Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

The radical separation of gender roles into nonoverlapping spheres accompanied by the sequestration of women probably froze into place during the era of social breakdown that ...

(There were no Turks in what is now called Turkey; they migrated to this area much later. The ancestral home of the Turkish tribes was the central Asian steppes north of Iran and Afghanistan.)

Meanwhile, a Persian family, the Buyids, insinuated themselves into the court as the khalifa’s advisers, clerks, helpers. Soon, they took control of the bureaucracy and thus of the empire’s day-to-day affairs. Boldly, they passed the office of vizier (chief administrator) down from father to son as a hereditary title.

The Buyids, like the khalifas, began importing the children of Turkish barbarians to Baghdad as slaves and raising them in dormitories over which they had absolute control, to serve as their personal bodyguards. Once the Buyids had their system in place, no one could oppose them, for their Turkish bodyguards had come to town at such a young age they had no memory of their families, their fathers, their mothers, their siblings: they knew only the camaraderie of the military schools and camps in which they grew up, and they felt soldierly allegiance only to one another and to the men who had controlled their lives in the camps.

The Buyids, then, became a new kind of dynasty in Islam. They kept the khalifa in place but issued orders in his name and enjoyed a high life behind the throne. Thus, Persians came to rule the capital of the Arab khalifate.

You might think that training slaves to be killers, giving them weapons, and then stationing them outside your bedroom door would be such a bad idea that no one would ever do it, but in fact almost everyone did it in these parts: every little breakaway Persian kingdom had its own corps of Turkish mamluks guarding and eventually controlling its little Persian king.

Accustomed to plunder as a way of life, they ruined cities and laid waste to crops. The highways grew unsafe, small-time banditry became rife, trade declined, poverty spread. Turkish mamluks fought bitterly with Turkish nomads—it was Turks in power everywhere. This is part of why anxiety permeated the empire in Ghazali’s day.

A light did shine at the edges, however, under a Persian dynasty called the Samanids. Their kingdom radiated from cities on either side of the Oxus River, which now forms the northern border of Afghanistan. Here, in the great urban centers of Balkh and Bokhara, the literary culture of ancient Persia revived, and Persian began to compete with Arabic as the language of learning.

But the Samanids, too, had mamluks, and one of their mamluk generals decided he would rather give orders than take them. Goodbye, Samanids; hello, Ghaznavids. The new rulers were called Ghaznavids because they moved their capital to the city of Ghazni, southeast of Kabul. The Ghaznavid dynasty peak...

Sultan Mahmud was bright enough to staff his imperial service with educated Persians who could read and write. He announced handsome rewards for men of learning, offers that attracted some nine hundred poets, historians, theologians, philosophers, and other literati to his court, which added to his prestige.

One of these literati was the poet Firdausi, who was writing Shahnama (The Book of Kings), an epic history of the Persian nation from the beginning of time to the birth of Islam, all in rhyming couplets. In the Middle World he has a stature comparable to Dante. Mahmud extravagantly promised this man one piece of gold for each couplet of his finished epic. He was shocked when Firdausi finally presented him with the longest poem ever penned by a single man: The Book of Kings has over sixty thousand couplets. “Did I say gold?” the sultan frowned. “I meant to say silver. One piece of silver for each couplet.”

The offended Firdausi went off in a huff and offered his poem to another king. According to legend, Sultan Mahmud later regretted his penny-pinching and sent servants with trunk loads of gold to coax the poet back, but they were knocking on the front door of the po...

The Book of Kings represents all of history as a struggle between the descendants of two legendary brothers, Iran and Turan, who (it is often thought) represent the Persians and the Turks, respectively: Iran is the good guy, and Turan the bad guy.

Not surprisingly, The Book of Kings is now the national epic of Iran, and I wonder if it was actually the cost of the book that gave the sultan pause: maybe he didn’t like seeing Turks presented as the bad guys of history. Firdausi also heaped scorn on the Arabs and devoted a long passage at the end to detailing their primitive savagery as compared to the civilized grace of the Persians at the time Islam was born.

The Turks would keep order with their military strength, the Arabs would provide unity by contributing religious doctrine, and the Persians would contribute all the remaining arts of civilization—administration, philosophy, poetry, painting, architecture, science—to elevate and beautify the world. The new ruling class would thus consist of a Turkish sultan and his army, an Arab khalifa and the ulama, and a Persian bureaucracy staffed by artists and thinkers.

thus called hashishin, from which derived the word assassin. I doubt this etymology, and I’ll tell you why. Sabbah was the archetypal prototerrorist, using murder largely for its propaganda value. Since he lacked the resources and troops to fight battles or conquer cities, he sent individuals, or at most small groups, to assassinate carefully targeted figures chosen for the shock their death would spark. The Assassins plotted their killings for months or even years, sometimes contriving to make friends with the victim or enter his service and work their way up to a position of trust.

Where in this long process was the hashish smoking supposed to take place? It doesn’t add up. The Lebanese writer Amin Malouf suggests that actually the word assassin probably derives from the Persian word assas, which means “foundation.” Like most religious schismatics, Sabbah taught that the revelations had been corrupted and that he was taking his followers back to the foundation, the original. Of course, every schismatic has a different idea about what the founding revelation was. Sabbah’s doctrine strayed pretty far from anything most scholars recognize as Islam.

At last Franj leaders sent a message into the city assuring the people of Ma’ra that none of them would be harmed if they simply opened their gates and surrendered. The city notables decided to comply. But once the Crusaders made it into Ma’ara, they did more than slaughter. They went on a frightening rampage that included boiling adult Muslims up for soup and skewering Muslim children on spits, grilling them over open fires, and eating them.

I know this sounds like horrible propaganda that the defeated Muslims might have concocted to slander the Crusaders, but reports of Crusader cannibalism in this instance come from Frankish as well as Arab sources. Frankish eyewitness Radulph of Caen, for example, reported on the boiling and grilling. Albert of Aix, also present at the conquest of Ma’ara, wrote, “Not only did our troops not shrink from eating dead Turks and Saracens; they also ate dogs!”2 What strikes me about this statement is the implication that eating dogs was worse than eating Turks, which makes me think that this Franj, at least, considered Turks a different species from himself.

Upon securing this city, the Franj indulged in an orgy of bloodletting so drastic it made all the previous carnage seem mild. One crusader, writing about the triumph, described piling up heads, hands, and feet in the streets. (He called it a “wonderful sight.”) He spoke of crusaders riding through heathen blood up to their knees and bridle reins.4 Edward Gibbon, the British historian who chronicled the fall of the Roman Empire, said the Crusaders killed seventy thousand people here over the course of two days. Of the city’s Muslims, virtually none survived.

The city’s Jewish denizens took refuge in their gigantic central synagogue, but while they were in there praying for deliverance, the Crusaders blockaded all the doors and windows and set fire to the building, burning up pretty much the entire Jewish community of Jerusalem in one fell swoop.

the Crusaders never penetrated deeply into the Muslim world. For example, no real army ever reached Mecca and Medina, only a small raiding party led by a renegade whom even other Franj regarded as a despicable rogue. The Crusaders never laid siege to Baghdad nor did they penetrate historic Persia. People in Khorasan and Bactria and the Indus Valley remained completely unaffected by the incursion and largely unaware of it.

What’s more, the Crusades stimulated no particular curiosity in the Muslim world about Western Europe. No one expended much energy wondering where these Franj had come from, or what their life was like back home, or what they believed. In the early 1300s, Rashid al-Din Fazlullah, a Jewish convert to Islam, wrote an epic Collection of All Histories, which included the history of China, India, the Turks, the Jews, the pre-Islamic Persians, Mohammed, the khalifas, and the Franj, but even at this late date, the part about the Franks was perfunctory and undocumented.7 In short, the Crusades brought virtually no European cultural viruses into the Islamic world. The influence ran almost entirely the other way.

Over the centuries a number of nomadic empires had formed and dissolved on the steppes, tribal confederacies that had no core principle of unity to hold them together. In the days of the Roman republic, a group of Turko-Mongol tribes called the Hsiung-nu congealed into a force so fearsome that the first emperor of a united China put about a million men to work building the Great Wall to keep them out. Once they couldn’t raid eastward, the Hsiung-nu turned west and by the time they got to Europe these steppe nomads were known as the Huns. Under Attila they swept all the way to Rome before they dissolved.

Along the way, he attracted a posse of close companions called nokars. In Persian-speaking lands, the word later came to mean “hired help,” but in Chengez’s day it meant “comrade in arms.”

It was the kingdom of the Khwarazm-Shahs. Their king Alaudin Mohammed considered himself quite the military mastermind, and in his arrogance decided to teach the Mongols a lesson. He started by intercepting 450 merchants traveling through his kingdom under Mongol protection. Accusing these poor merchants of spying for the Mongols, he had them killed and took their goods, but he quite deliberately let one man escape so that he would take news of the massacre back to Chengez. He was looking for trouble.

The Mongol lord sent three envoys west to demand reparations. It was probably the last time Chengez would show himself so forbearing. And now, Alaudin Mohammed made his really big mistake. He executed one of the envoys and sent the other two home with their beards plucked out. In this region, one could offer a man no more grievous insult than to pluck out his beard. Alaudin knew this full well, but he wanted to give offense, because he was spoiling for a fight—and he got one. In 615 AH (1219 CE) the great catastrophe began.

Chengez scorched Transoxiana, the lands on either side of the Oxus River and destroyed famous cities such as Bokhara, where the renaissance of Persian literature had begun two centuries earlier. He razed the legendary old city of Balkh, known to the ancients as “the Mother of Cities,” dumping its library into the Oxus River, hundreds of thousands of handwritten volumes swept away.

Then he marched on Khorasan and Persia, and here the Mongols attempted genocide. No other word really seems appropriate. Writing shortly after the events in question, the Muslim historian Sayfi Heravi said the Mongols killed 1,747,000 when they sacked the city of Naishapur, killing everything down to the cats and dogs. At the city of Herat, he put the toll at 1,600,000. Another Persian historian, Juzjani, claimed that 2,400,000 died in Herat.

Whatever the numbers were based on, there must have been some truth to them. Two histories completed around 658 AH (1260 CE), one in Baghdad, one in Delhi, gave almost exactly similar accounts of these horrors, roughly the same statistics for the casualties.

When the Mongols attacked Persia, they destroyed, among other things, the qanat, ancient underground canal works that were, to an agricultural society in a riverless land, life’s blood itself. Some of the qanats were destroyed outright and some filled up with sand and vanished just as surely as if they had been deliberately destroyed because no one was left to repair them. When the Arab geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi wrote a description of western Iran, northern Afghanistan, and the republics north of the Oxus River a few years before the Mongol invasion, he described a fertile, flourishing province. A few years after the invasion, it was a desert. It still is.

Muslim sources put the toll at eight hundred thousand. Hulagu himself was more modest. In a letter to the king of France, he claimed he had killed only two hundred thousand. Whichever the case might be, the city itself was burned down, for Hulagu kept his promises. All the libraries and schools and hospitals, all of the city’s archives and records, all the artifacts of civilization enshrined there, all the testimonials to the great surge of Islamic civilization in its golden age, perished utterly.

The first conversion occurred in 1257 CE, a khan named Berke. One of Hulagu’s successors, Tode Mongke, not only converted but declared himself a Sufi. After that the Mongol ruling house of Persia produced more rulers with Muslim names.

1295, Mahmoud Ghazan inherited the Persian throne. He had been a Buddhist but converted to Shi’ite Islam, and his nobles soon converted as well; his descendants went on to rule Persia as the Muslim Il-Khan dynasty.

Princeton historian Bernard Lewis, among others, has taken this to mean that the Mongols weren’t really so bad. Yes, they destroyed whole cities, but look on the bright side: they left whole cities intact. Lewis has even said that “by modern standards,” the destruction wrought by the Mongols was “trivial.” His argument rests partly on the fact that within the Muslim world, Islamic civilization rapidly absorbed the Mongols. The ones who ended up in charge of Persia soon evolved into the benign Shi’ite Il-Khan dynasty. In converting to their subjects’ religion, the Mongols even brought a fresh breeze, a new spirit, a cluster of new ideas into the Islamic world.

This is all very true, but it’s a bit like saying the World Wars of the twentieth century were, in the final analysis, “trivial” because even though millions were killed, millions weren’t, and even though countries such as Russia, Germany, France, and Great Britain were devastated, they quickly rebuilt and look at them now.

The hardest-hitting response was delivered by the Syrian jurist Ibn Taymiyah. His family originated in Harran, a town near the intersection of present-day Syria, Iraq, and Turkey, right in the path of the Mongol invasion. They fled the wrath of Hulagu with nothing but their books, ending up in Damascus, where Ibn Taymiyah grew up. He studied the standard Islamic disciplines with unusual brilliance and earned, at an early age, the standing to issue fatwas, religious rulings. Intense horrors tend to spawn extreme opinions, and Ibn Taymiyah was rooted in his times. No doubt the anxiety of his uprooted family gave him an emotional stake in puzzling out the meaning of the Mongol catastrophe, or perhaps his personality would have inclined him to the views he propounded no matter when or where he was born—who can tell? But in a Syria so recently crushed by the Mongols and still suffering the residue of the Crusades, Ibn Taymiyah at least found a ready audience for his thoughts. If he had never been born, the audience that embraced him might well have found someone else to express those same ideas.

Ibn Taymiyah propounded three main points. First, he said there was nothing wrong with Islam, nothing false about the revelations, and nothing bogus about seeing Muslim victories as proof of them. The problem, he proposed, lay with Muslims: they had stopped practicing “true” Islam, and God therefore had made them weak. To get back to their victorious ways, Muslims had to go back to the book and purge Islam of all new ideas, interpretations, and innovations: they must go back to the religious ways of Mohammed and his companions, back to those values and ideals, back to the material details of their everyday lives: the earliest rulings were the best rulings.

Second, Ibn Taymiyah asserted that jihad was a core obligation of every Muslim, right in there with praying, fasting, abjuring deceit, and other sacramental practices; and when Ibn Taymiyah said “jihad” he meant “strap on a sword.” The Umma, he said, was special because they were martial. No previous recipients of revelations from God had “enjoined all people with all that is right, nor did they prohibit all that is wrong to all people.” Some of them did not “take up armed struggle at all,” while others struggled merely “for the purpose of driving their enemy from their land, or as any oppressed people struggles against their oppressor.” To Ibn Taymiyah, this limited, defensive idea of jihad was inaccurate: jihad meant actively struggling, fighting even, not just to defend one’s life, home, and property but to expand the community of those who obeyed Allah.

Ibn Taymiyah mythologized the perfection of life in that first community, referring to Mohammed’s companions as al-salaf al-salihin, “the pious (or pristine) originals.” Versions of his doctrines eventually reemerged in India and North Africa as the movement called Salafism, which is with us to this day. The word comes up often in news stories about “Islamists.” It started here, in the shadow of the Mongol holocaust.

Another Ottoman ruler, Bayazid I (1389-1402) launched a program called the devshirme, which consisted of bringing captured boys from Christian Europe back to his palace, raising them as Muslims, and developing them into crack soldiers. These were really just the familiar mamluks of Islamic history by another name; mamluks were Turkish boys growing up in Arab or Persian courts, these were Christian boys growing up in a Turkish court.

In 1502, at the age of fifteen, Ismail declared himself Shahanshah of Iran. Shahanshah meant “king of kings.” It was the title the Sassanid monarchs had used, and the ancient Persian monarchs before them. In rejecting the titles of “khalifa” and “sultan,” Ismail was rejecting Arab and Turkish historical tradition in favor of a nativist Persian identity. In calling his realm Iran, he was invoking the ancestral king named in Firdausi’s epic of the Persian people, The Book of Kings. In fact, Ismail’s propagandists said he was related by blood to the Sassanid kings of yore.

Ismail also separated himself from his neighbor by declaring Twelver Shi’ism the state religion. He had his henchman publicly curse the first three khalifas of Islam: Abu Bakr, Omar, and Othman. The state declared that Ali was the Prophet’s only legitimate successor and the imams descended from him the only religious authorities. Ismail’s propagandists spread the news that in addition to being descended from the Sassanids, Ismail was also descended from Ali. They suggested that he was even in direct communication with the Hidden Imam (who was, of course, in direct communication with God). In fact, Ismail came pretty close to declaring that he himself was the Hidden Imam and may well have believed this of himself—how could he not, given his upbringing? Some people say he even thought he was God.

Well, wouldn’t you know it: the Ottoman sultan Selim the Grim retaliated by locking up or executing Shi’is living in his realm. Inevitably, as Sunnis fled west into Anatolia, Shi’is fled east into Persia. The whole process led to an ever greater concentration of Shi’ism in the Safavid empire (and Sunnism in the Ottoman) and the Safavids did everything they could to promote this trend as well as to fuse Shi’ism with Persian culture. This fusion of Shi’ism and Persian nationalism became the ideological foundation of their new empire, the core of which later became the modern nation of Iran.

Historians usually score Chaldiran as a victory for the Ottomans, but overall it was more of a draw, because Selim could not hold Tabrez. With winter coming, he fell back to more secure bases deeper inside Anatolia, and by the following year the Persians had reoccupied Tabrez and inoculated it with a scorched-earth campaign that left nothing for invaders to feed on if they wanted to attack again. So the battle of Chaldiran actually ended up defining the frontier between the Ottoman and Safavid realms, which hardened eventually into the border between the successor states, Iran and Turkey, and remains the border between those countries to this day.

This no-doubt-about-it Persian Empire peaked under Ismail’s great grandson Shah Abbas the Great, who died in 1629 after a forty-two-year reign. Abbas equipped his armies with firearms and cannons, and in his era Iran developed booming state-supported textile, ceramics, garment, and carpet industries, which exported goods to places as distant as western Europe, Africa, and India.

The art of painting, and particularly of the “Persian miniature”—exquisitely detailed scenes surrounded by floral and geometric borders—climaxed in Safavid Persia. Calligraphy, regarded as a major art form in the Islamic world due to Muslim reverence for the written Qur’an, also reached perfection here. The two arts came together in illuminated books, the highest artistic products of the age, and the culminating work in this form was a Book of Kings, Firdausi’s epic, produced for a Safavid monarch: it had 258 paintings and sixty thousand lines of calligraphy by various artists—essentially, an entire museum between two covers.

And if architecture was the highest art form of Safavid Persia, then city building was its meta-art. The Safavids kept moving their capital (seeking safety from the ever-looming Ottomans) and every time they adopted a new city as their home, they remade it aesthetically. In 1598, after choosing Isfahan as his new capital, Shah Abbas launched a building program that transformed the entire city into a single integrated jewel: by the time he was done, it abounded in public squares, gardens, mosques, mansions, pools, palaces, and public buildings interlaced with handsome boulevards. Awestruck visitors coined the phrase Isfahan Nisfi-Jahan, “Isfahan, half the world” (their point being that if you hadn’t seen Isfahan, you’d missed half of all there was to see in the world).

Born and raised a Muslim, Akbar certainly considered himself a Muslim monarch, but he was deeply curious about other religions. He called leading Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jains, Zoroastrians, Buddhists, and others to his court to explain and debate their views while the emperor listened. Finally Akbar decided every religion had some truth in it and no religion had the whole truth, so he decided to take the best from each and blend them into a single new religion he called Din-i Illahi, “the God Religion.”

The doctrines of this new religion included, first, that God was a single, all-powerful unity; second, that the universe was a single integrated whole reflecting its creator; third, that every person’s first religious obligation was to do no harm to others; and fourth, that people could and should model themselves on Perfect Lives, of which many examples existed—Mohammed provided such a model, said Akbar, and so did the Shi’i imams. Akbar went on to suggest modestly that he himself provided yet another.