Considering that my country has been at war with a nebulous band of Muslims called "terrorists" for 10+ years, I'd have thought that I would have read something like Tamim Ansary's Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes a lot sooner than I did. Growing up, Islam is not something I gave much thought to. I had a classmate whose family was from, I think, Saudi Arabia. Her parents spoke Arabic but I really didn't think much of this because other classmates would go home to parents who spoke Chinese, Polish, and Spanish. I simply knew that not everyone's family spoke English all the time. As I grew older, my impressions of the Middle East and Islam were mostly shaped by news reports of Muslims hijacking the Achille Lauro, blowing up Pan Am Flight 103, and bombing Marine barracks in Beirut. Oh, and various rich men in OPEC. I don't think I held it that all Muslims were oil barons or terrorists but rather that there's a lot of oil and violence over there with "over there" being the operative words. Islam just never seemed to encroach on these shores.
Of course 9/11 changed all that. And while I meant to learn more about the Middle East and Islam in the wake of those events, I never did. Luckily Ansary wrote Destiny Disrupted and my partner urged me to read it. Ansary was born in Afghanistan but moved here to the U.S. in his teens so he has one foot in the West and the other in the Islamic world and this gives him a valuable perspective. He is a gifted writer but not a historian. This too gives him a valuable perspective but it's one that works both ways.
Destiny Disrupted is aimed at ignorant people like myself who want to learn more about the Islamic world, the world which spawned Osama bin Laden and where our troops are fighting wars. He seems to be saying, "You want some context? Well, I'll give you context. 1,400 years worth of the stuff." But, in a larger sense, he is attempting to illuminate one strand of the great tapestry of human history. As he notes, "Islam can be seen as one world history among many that are unfolding simultaneously, each in some way incorporating all the others." We in the West have our story of civilization starting in Egypt and Mesopotamia, coming to an early climax in ancient Greece and Rome, continuing through the Middle Ages until the Industrial Revolution. A couple world wars and then America is on top. Destiny Disrupted is about creating a narrative like that but for the 1+ billion Muslims of the world.
Ansary begins by stating that, instead of using the term "Middle East", he's adopted "Middle World". "Middle East" may make sense to Westerners but not to folks living there. He also brings in the Islamic calendar so dates are placed within the familiar Western calendar of Common Era years as well as in years After the Hijra. The Hijra is where the book really begins. We learn of Mohammed's revelations and his accumulation of followers and of the machinations of his enemies in Mecca. In 622C.E. Mohammed and his followers fled to Medina and this is the Hijra. Destiny Disrupted explained a lot about Islam but it shouldn't be viewed as a guide to the religion. It gives you the general currents and the prominent figures of the story but this isn't an exegetical work. Ansary isn't out to throw quotes from the Qur'an at the reader but he does want you to understand that Islam is about more than a supernatural figure called Allah. It is a religion but it is also a prescription for daily life in a way that, I, at least, don't think of Christianity as being.
Without wanting to elaborate too much on 1400 years of history, I will say that it's a fascinating story. Mohammad's life encapsulates one era of Islamic history and the first four khalifates comprise another. Islam expanded its reach both in the hearts of people and in square miles. Then came dynasties such as the Umayyad and Abbasid. Things were looking good. Then the Seljuk Turks started invading Muslim lands in the 10th century (C.E.) and conquered the Islamic world. In the 13th century Chengez Khan and the Mongols gave a brief and exceptionally bloody encore. And let's not forget the Ottomans.
While the Islamic world was never wholly separated from the West, it isn't until (the Crusades aside) what we call The Age of Exploration that events take on a more "modern" patina. Western Europeans come to trade but, over the course of a few centuries, they insert themselves into Muslim societies and essentially colonize them with comparatively little bloodshed thanks to corrupt leaders, lopsided, no-bid contracts, et al. What started before the Industrial Revolution bloomed when oil was discovered and the history begins to sound really familiar. Destiny Disrupted is mostly a political history but Ansary gives the reader generous doses of cultural history as well such as how Western intervention and colonization spawned various reform movements.
Because Ansary is not a historian by trade, he is free to write in a very conversational tone. For instance, when Arab victory over a Sassanid army was assured, a Pheidippides-like messenger rides to Medina to deliver the news. Ansary writes: "Approaching Medina, he passed a geezer by the side of the road..." I think that this kind of approach helps readers who generally find history incredibly boring or who are unfamiliar with the material at hand to ease into the subject matter and hold their attention. On the other hand, his approach can elide nuance and give an incomplete impression. Take what he writes about Saladin, the Muslim leader who basically put the final kibosh on the Crusader Kingdoms and started his own dynasty. Ansary describes him as living an ascetic lifestyle and being a pretty nice guy who "often went out of his way to perform acts of hospitality and grace." "His power," we are told, "ultimately lay in the fact that people simply adored him." This allowed him to let "his reputation unite his people and soften his enemies."
While I'm not out to say that Ansary is wrong, the description of Saladin here omits the fact that Saladin got his ass handed to him by Baldwin IV, King of Jerusalem, at the battle of Montgisard and that Saladin encountered some rough spots in trying to keep his holdings consolidated. You can't deny Saladin's accomplishments or his reputation in the Islamic world, but I think that Ansary makes things out to be a bowl of cherries when things were actually more complicated.
Exactly how many more instances like this there are in the text, I don't know. But I don't feel that this diminishes the larger story being told. Ansary is out to provide a history for the lay reader and he accomplishes that well. He's not trying to place the Islamic world above Christendom, though he does take some well-deserved jabs at Western imperialism and arrogance. The story of the world through Islamic eyes runs parallel to and intersects that of the one seen through Western eyes. Destiny Disrupted doesn't answer the question that was asked so many times in the aftermath of 9/11 – why do they hate us? – with a litany of grievances but rather with the idea that the Islamic world and the West tend to talk past one another. There are some definite incompatibilities between the two cultures but collectively we have no way of beginning to mediate differences. Each views the other as The Other – that depersonalized bogeyman – and it seems that we can only communicated with greenbacks or at the point of a gun.
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