Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

Albert Hourani in A History of the Arab Peoples,

“Islamic world,” I mean societies with Muslim majorities and/or Muslim rulers.

Islam. Unlike older religions—such as Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, even Christianity—Muslims began to collect, memorize, recite, and preserve their history as soon as it happened, and they didn’t just preserve it but embedded each anecdote in a nest of sources, naming witnesses to each event and listing all persons who transmitted the account down through time to the one who first wrote it down, references that function like the chain of custody validating a piece of evidence in a court case.

the phrase Middle East assumes that one is standing in western Europe

Therefore, I prefer to call this whole area from the Indus to Istanbul the Middle World, because it lies between the Mediterranean world and the Chinese world.

intercommunicating zones”: each had more interaction internally than it had with the other.

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,

The Amorites clocked a crucial moment in this cycle when they built the famous city of Babylon and from this capital ruled the (first) Babylonian Empire.

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.

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.

That quote you sometimes see associated with the U.S. Postal Service, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,” comes from ancient Persia.

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 struggle ever since, and the contest would endure to the end of time.

Ahura Mazda embodied the principle of good, Ahriman the principle of evil.

We often hear of Alexander the Great conquering the world, but what he really conquered was Persia, which had already conquered “the world.”

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 Byzantine Empire lasted almost a thousand years, by few can name five events that took place in the empire during all that time.

The emigration of the Muslims from Mecca to Medina, is known as the Hijra

The Hijra takes pride of place among events in Muslim history because it marks the birth of the Muslim community, the Umma, as it is known in Islam.

The word hijra means “severing of ties.”

his first four successors, remembered as the Rashidun, “the rightly guided ones”: Abu Bakr, Omar, Othman, and Ali.

Omar’s treatment of Jerusalem set the pattern for relations between Muslims and the people they conquered. Christians found that under Muslim rule they would be subject to a special poll tax called the jizya.

Many religions say to their followers, “The world is corrupt, but you can escape it.” Islam said to its followers, “The world is corrupt, but you can change it.”

The final product was compiled into a book in which the verses were arranged more or less in order of length (rather than thematically or chronologically). All other compilations, competing versions, and rejected verses were destroyed. From then on, every Qur’an would be the same, word for word, and that’s the Qur’an all Muslims have today.

The members of the Umayyad clan, Othman’s close relatives, had fled to Damascus, where their kinsman Mu’awiya had quietly been assembling his military force.

Compromising with the enemy disappointed a faction of Ali’s most committed followers, and these younger, more radical of his partisans split away. They came to be known as Kharijites, “ones who departed.” This splinter group reformulated the ideals of Ali’s followers into a revolutionary new doctrine: blood and genealogy meant nothing, they said. Even a slave had the right to lead the community. The only qualification was character.

Ali’s partisans immediately looked to his son Hassan as his successor, but Mu’awiya swept this challenge aside by offering Hassan a sum of money to renounce all claim to the khalifate. Mohammed’s older grandson, heartbroken and war-weary at this point, stepped aside. He had no stomach for continuing the fight, and under the circumstances now prevailing, claiming the khalifate could only constitute a power grab, and what good was that? And so the Umayyad dynasty began.

Yazid no doubt believed he had solved his problem: surely Ali’s descendents would never make trouble again. He was quite wrong, however. By crushing Hussein at Karbala, this emperor lit a spark. The passionate embrace of Ali’s cause now became a prairie fire called Shi’ism.

But when Shi’i say “imam,” they mean something considerably more elevated. To Shi’i there is always one imam in the world, and there is never more than one. They proceed from the premise that Mohammed had some palpable mystical substance vested in him by Allah, some energy, some light, which they call the baraka of Mohammed.

When Hussein was martyred at Karbala, the whole “imam” idea flowered into a rich theological concept that addressed a religious craving left unnourished by the mainstream doctrines of that time.

The mainstream doctrine, as articulated by Abu Bakr and Omar, said that Mohammed was strictly a messenger delivering a set of instructions about how to live. The message was the great and only thing. Beyond delivering the Qur’an, Mohammed’s religious significance was only his sunna, the example he set by his way of life, an example others could follow if they wanted to live in God’s favor. People who accepted this doctrine eventually came to be known as Sunnis, and they comprise nine-tenths of the Muslim community

The Shi’i, by contrast, felt that they couldn’t make themselves worthy of heaven simply by their own efforts. To them, instructions were not enough. They wanted to believe that direct guidance from God was still coming into the world, through some chosen person who could bathe other believers in ...

For one thing, perpetual war drained violence to the edges of the empire and helped keep the interior at peace, reinforcing the theory of a world divided between the realm of peace (Islam) and the realm of war (everything else),

do. Again, Islam is not merely a creed or a set of beliefs: it is a program every bit as concrete as a diet or an exercise regiment. Islam is something one does.

shari’a refers to something bigger than “Islamic law.” It is the whole Islamic way of life, which is not something to be developed but something to be discovered, as immutable as any principle of nature.

tawhid: the unity, singleness, and universality of Allah.

In reaction, perhaps, to the luxurious lifestyles of Muslim elite, some of these seekers embraced voluntary poverty, living on bread and water, dispensing with furniture, and wearing simple garments made of rough, uncarded wool, which is called suf in Arabic, for which reason people began to call these people Sufis.

the pattern in Sufism: direct transmission of techniques leading to enlightenment from master to mureed, as would-be Sufis were called.

Ghazali identified twenty premises on which Greek and Greco-Islamic philosophy depended, then used syllogistic logic to dismantle each one. His most consequential argument, to my mind, was his attack on the notion of cause-and-effect relationships among material phenomena. No such connections exist, according to Ghazali: we think fire causes cotton to burn, because fire is always there when cotton burns. We mistake contiguity for causality.

Actually, says Ghazali, it’s God who causes cotton to burn, since He is the first and only cause of all things. The fire just happens to be there.

The practice of relegating women to an unseen private realm derived, it seems, from Byzantine and Sassanid practices.

In that cataclysmic transition, the new rulers lured all the Umayyads into a room and clubbed them to death. Well, not quite all. One Umayyad nobleman skipped the party. This man, the last of the Umayyads, a young fellow by the name of Abdul Rahman, fled Damascus

Abdul Rahman impressed the locals in Spain.

Andalusian Spain became an independent state, separate from the rest of the khalifate. So the Muslim story was now unfolding from two centers.

Shi’i warriors from Tunisia managed to seize control of Egypt and declared themselves the true khalifas of Islam because (they said) they were descended from the Prophet’s daughter Fatima, for which reason they called themselves the Fatimids. These rulers built themselves a brand new capital they called Qahira, the Arabic word for “victory.” In the West, it is spelled Cairo.

Like Rome, the Abbasid khalifate was plagued by nomadic barbarians north of its borders. In the west, the barbarians of the north were Germans; here they were Turks. (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.)

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.

On the Muslim side, the absence of unity was breathtaking. It stemmed partly from the fact that the Muslims saw no ideological dimension to the violence, at first. They felt themselves under attack not as Muslims but as individuals, as cities, as mini states.

Some of the murders were not proven to have been the work of the Assassins, but once the terrorist narrative had been reified, the terrorists didn’t need to commit all the terrorist acts. They could claim any murder that bore their stamp and use it to forward their cause.

Historians traditionally count eight Crusades over the course of two hundred years, but really there was at least a trickle of crusaders arriving and leaving at any given time during those years. So it’s probably more accurate to say that the Crusades lasted about two hundred years, with eight periods during which the traffic swelled, usually because some monarch or coalition of monarchs organized a campaign.

We often hear about the Mongol “hordes,” a word that evokes pictures of howling savages swarming over the horizon by the millions to overwhelm their victims with sheer numbers. In fact, horde is simply the Turkic word for “military camp.” The Mongols did not actually field incomparably huge armies. They won battles with strategy, ferocity, and, yes, technology. For