Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

The first civilizations emerged along the banks of various big slow-moving rivers subject to annual floods. The Huang Ho valley in China, the Indus River valley in India, the Nile Valley in Africa—these are places where, some six thousand years ago or more, nomadic hunters and herders settled down, built villages, and became farmers.

Perhaps the most dynamic petri dish of early human culture was that fertile wedge of land between the Tigris and Euphrates known as Mesopotamia—which means, in fact, “between the rivers.” Incidentally, the narrow strip of land flanked by these two rivers almost exactly bisects the modern-day nation of Iraq. When we speak of “the fertile crescent” as “the cradle of civilization,” we’re talking about Iraq—this is where it all began.

Conquest, consolidation, expansion, degeneration, conquest—this was the pattern. It was codified in the fourteenth century by the great Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun, based on his observations of the world he lived in. Ibn Khaldun felt that in this pattern he had discovered the underlying pulse of history.

About fifty-five hundred years ago, a dozen or so cities along the Euphrates coalesced into a single network called Sumer. Here, writing was invented, the wheel, the cart, the potter’s wheel, and an early number system. Then the Akkadians, rougher fellows from upriver, conquered Sumer. Their leader, Sargon, was the first notable conqueror known to history by name, a ferocious fellow by all accounts and the ultimate self-made man, for he started out poor and unknown but left records of his deeds in the form of clay documents stamped with cuneiform, which basically said, “This one rose up and I smote him; that one rose up and I smote him.”

Sargon led his armies so far south they were able to wash their weapons in the sea. There he said, “Now, any king who wants to call himself my equal, wherever I went, let him go!” meaning, “Let’s just see anyone else conquer as much as I have.”1 His empire was smaller than New Jersey.

The Assyrians acquired a nasty reputation in history as merciless tyrants. It’s hard to say if they were really worse than others of their time, but they did practice a strategy Stalin made infamous in the twentieth century: they uprooted whole populations and moved them to other places, on the theory that people who had lost their homes and lived among strangers, cut off from familiar resources, would be too confused and unhappy to organize rebellion.

The Assyrians fell at last to one of their subject peoples, the Chaldeans, who rebuilt Babylon and won a lustrous place in history for their intellectual achievements in astronomy, medicine, and mathematics. They used a base-12 system (as opposed to our base-10 system) and were pioneers in the measurement and division of time, which is why the year has twelve months, the hour has sixty minutes (five times twelve), and the minute has sixty seconds.

But the Chaldeans followed the Assyrian strategy of uprooting whole populations in order to divide and rule. Their king Nebuchadnezzar was the one who first smashed Jerusalem and dragged the Hebrews into captivity. It was also a Chaldean king of Babylonia, Balshazzar, who, while feasting in his palace one night, saw a disembodied hand write on his wall in letters of fire, “Mene mene tekel upharsin.”

(Aramaic, as it happens.) They sent for the Hebrew captive Daniel, who said the words meant “Your days are numbered; you’ve been weighed and found wanting; your kingdom will be divided.” At least so goes the Old Testament story in the book of Daniel.

Balshazzar barely had time to ponder the prophecy before it came true. A sudden blistering bloodbath was unleashed upon Babylon by the newest gang of ruffians from the highlands, an alliance of Persians and Medes. These two Indo-European tribes put an end to second Babylonia and replaced it with the Persian Empire.

Yet the Persian Empire stands out for several reasons. First, the Persians were the counter-Assyrians. They developed a completely opposite idea of how to rule a vast realm. Instead of uprooting whole nations, they resettled them. They set the Hebrews free from captivity and helped them get back to Canaan.

The Persian emperors pursued a multicultural, many-people-under-one-big-tent strategy. They controlled their enormous realm by letting all the different constituent people live their own lives according to their own folkways and mores, under the rule of their own leaders, provided they paid their taxes and submitted to a few of the emperor’s mandates and demands. The Muslims later picked up on this idea, and it persisted through Ottoman times.

Second, the Persians saw communication as a key to unifying, and thus controlling, their realm. They promulgated a coherent set of tax laws and issued a single currency for their realm, currency being the medium of communication in business. They built a tremendous network of roads and studded it with hostels to make travel easy. They developed an efficient postal system, too, an early version of the Pony Express. That quote you sometimes see associated with the U.S. Postal Service, “Neither snow nor rai...

The Persians also employed a lot of translators. You couldn’t get away with saying, “But, officer, I didn’t know it was against the law; I don’t speak Persian.” Translators enabled the emperors to broadcast written descriptions of their splendor and greatne...

The part of Darius’s Behistun inscription written in Old Persian was decipherable from modern Persian, so after it was rediscovered in the nineteenth century, scholars were able to use it to unlock the other two languages and thus gain access to the cuneiform libraries of ancient Mesopotamia, libraries so extensive that we know more about daily life in this area three thousand years ago than we know about daily life in western Europe twelve hundred years ago.

Religion permeated the Persian world. It wasn’t the million-gods idea of Hinduism, nor was it anything like the Egyptian pantheon of magical creatures with half-human and half-animal shapes, nor was it like Greek paganism, which saw every little thing in nature as having its own god, a god who looked human and had human frailties. No, in the Persian universe, Zoroastrianism held pride of place. Zoroaster lived about a thousand years before Christ, perhaps earlier or perhaps later; no one really knows. He hailed from northern Iran, or maybe northern Afghanistan, or maybe somewhere east of that; no one really knows that, either.

Zoroaster never claimed to be a prophet or channeler of divine energy, much less a divinity or deity. He considered himself a philosopher and seeker. Bu...

Zoroaster preached that the universe was divided between darkness and light, between good and evil, between truth and falsehood, between life and death. The universe split into these opposing camps at the moment of creation, they had been locked in st...

People, said Zoroaster, contain both principles within themselves. They choose freely whether to go this way or that. By choosing good, people promote the forces of light and life. By choosing evil, they give strength to the forces of darkness and death. There is no predestination in the Zoroastrian universe. The outcome of the great contest is always in doubt, and not only is every human being free to make moral choices, but every moral choice affects that cosmic outcome. Zoroaster saw the drama of the universe vested in two divinities—not one, not thousands, but two. Ahura Mazda embodied the principle of good, Ahriman the principle of evil. Fire served as...

Zoroaster spoke of an afterlife but suggested that the good go there not as a reward for being good but as a consequence of having chosen that direction. You might say they lift themselves to heaven by the bootstraps of their choices. The Persian Zoroastrians rejected religious statues, imagery, and icons, laying the basis for t...

Sometimes Zoroaster, or at least his followers, called Ahura Mazda “the Wise Lord” and spoke as if he was actually the creator of the entire universe and as if it was he who had divided all of creation into two opposing aspects a short time after the moment of creation. Thus, Zoroaster’s dualism inched toward monotheism, but it never quite arrived there. In the end, for the ancient Persian Zoroastrians, two de...

A Zoroastrian priest was called a magus, the plural of which is magi: the three “wise men of the East” who, according to the Christian story, brought myrrh and frankincense to the infant Jesus in his stable were Zoroastrian priests. The word magician also derives from magi. These priests were tho...

In the late days of the empire, the Persians broke into the Mediterranean world and made a brief, big splash in Western world history. Persian emperor Darius sallied west to punish the Greeks. I say “punish,” not “invade” or “conquer,” because from the Persian point of view the so-called Persian Wars were not some seminal clash between two civilizations. The Persians saw the Greeks as the primitive inhabitants of some small cities on the far western edges of th...

Emperor Darius wanted the Greeks merely to confirm that they were his subjects by sending him a jar of water and a box of soil in symbolic tribute. The Greeks refused. Darius collected an army to go teach the Greeks a lesson they would never forget, but the very size of his army was as much a liability as an asset: How do you direct so many men at such a distance? How do you keep them supplied? Darius had ignored the first principle of military strategy: never fight a land war in Europe. In the end, it was the Greeks who taught the Persians an unforgettable lesson—a lesson that they quickly forgot, however, for less than one generation later, Darius’s dimwit...

It didn’t end there, however. About 150 years later, Alexander the Great took the battle the other way. We often hear of Alexander the Great conquering the world, but what he really conquered ...

These Parthian knights were like mobile castles. But mobile castles are cumbersome, so the Parthians had another cavalry corps as well, lightly clad men riding naked horses. As a battle tactic, the light cavalry sometimes pretended to have been routed; in the hot middle of the fighting, they would suddenly turn tail and race away. The army they were fighting would break ranks and chase after them, losing all order as they clamored, “Get ’em, boys; they’re on the run; let’s finish ’em!” whereupon the Parthians would suddenly wheel around and fire into the disorganized rabble their opponents had become, annihilating them in minutes. This was later known as a Parthian shot, and when you hear the phrase “parting shot,” you may actually be hearing a corruption of the phrase “Parthian shot.”

The Parthians were originally nomadic herders and hunters from the mountains northeast of Persia, but once they appropriated the frame of the old Persian Empire, they became, for all practical purposes, Persians. (Their name, Parthian, is probably a corruption or variation of “Persian.”) This empire endured for centuries without leaving much of a trace, because they took little interest in art and culture, and mobile castles get recycled for scrap metal once the warriors inside them die.

In 53 BCE the Parthians crushed the Romans in a battle, capturing thirty-four thousand legionnaires and killing Crassus who, along with Caesar and Pompey, had been coruler of Rome. Thirty years later, the Parthians dealt Mark Antony a stinging defeat and established the Euphrates River as the border between the two empires. The Parthians were still expanding east when Christ was born. The spread of Christianity went little noticed by the Parthians, who favored Zoroastrianism in a lukewarm sort of way.

Zoroastrianism enjoyed a huge resurgence—fire and ashes, sunlight and darkness, Ahura Mazda and Ahriman: it was the state religion. Missionary monks had been roaming west from Afghanistan, teaching Buddhism, but the seeds they dropped would not grow in the soil of Zoroastrian Persia, so they turned east, which is why Buddhism spread to China but not Europe.

The greatest of the Sassanid kings, Khusrow Anushervan, came to be remembered (by Persian speakers) as the archetype of the “just king,” conflated perhaps with Kay Khosrow, the third king of Iran’s mythical first dynasty, something like an Arthurian figure presiding over a Persian Camelot and served by noble warriors.3

Mutual respect and affection between Mohammed and Khadija led the two to marriage, a warm partnership that lasted until Khadija’s death twenty-five years later. And even though Arabia was a polygynous society in which having only one wife must have been uncommon, Mohammed married no one else as long as Khadija lived.

Gradually, he went public with the message, until he was telling people all around Mecca, “There is only one God. Submit to His will, or you will be condemned to hell”—and he specified what submitting to the will of God entailed: giving up debauchery, drunkenness, cruelty, and tyranny; attending to the plight of the weak and the meek; helping the poor; sacrificing for justice; and serving the greater good.

“Everyone,” however, was not at the mosque or the meeting. One leading candidate for the role of successor did not even hear that the issue was being discussed. The Prophet’s cousin Ali was washing the Prophet’s body when the elders met. By the time he heard anything about the discussion, the decision had already been made.

You can see how this might have rankled. In the last months of Mohammed’s life, Ali may well have felt like he was the Prophet’s successor, no discussion needed, for he stood closest to the Prophet in every way. Mohammed had several cousins, but Ali was special because his father Abu Talib had adopted Mohammed and raised him as a son, which essentially made Ali and Mohammed brothers.

But Ali was almost thirty years Mohammed’s junior, and in tribal Arab culture a much-older brother had a near paternal status with his sibling. In fact, as a little boy, Ali had moved in with Mohammed and Khadija and had grown up mostly in their household, so in addition to being practically like a brother to Mohammed, Ali was practically like a son to him to...

When the assassins were coming to murder Mohammed in his bed, it was Ali who wrapped himself in the Prophet’s blankets and risked taking the knife meant for Mohammed. In Medina, when the Muslims were in danger of annihilation, it was Ali who proved himself repeatedly as the virtual Achilles of Islam—for in those days, battles often began with individual challenges leading to single combat, and at e...

At the battle of Uhud, when all seemed lost and some Muslims fled for home, Ali was among those who rallied around the Prophet, and bore him home wounded but safe. As the community flowered and the Prophet became a head of state, he kept Ali by his side as his right-hand man. Indeed, on the way home from his last sermon, Mohammed to...

While all of Mohammed’s close companions had charisma, Ali’s glow seemed uniquely spiritual to a committed group of partisans, many of them younger Muslims, who felt something of the same authority radiating from Ali that everyone had felt radiating from Mohammed. All the points mentioned marked Ali as special, but one further factor elevated him above all others, and it might have been the most important factor of all, or so it seemed in retrospect to later Muslims: Mohammed had no sons. Only one of his daughters produced sons who lived past childhood, and that one daughter was Fatima, who was married to Ali.

Ali’s sons were therefore Mohammed’s grandsons, and Ali’s descendents would be the prophet’s descendents. Ali and Fatima were Mohammed’s family. Set all this aside, however, and picture Ali indoors with the womenfolk, drowning in grief as he bathed the Prophet’s body. Then, picture him emerging finally into the terrible first day of the rest of his life, still reeling from the enormity of what had happened, only to find that while he was preparing Mohammed’s body for burial, Mohammed’s peer-group companions had been picking a successor for Mohammed, not only passing over Ali but failing even to consult him, failing even to inform him that the meeting was taking place. Surely, Ali felt he deserved some greater consideration than that!

On the other hand, every point in Ali’s favor counted against him from another perspective. Ali was close to the Prophet? Part of his family? Good for him, but when did Allah ever say He was conferring special privileges upon a particular family? Dynastic succ...

Besides, the Prophet had said there would be no more Messengers after him. If this was true, Ali’s charisma had no religious significance, in which case, shouldn’t Muslims separate the Prophet’s bloodline from leadership roles in the community to prevent undue concentrations of power from distorting the egalitarian universalism of the Islamic message? Seen in that light, in fact, wasn’t Ali’s charisma precisely the qual...

No, said Abu Bakr’s proponents, what the community needed at this point was steady judgment, not youthful passion. Ali was just over thirty years of age at this time; Abu Bakr was almost sixty. In the Arabia of that time, choosing a thirty-year-old man as leader over a sixty-year-old probably struck most Arabs as unthin...

Some say it took Ali six hard months to concede the election, during which some of Abu Bakr’s more unruly followers threatened him and roughed up his family. In one such shove and scuffle, they say, a door was slammed against his wife Fatima’s belly, who was pregnant at the time, and this manhandling may ha...

Others claim that Ali swore allegiance to Abu Bakr just a few days after the latter took office; they minimize the abuse that Fatima suffered and attribute her miscarriage to an accident. A disagreement like this can never now be resolved by an appeal to evidence. It can only reflect the position one takes on the theological schism that developed out of the succession, for the disagreement between proponents of Abu Bakr and Ali eventually engendered two different sects of Islam, the Sunnis and the Shi’i, each of whom has a different version of these events. Ali’s partisans developed int...

But Abu Bakr responded to the crisis by declaring secession to be treason. The Prophet had said, “No compulsion in religion,” and Abu Bakr did not deny that principle. People were free to accept or reject Islam as they pleased; but once they were in, he asserted, they were in for good. In response to a political crisis, Abu Bakr established a religious principle that haunts Islam to this day—the equation of apostasy with treason.

Omar directed the Umma for ten years, and during that time he set the course of Islamic theology, he shaped Islam as a political ideology, he gave Islamic civilization its characteristic stamp, and he built an empire that ended up bigger than Rome.

Meanwhile, the Persians were doing their best to unravel the upstart Muslim community with spies and provocateurs. Instead of swatting at individual Persian agents, Omar decided to throttle the threat at its source. He called on Muslims to topple the Sassanid empire, a proposal of breathtaking audacity: ants vowing to fell a mastiff.

Omar’s decision to call a war of conquest a “jihad” has obvious ramifications for modern times and has been much debated. In Mohammed’s day, the word jihad did not loom large. Etymologically, as I said, it didn’t mean “fighting” but “striving,” and though it could be applied to fighting an enemy, it could also be used to discuss striving against temptation, struggling for justice, or trying to develop one’s compassion.

The word jihad as “fighting” does come up in the Qur’an, bound explicitly to self-defense. Those verses were revealed at a time when the Quraysh were trying to erase Islam and Muslims from the face of the earth. In that context, it was no stretch to argue that fighting had a moral dimension: if the community of believers was what made justice possible on earth, then those who let hostile forces extingu...

In 15 AH (or thereabouts), near a town called Qadisiya, an Arab force traditionally numbered at thirty thousand warriors found itself facing a Sassanid army of sixty thousand crack troops. Only a river separated them. Several times, the Arab commander Waqqas sent envoys to negotiate with Rustum, the commander of the Sassanid force. As the story goes, General Rustum asked one envoy if he headed up the Muslim army. The man replied, “No, we’re Muslims. Among us, there is no highest and lowest.” Rustum said, “Look, I know you Arabs are hungry and poor, and I’m sure you’ve been causing trouble out of desperation. So I tell you what, I’ll give each of you two suits of clothing and a bag of dates. Will that convince you to go back where you came from?” The Muslim envoy said, “We’re not here to take anything from you, General. We’re here to give you Islam! You are headed to hell; we offer you an opportunity to go to heaven.”