid an ambush, and smashed them like so many ants, killing many, capturing many more, and chasing the remainder back into Byzantine lands. It was so piece of cake he gave them no more thought.

He didn't know that this "army" was merely the ragtag vanguard of a motility that would plague Muslims of the Mediterranean coast for another two centuries.

Europe begins to brush confronting the Muslim world during the Crusades, which was largely a series of misadventures ranging from the comic to the atrocious, just always tragic. However, to Muslims it was not the Crusaders merely the Mongols who were the most fearsome invaders in history, and they become a affiliate of their own; the Crusaders plagued the Mediterranean coast, simply the Mongols smashed the very heart of the Muslim world.

Information technology'south well known that Islam had a golden age of science and scholarship, during several centuries in which Arabs were far more advanced than Europeans. Ansary talks about the intellectual and theological movements that roiled the Muslim world during this time, and how they differed from similar movements in the Western globe. It's all quite interesting, and too puts in context Islam'southward reject, the forces that resulted in what ultimately became technological and cultural stagnation as Europe emerged from its Dark Ages.

Upon reaching the modern era, European colonialism, and finally, the 20th century, World War Ii, Israel, and age of oil, Ansary tries to put everything together so that the reader tin come across the forces in conflict equally a complicated event of all sorts of historical factions and shenanigans, Muslims oppressing each other about of all, however exacerbated past the at times heavy-handed meddling of Western powers. Nil is as simple as "They hate our freedom" or "Muslims wants to accept over the world," nor is State of israel and oil exploitation the sole reason for conflict at present. At the same time, Ansary is no apologist:

On the other side, I often hear liberal Muslims in the United States say that "jihad merely means 'trying to exist a good person,'" suggesting that only anti-Muslim bigots think the term has something to do with violence. Just they ignore what jihad has meant to Muslims in the grade of history dating back to the lifetime of Prophet Mohammed himself. Anyone who claims that jihad has zip to practise with violence must account for the warfare that the primeval Muslims called "jihad." Anyone who wants to say that early Muslims felt a sure way but we modern Muslims can create whole new definitions for jihad (and other aspects of Islam) must wrestle with the doctrine Muslims have fleshed out over time: that the Qur'an, Mohammed'southward prophetic career, and lives, deeds, and words of his companions in the first Muslim community were the volition of God revealed on Earth and no mortal human being can improve on the laws and community of that time and identify.

How did Islamic republic of iran come up to hate united states of america? What are the true origins of Wahhabism? How did the Muslim Brotherhood go from what was essentially a Muslim YMCA to the scary product of democracy in Egypt? And why is Israel the eternal sticking point in every peace process in the Middle Eastward? Ansary addresses all these questions historically, with piddling evident bias one manner or the other, but Destiny Disrupted is not primarily about disharmonize with the W — the W only figures into the last few chapters. It'due south a wide, comprehensive overview of fourteen hundred years of history that didn't matter to most Westerners until now.

Verdict: Destiny Disrupted is a very well-written history that will exist enlightening to anyone interested in that part of the earth, and full of insight into the Muslim way of thinking, without trying to tilt the reader one way or the other with respect to current political conflicts. Tamim Ansary pulls off what few historical writers do, especially on such a dense and relatively obscure subject condensed into a book of readable length. I found information technology utterly interesting and enjoyable, educational, and the writer's phonation was a noticeable enhancement to the narrative without ever slipping into didacticism or soapboxing. So, in instance it's non articulate, I really liked this volume and recommend it highly.

---

My complete list of book reviews.

romannobjess.blogspot.com

Source: https://inverarity.livejournal.com/239681.html

Share this post