Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

Summary

Destiny Disrupted is a narrative history of the Islamic world from the time of Muhammad to the early twenty-first century, written for general Western readers by the Afghan-American author Tamim Ansary and published in 2009 by PublicAffairs. It won the Northern California Book Award for general nonfiction in 2010. The book is under copyright; the library provides this summary and a study guide rather than the text. Ansary's premise is that there is more than one way to tell world history. The familiar Western story runs from Mesopotamia and Egypt through Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the modern democracies. Muslims, he argues, have long told a different story, with its own beginning, turning points and sense of direction, centered on the lands he calls the Middle World, between the Indus valley and Istanbul. His introduction tells how he came to see the gap between these narratives while working on Western educational materials, when Islam was treated as a minor topic, shortly before the attacks of September 2001. The narrative begins with the empires of Persia and Byzantium on the eve of Islam and the career of Muhammad in Mecca and Medina, including the hijra of 622, which Ansary treats as the founding moment of the Muslim community as a social project. It follows the first four caliphs, the conquests, and the civil wars that produced the split between Sunni and Shia, then the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, the flowering of law, theology, philosophy and science in Baghdad and elsewhere, and the rise of Sufism. Ansary describes the arrival of the Turks, the Crusades as they looked from the Muslim side, and the far greater catastrophe of the Mongol invasions and the sack of Baghdad in 1258. The middle of the book recounts recovery in three great empires, the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal, and then turns to Europe, explaining how commercial and scientific change there led to Western power reaching into the Middle World. The later chapters trace the varied Muslim responses to that encounter: the reform movements associated with Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani; secular modernizers such as Atatürk and Reza Shah; nationalism, oil and the new states after the First World War; and the rise of Islamist movements from the Muslim Brotherhood to the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the wars in Afghanistan. The book ends with the attacks of 2001 and their aftermath, presented as a collision between two world histories that had long run side by side. Ansary writes in a conversational voice, with personal asides and humor, and he presents the convictions of the people he describes in their own terms.

Plot or Argument

• Introduction: two world histories

  Ansary explains how Western and Muslim accounts of world history differ in their center, their turning points and their sense of where history is going.

• The Middle World before and at the rise of Islam

  Persian and Byzantine empires, Arabian society, and the life of Muhammad, from revelation in Mecca to the hijra and the community at Medina.

• Caliphs, conquests and the great split

  Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali; the rapid expansion of the community; civil war and the origins of the Sunni and Shia traditions.

• Umayyads and Abbasids

  The Damascus caliphate, the Abbasid revolution, Baghdad's golden age, and the development of law, theology, philosophy, science and Sufism.

• Turks, Crusaders and Mongols

  Turkish dynasties take power, Frankish crusaders arrive and are eventually expelled, and the Mongols devastate the eastern Islamic lands and Baghdad.

• Rebirth in three empires

  The Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires restore Muslim power and culture from the Balkans to India.

• Meanwhile in Europe, and the West comes East

  Ansary explains Europe's commercial, scientific and political transformation and the growing reach of European trade companies and states into the Middle World.

• Reform, secularism and nationalism

  Muslim thinkers and rulers answer the Western challenge through religious reform, secular modernization, constitutions and nationalism, as the Ottoman Empire ends and new states emerge.

• Islamism, oil and crisis

  The Muslim Brotherhood, oil wealth, the Iranian revolution, the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the attacks of 2001 bring the two histories into open collision.

Lessons

• Every people tells a story of the world

  Ansary's central idea is that history depends on where the storyteller stands. The same centuries look different from Baghdad than from Paris, and the events that seem central to one people may hardly appear in another's account. Learning another people's story is a way of understanding their hopes and grievances.

  • What does Ansary mean by the Middle World, and why does he place it at the center of his narrative?
  • Which events in his account would hardly appear in a Western world-history textbook?
  • What is the center of the story you were taught about the world?

• Faith as a community project

  Ansary presents early Islam not only as a set of beliefs but as an effort to build a just community under God, beginning with the hijra to Medina. Many later debates, about who should lead, how law should be applied and how to respond to outside powers, can be understood as arguments about that project.

  • Why does Ansary treat the hijra, rather than Muhammad's birth or first revelation, as the decisive beginning?
  • How did the question of leadership after Muhammad divide the community?

• Catastrophe and recovery

  The Mongol destruction of Baghdad was, in Ansary's telling, a far deeper wound to the Muslim world than the Crusades. Yet within a few centuries three powerful empires rose again. The book invites reflection on how civilizations absorb disaster and rebuild.

  • Why were the Mongol invasions more devastating to the Muslim world than the Crusades, according to Ansary?
  • What enabled the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires to flourish?
  • Can you think of a community that rebuilt after disaster? What made the recovery possible?

• Many answers to one challenge

  When European power arrived, Muslim responses varied widely: return to the sources of the faith, reform and synthesis with Western learning, secular modernization, nationalism, and later political Islam. Ansary presents each in the terms its advocates used, which helps readers see that the modern Muslim world is not one voice.

  • Compare the responses of Wahhab, Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan and al-Afghani to the problems of their times.
  • Why did secular modernizers such as Atatürk believe their path would strengthen their nations?

Context

After September 2001 American readers sought accessible accounts of Islamic history. Most general histories had been written from inside academic Middle Eastern studies or from a Western vantage. Ansary, raised in Kabul in a Muslim family and educated in the United States, wrote a narrative intended to show how the past looks from within the Muslim tradition while remaining readable for Westerners.

Composition

Ansary drew on standard scholarship and on the traditional Muslim narrative of sacred and political history, writing in a conversational first person with frequent personal asides. The book appeared in 2009 from PublicAffairs, the New York publisher that also issued his later histories of Afghanistan and of human culture.

Reception

The book was widely read in book groups, college courses and schools, and won the 2010 Northern California Book Award for general nonfiction. Reviewers praised its clarity and its success in conveying an insider's sense of the story; some specialists noted its simplifications, its reliance on traditional accounts of early Islam, and that its broad generalizations about 'the Islamic world' and 'the West' necessarily pass over regional variety. It remains a common introduction for general readers.

Comparisons

• the-koran

  The Qur'an is the scripture whose revelation and community Ansary's narrative begins with; reading the text alongside the history shows what the early community believed it was building.

• kennedy-the-great-arab-conquests

  Kennedy's scholarly account of the seventh- and eighth-century conquests expands the early chapters of Ansary's survey with fuller evidence.

• kennedy-when-baghdad-ruled-the-muslim-world

  Kennedy's history of the Abbasid court treats in depth the Baghdad golden age that Ansary presents as a high point of the Muslim narrative.

• ibn-khaldun-muqaddimah

  Ibn Khaldun, writing after the Mongol catastrophe, offered a Muslim theory of the rise and fall of dynasties that stands behind many later Muslim readings of history.

• usama-ibn-munqidh-memoirs

  Usama's memoir gives a twelfth-century Muslim nobleman's firsthand view of the Crusaders, illustrating the perspective Ansary describes in his chapters on that period.

• ghazali-deliverance-from-error

  Al-Ghazali's spiritual autobiography is a primary source for the meeting of law, philosophy and Sufism that Ansary sketches in the classical age.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• Ansary's comparison of the Western and Muslim narratives of world history in the introduction.
• The importance he gives to the hijra and to the community at Medina.
• The origins of the Sunni and Shia traditions and why they matter later.
• The contrast between the Crusades and the Mongol invasions in Muslim memory.
• The range of Muslim responses to European power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Key terms and names

Middle World

Ansary's term for the lands between the Indus and the Mediterranean, the heartland of the Muslim narrative.

Hijra

Muhammad's migration from Mecca to Medina in 622, the start of the Islamic calendar.

Umma

The community of Muslim believers.

Caliph (khalifa)

Successor to Muhammad as leader of the Muslim community; the office was disputed from the start.

Sunni and Shia

The two main branches of Islam, which divided first over the question of rightful leadership after Muhammad.

Sharia

Islamic law, developed by scholars from the Qur'an, the sayings and practice of Muhammad, and methods of reasoning.

Sufism

The mystical tradition of Islam, emphasizing inner devotion and the nearness of God.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension According to Ansary, how does the Muslim narrative of world history differ from the Western one in its starting point and turning points?
2. Comprehension What were the three great Muslim empires of the early modern period, and where were they located?
3. Interpretation Why does Ansary describe early Islam as a social project as well as a religion? What evidence does he give?
4. Interpretation Why might the Mongol conquests loom larger than the Crusades in Muslim historical memory?
5. Interpretation How does Ansary present the Islamist movements of the twentieth century, and how does he connect them to earlier reform movements?
6. Big Question Can a person understand another civilization's history fairly without sharing its faith? What does that require of a Christian student?

Faith Connections

• Genesis 16; 21:8–21 (Scripture)

  The story of Hagar and Ishmael, whom Muslim tradition honors as an ancestor of the Arabs, is shared ground at the beginning of the two narratives.

• 1 Peter 3:15 (Scripture)

  'Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.' Understanding another tradition's story is part of answering its adherents with knowledge and gentleness.

• John of Damascus, On Heresies 100 (Church Fathers)

  Writing under the Umayyad caliphate in which his family served, John gave one of the earliest Christian descriptions of Islam, an example of Christians living within the Muslim world Ansary describes.

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles (Great Conversation)

  Aquinas engaged the Muslim philosophers Avicenna and Averroes, whose work belongs to the classical age Ansary narrates, while reasoning with those who did not share Christian scripture.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: World history can be told from different centers; Muslims have long understood history as the unfolding of a community founded on revelation, whose golden age, catastrophes, recovery and modern struggles form a coherent narrative; because Westerners rarely learn this narrative, they misunderstand Muslim responses to the modern world; therefore learning the Muslim story on its own terms is necessary to understand the encounter between the two civilizations.

Rhetorical device: parallel narratives (perspective shift). Ansary repeatedly sets what was happening in Europe beside what was happening in the Middle World at the same time, so that familiar Western events appear as background to a different story.

Debate: Resolved: High school world-history courses should be organized around more than one civilizational narrative.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Ansary argues that the Muslim and Western narratives of world history ran in parallel until they collided. Choose one period, such as the Crusades, the nineteenth century, or the twentieth, and explain how each narrative would describe it.

Comparison with The Muqaddimah: Ibn Khaldun and Ansary both try to explain the rise and fall of Muslim states. Compare Ibn Khaldun's theory of group solidarity with Ansary's account of disruption and recovery.

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Draw two parallel timelines from 600 to 2001, one listing the turning points of a standard Western world history and one listing those Ansary emphasizes, and mark where the two stories meet.

• Essay

  Write the opening page of a world-history textbook as it might be written in Baghdad in 1000, in Istanbul in 1550, or in Delhi in 1650.

• Classroom

  Make a map of the Middle World as Ansary defines it, and locate Mecca, Medina, Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, Isfahan, Istanbul, Delhi and Kabul.

• Dialogue

  Imagine a conversation in 1880 between Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani about how Muslims should respond to European power.

Further Reading

• Islam: A Short History, Karen Armstrong

• The Venture of Islam, Marshall G. S. Hodgson

• A History of the Arab Peoples, Albert Hourani

• What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, Bernard Lewis

• West of Kabul, East of New York, Tamim Ansary