Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

World history, after all, is not a chronological list of every damn thing that ever happened;

In short, less than a year before September 11, 2001, the consensus of expert opinion was telling me that Islam was a relatively minor phenomenon whose impact had ended long before the Renaissance.

In both histories, the great early empire fragments because it simply grows too big. The decaying empire is then attacked by nomadic barbarians from the north—but in the Islamic world, “the north” refers to the steppes of Central Asia and in that world the nomadic barbarians are not the Germans but the Turks. In both, the invaders dismember the big state into a patchwork of smaller kingdoms permeated throughout by a single, unifying religious orthodoxy: Catholicism in the West, Sunni Islam in the East.

But what if we look at world history through Islamic eyes? Are we apt to regard ourselves as stunted versions of the West, developing toward the same endpoint, but less effectually? I think not.

When you chart the hot spots of the world—Kashmir, Iraq, Chechnya, the Balkans, Israel and Palestine, Iraq—you’re staking out the borders of some entity that has vanished from the maps but still thrashes and flails in its effort not to die.

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 was Persia, which had already conquered “the world.”

With Alexander, the Mediterranean narrative broke forcefully in upon the Middle World one. Alexander dreamed of blending the two into one: of uniting Europe and Asia.

Dar al-Islam, which means “the realm of submission (to God)” but also, by implication, “the realm of peace.”

When Prophet Mohammed died, it was like a saint dying but it was also like a king dying. He was irreplaceable, yet someone had to take his place. Without a leader, the Umma could not hold together.

Mohammed had no sons.

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.

the idea that the world was divided into the mutually exclusive realms of Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, “the realm of peace” and “the realm of war.” This schema depicted Islam as an oasis of brotherhood and peace surrounded by a universe of chaos and hatred. Anything a person did to expand Dar al-Islam constituted action in the cause of peace, even fighting and bloodshed, because it shrank the realm of war.

The idea of lower taxes and greater religious freedom struck Christians as a pretty good deal, and so Muslims faced little or no local resistance in former Byzantine territory.

People have proven time and again that they will attack extraordinary obstacles and endure tremendous hardships if they think the effort will impart meaning to their lives. The human hunger for meaning is a craving as fundamental as food and drink. Everyday life gives people little opportunity for this sort of nourishment, which is one reason why people get swept along by narratives that cast them as key players in apocalyptic dramas.

Let me not minimize a final factor intertwined with the hunger for meaning. War gave Muslims opportunities for plunder.

Muslims insisted on holding political power but not on their subjects being Muslims.

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.”

Islamic rule was acquiring hints of possible oppression and corruption.

The Muslim enterprise didn’t have quite the same flavor as it had in Omar’s day, but who could argue with prosperity?

If piety consisted of penance and prayer, he had to rank among the top ten most pious men of his time, but Othman saw no ethical ambiguity in people making money, so long as their moneymaking promoted overall well being.

What a strange moment this must have been for Ali. For twenty-five agonizing years he must have felt like he was watching the ship drift off course.

Both sides claimed to be fighting for truth, justice, and the Islamic way, yet each was calling on Muslims to fight other Muslims. This wasn’t what they called jihad back in the good old days!

Now he was . . . negotiating? With Mu’awiya, the utter embodiment of anti-Muslim materialism? What kind of God-gifted avatar of Allah-guided truth was he?

And so the Umayyad dynasty began.

To me it sounds like Islam lost its way here

What is Shi’ism? One often hears it summed up as if it were just another quarrel about dynastic succession, like the battles between Maud and Stephen in twelfth-century England. If that had really been the case, the movement would have faded out after Ali died. Who today calls himself a Maudist or a Stephenist? Who today even cares which of these two had the more legitimate claim to the English throne? Ali, however, kept gaining new adherents after his death. The ranks of his Shi’i kept on swelling. People who were not even born when Ali died grew up to embrace his cause and shape their identities around the conviction that he should have been the first khalifa. How could this be?

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 a soul-saving grace, some living figure who would keep the world warm and pure. They adopted the term imam for this reassuring figure. His presence in the world ensured the continuing possibility of miracle.

When Mohammed as Messenger denounced the malefactors of great wealth who ignored the poor and exploited the widows and orphans, the Umayyads were some of the main people he was talking about.

But once Islam began to look like a juggernaut, the Umayyads converted, joined the Umma, and climbed to the top of the new society; and here they were again, back among the new elite.

Omar had done them a great favor by sanctifying offensive warfare as jihad so long as it was conducted against infidels in the cause of Islam. This definition of jihad enabled the new Muslim rulers to maintain a perpetual state of war on their frontiers, a policy with pronounced benefits.

Jesus may have healed the blind and raised the dead. Moses may have turned a staff into a snake and led an exodus for which the Red Sea parted. Visible miracles of this ilk proved the divinity or divine sponsorship of those prophets. Mohammed, however, never really dealt in supernatural miracles such as those. He never solicited followers with displays of power that contradicted the laws of nature.

All this came at a price however, the usual price of stability, which ensures that whatever is the case one day is even more the case the next day. The rich got richer.

Many Persians accepted Islam, but they would not be Arabized. Those who did convert to Islam presented the society with a challenging religious contradiction. Islam claimed to make every Muslim equal to every other. Join the Umma and you join an egalitarian brotherhood—such was the promise of this new religion, this powerful movement. But the Arab-dominated society forged by the Umayyads couldn’t deliver on the promise. Arabs were the rulers now; they were the aristocrats. Far from making even a show of equal status for all, Umayyad society spawned formal institutions to discriminate among various gradations of folk in society and to keep them layered:

In fact, quite probably, no ruler anywhere could ever meet their standards, period, so the Kharijites could preach revolution no matter what the circumstances. As long as anyone was in power, someone would feel oppressed, and as long as anyone felt oppressed, Kharijite agitators could use their doctrines to fuel insurgencies.

Islamic version of socialists

This was just one of many angry little hard-core bands of antigovernment conspirators active at this time, all preaching some version of the same message: the community had fallen off the track, history had gone off course, the Messenger’s mission had been subverted, and toppling the Umayyads and empowering a member of the Prophet’s family in their stead would set everything right again. Let me note that this narrative has been reinvented again and again in the Muslim world over the course of history, and some version of it is being recited even today, by revolutionaries who have substituted “the West” for “the Umayyads.”

In short, while Mohammed was alive, the Islamic project had an organic vitality. It was constantly in the process of unfolding and evolving. Any element of it might change at any time.

I emphasize social power, because in Muslim society, which is so community oriented, social pressure—the power of shaming—might be the most powerful of all forces, as opposed to political power, which operates through procedural rules, control of money, monopoly control of the instruments of force, and so on.

By the time a person acquired the status to question the doctrine, he would have no inclination to do so. Incorrigible dissenters who simply would not stop questioning the doctrine probably wouldn’t make it through the process. They would be weeded out early. The process by which the ulama self-generates makes it an inherently conservative class.

In its early stages, science is inherently difficulty to disentangle from theology. Each seems to have implications for the other, at least to its practitioners.

Science challenges religion because it insists on the reliability and sufficiency of its method for seeking truth: experimentation and reason without recourse to revelation.

The more rigid, mainstream scholars didn’t like the idea of a third zone, because it suggested that the moral universe wasn’t black-and-white but might have shades of gray.

If any intelligent person could weigh in on whether a law was right or wrong, based on whether it made rational sense, why would anyone need to consult scholars who had memorized every quotation ever ascribed to Prophet Mohammed?

Above all, he declared uncompromisingly that no one could know what was right or wrong on their own. They could guarantee their soul’s safety only by following in the footsteps of Mohammed and trusting strictly to revelation.

The philosopher hit Ibn Hanbal with logic, the scholar struck back with scripture. The philosopher tied him up in knots of argument, Ibn Hanbal burst free with invocations to Allah on high. Obviously, no one could really “win” a debate of this sort because the debaters did not agree on terms.

Still he clung to his principles: never would he let reason trump revelation, never!

“Is this all the revelation comes to in the end— a set of rules? Because I’m not feeling it. Is there nothing more to Islam?”

But the sober Sufis began to back away from him, because Hallaj was saying things like, “My turban is wrapped around nothing but God.” And again, “Inside my clothes you’ll find nothing but God.” And finally, in case someone didn’t get his point, “I am God.”

Take it however you will, the argument against causality undermines the whole scientific enterprise. If nothing actually causes anything else, why bother to observe the natural world in search of meaningful patterns? If God is the only cause, the only way to make sense of the world is to know God’s will, which means that the only thing worth studying is the revelation, which means that the only people worth listening to are the ulama.

Ghazali allowed that mathematics, logic, and even the natural sciences could lead to true conclusions, but wherever they conflicted with the revelations, they were wrong.

When he came out of it many months later, he declared that the scholars had it right, but the Sufis had it righter: The Law was the Law and you had to follow it, but you couldn’t reach Allah through book learning and good behavior alone. You needed to open your heart, and only the Sufis knew how to get the heart opened up.

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