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A mural of history
DESTINY DISRUPTED:
A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes
By Tamim Ansary
390 pp. Public Affairs Books $26.95
Reviewed by Bob Sanchez
When I studied world history in public schools, it was European history: a few kings, a few wars, the Magna Carta, the French and industrial revolutions. Great armies and armadas sealed the fate of nations. Hannibal and his elephants crossed the Alps, Caesar conquered Gaul, and Churchill braved the blitzkreig.
World history pretty much dropped off Christianity’s outer edges, much as ships supposedly dropped off the edges of pre-Columbian earth. Yes, the Cradle of Civilization lay between the Tigris and the Euphrates, but American schoolchildren were taught that civilization moved west from there. Left behind were the Ottoman Empire and the Moors whom Queen Isabella drove out of Spain. Neither Ottomans nor Moors were Christian, and neither were mentioned much in the classroom. They were just an unread page in a textbook.
But there is another historical viewpoint Tamim Ansary thinks you should know about. In his broad-sweeping Destiny Disrupted he chronicles the beginnings and growth of Islam up to the present—the major figures, the faith, the intrigues, the triumphs, and the bloodshed. Muslim countries, as Ansary demonstrates, are not “stunted versions of the West.” Although laced with entertaining detail, Destiny Disrupted does a beautiful job of painting the larger mural of Islamic history from early victories against great odds that proved Allah to be on their side—until the Mongols rode into town—up to the open warfare between the U.S. and the Taliban. He puts special emphasis on the early years of Islam to lay the foundation for understanding the nature and direction of this faith.
Ansary writes that his book is “neither a textbook nor a scholarly thesis,” although I think it should be assigned reading in a college-level history course. Without being the least bit preachy, he fills a major gap in Western readers’ understanding of the world. He accurately likens his book to a casual conversation, what he would tell you in a coffee house about a parallel view of world history. His purpose is not to convey all that happened in Muslim history. “My aim is mainly to convey what Muslims think happened,” he writes, “because that’s what motivated Muslims over the ages and what makes their role in world history intelligible.”
Ansary is an accomplished and entertaining writer. Born in Afghanistan and a resident of San Francisco, he has contributed to many history textbooks, written a New York Times bestseller, and has written for major publications such as Parade and the San Francisco Chronicle.
I wasn’t sure what I was getting into with this book, but the tone and content turned out to be just right for me. Ansary carries a banner for no one and points out chicanery and treachery wherever he sees it. This passage illustrates the tone:
After that, [Omar] became one of Mohammad’s closest companions, but he always remained a tough guy’s tough guy, subject to outbursts of frightening rage, and though he had a good heart beneath it all, many wondered if the khalifate could be entrusted to a man whose very demeanor frightened children.
Ansary spends a good deal of space on Mohammed, on the incidents that established his reputation as the sole messenger of God, and on who would take charge of the religion upon Mohammed’s death. Because that question wasn’t settled beforehand, it became a cause of unending bloodshed.
Speaking of settling things, we learn that faithful Muslims use Mohammad’s life as a guide: “What would Mohammed do?” is a profound question among both Shi’i and Sunni, whose differences date back to that question of Mohammed’s successor. But they all apparently agreed that Mohammed would continue to spread God’s word. Thus they saw a world divided in two: a world of peace (Islam) and a world of war (everything else) so that war was always at the outer boundaries of Islam.
One of Ansary’s interesting insights concerns Islam’s modern relationship with the West. All had seemed well with Islam’s view of the United States through both world wars, he writes. And then Iranians elected Mohammed Mossadeq, a secular modernist, as prime minister. Mossadeq announced he planned to nationalize the country’s oil, for which the CIA tagged him as “a madman” and brought him down. Thus began a series of events suggesting that the U.S. might not have Iran’s—or Islam’s—best interests at heart.
Ansary’s obvious ease in both Western and Islamic cultures has helped him give readers a measure of understanding of a society that increasingly makes the West nervous.
Bob Sanchez is an associate editor and the webmaster of The Internet Review of Books. His novels, When Pigs Fly and Getting Lucky, have received rave reviews.
Bob invites you to check out his blog and his website.
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