Five-minute digest
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.
Top 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.
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.
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.
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.