Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

The new humanists did not think of themselves as competing with Christianity; they were hardly godless atheists; but Church officials saw a threat in the new forms of thought. They could feel where all this was going.

Then one day, a great insight hit Luther. He could not have salvation until he believed himself saved. If he lacked this belief, it didn’t matter what the priest said or did. If he had this belief, it didn’t matter what the priest said or did. Which raised a big, big question: of what use was the priest? Why was he even in the mix?

A summary of Luther's life ha

But ultimately, the Protestant Reformation was nothing like anything that had happened in Islam. Protestant Reformers rebelled against the Church and the pope, but in Islam, there was no church or pope to rebel against.

Christianity was inherently about the individual: a plan for the salvation of each person. Islam, however, was a plan for how a community should work; any reform movement that sought to secure for each individual the right to practice the religion as he or she thought best would inherently go up against the core doctrines of Islam itself.

By empowering the individual, the Protestant Reformation had consequences that went far beyond religion. At some level, breaking the hold of “the Church” amounted to breaking the hold of any church.

Probably none of the reformers thought they were encouraging people to think outside the box on matters of faith.

And legitimizing the authority of individuals to think what they wanted about God implicitly legitimized their authority to think what they wanted about anything.

If the Church had still been ubiquitous and all-powerful, every idea would have required that an addendum be accounted for: how does it relate to the faith? If one were thinking, “I wonder why everything falls down instead of up,” the voice of the church inside one’s conscience would immediately ask, “and how will the explanation help me to be a better Christian?” There’s only so far and so fast a mind can roam if it’s dragging around this baggage all the time.

part. A lot of nature’s puzzles were like that: they became much easier to explain if you didn’t have to square your explanation with the dictates of the faith.

It’s ironic, therefore, that he himself felt his proudest accomplishment was remaining celibate all his life.

The momentous thing was not so much the discoveries themselves as the fact that in the West they persisted, they accumulated, and they reinforced one another until they brought about a complete and coherent new way to view and approach the world, the scientific view, which enabled the West’s later explosive advances in technology.

Why did all this happen in the West but not in the East? Possibly because Muslims made their great scientific discoveries just as their social order started crumbling, whereas the West made its great scientific discoveries just as its long-crumbled social order was starting to recover and in the wake of a religious reformation that broke the grip of church dogma on human thought, empowering individuals to speculate freely.

So later, when the West went east, it was a case of nation-states, hard and sharp as knives, cutting into empires, loose and soft as bread.

which reduced the vigor of the empire because it meant the experts and specialists who ran the empire were no longer drawn exclusively from those who showed early promise but also included dullards with rich and important parents.

the sort of thing that makes religious conservatives rail about the moral fabric of society and the importance of restoring old-fashioned values like discipline and respect for elders.

If they sought the approval of the ulama they would be conceding ultimate authority to the ayatollahs; if they asserted their own authority as supreme, they would have to forego the ulama’s approval and in that case rule without popular legitimacy.

Europeans never invaded Persia, never made concerted war on it. They just came to sell, to buy, to work, to “help.” But there they were when things came apart. And like opportunistic viruses that lurk in the body unnoticed but flourish into illness when the immune system breaks down, the Europeans flowed into whatever cracks opened up in the fragmenting society, growing ever more powerful as the cracks grew wider, until at last they were in command.

Not a flattering metaphor for the West

In Bengal, where the British elbowed out all other Europeans, the East India Company pretty much destroyed the Bengali crafts industry, but hardly noticed itself doing so. It was simply buying up lots of raw material at very good prices. People found more profit in selling raw material to the British than in using those materials to make their own goods.

Essentially, they auctioned off their economy to foreigners.

But what about the Egyptians? Who were they? What part did they play? Did they welcome Napoleon? Help him? Did he have to conquer them? Did they play any part in the battle between France and Britain? Who did they side with? What happened after the Europeans left? Western histories don’t address these questions much, focusing mainly on the clash of Britain and France. It’s almost as if the Egyptians weren’t there.

Typical approach of Western textbooks. We're just the backdrop, the pawns

As soon as the U.S. Civil War ended, the price of cotton dropped and Egypt was ruined.

Duval told him France did not discuss money with Arabs. The governor slapped Duval in the face with . . . a fly swatter. What a blow to French honor!

By 1850, Europeans controlled every part of the world that had once called itself Dar al-Islam. They lived in these countries as an upper class, they ruled them directly or decided who would rule, they controlled the resources, they dictated the policies, and they circumscribed the daily lives of their people.

The Europeans were scarcely even aware that there had been a struggle and that they had won. But Muslims noticed, because it’s always harder to ignore a rock you’re under than a rock you’re on.

The same could not be said for the new overlords. The Europeans came wrapped in certainty about their way of life and peddling their own ideas of ultimate truth. They didn’t challenge Islam so much as ignore it, unless they were missionaries, in which case they simply tried to convert the Muslims. If they noticed Islam, they didn’t bother to debate it (missionaries are not in the debating business) but only smiled at it as one would at the toys of a child or the quaint relics of a more primitive people. How maddening for Muslim cognoscenti! And yet, what could Muslims do about it?

Bleck!

And yet by the end of the eighteenth century, Muslims looked around and saw with dawning horror that they had been conquered: from Bengal to Istanbul, they were subservient to foreigners in every aspect of their lives, in their own cities and towns and neighborhoods and in their very homes.

With this question looming over the Muslim world, movements to revive Islam could not be extricated from the need to resurrect Muslim power.

From Medina the youngster made his way to the cosmopolitan city of Basra on the Persian Gulf, and what this ultimate country boy saw in Basra—the clamorous diversity of opinion, the many schools of thought, the numerous interpretations of the Holy Word, the crowds, the lights, the noise—appalled him. This, he decided, was the sort of excrescence that was making Islam weak.

The purpose of life was to follow the Law.

And who were the enemies of Islam? According to Wahhab’s doctrines, those who did not believe in Islam were, of course, potential enemies but not the most crucial offenders. If they agreed to live peacefully under Muslim rule, they could be tolerated. The enemies of real concern were slackards, apostates, hypocrites, and innovators.

Islam was the last of the revealed religions because it was the beginning of the age of reason-based religions.

Modernization, he said, didn’t have to mean Westernization:

It wasn’t some dysfunction in these societies that generated their indifference to potentially world-changing technologies, quite the opposite. It was something working too well that led them into “a high-level equilibrium trap” (to borrow a phrase from historian Mark Elvin.1) Necessity, it turns out, isn’t really the mother of invention; it’s the mother of the process that turns an invention into a product, and in late-eighteenth-century Europe, that mother was ready.

And who wouldn’t want to be a shoe tycoon? Or a spoon tycoon or any kind of tycoon? Of course, this process left countless artisans and craftspeople out of work, but this is where nineteenth-century Europe differed from tenth-century China. In Europe, those who had the means to install industrial machinery had no particular responsibility for those whose livelihood would be destroyed by a sudden abundance of cheap, machine-made goods.

industrialization required that a society organized universally as large networks of interconnected clans with tribal loyalties superseding most other affiliations rethink itself overnight as a universe of atomized individuals, each one making independent economic decisions based on rational self-interest and responsible only to a nuclear family.

That is, no one looking at machine-made consumer goods said, “Gee, we, too, should have a Reformation and develop a cult of individualism and then undergo a long period of letting reason erode the authority of faith while developing political institutions that encourage free inquiry so that we can happen onto the ideas of modern science while at the same time evolving an economic system built on competition among private businesses so that when our science spawns new technologies we can jump on them and thus, in a few hundred years, quite independently of Europe, make these same sorts of goods ourselves.” No, people said, “Nice goods, where can we get some?”

He and others who forged the United States—politicians, historians, philosophers, writers, thinkers, and citizens in general—asserted a nationalist idea quite distinct from the ideologies spawned in Europe. Instead of seeking nationhood in a common religion, history, traditions, customs, race, or ethnic identity, they proposed that multitudes of individuals could become “a people” by virtue of shared principles and shared allegiance to a process. It was a nationalism based on ideas, a nationalism that anyone could embrace because, in theory, it was a nation any person could become a member of, not just those who worn born into it.

the millet system became a mechanism for exacerbating existing fault lines in Ottoman society.

He urged his fellow Turks never to speak of “rights.” There were no rights, he said, only duties: the duty to hear the voice of the nation and follow its demands.

To recap—it’s worth a recap: Britain essentially promised the same territory to the Hashimites, the Saudis, and the Zionists of Europe, territory actually inhabited by still another Arab people with rapidly developing nationalist aspirations of their own—while in fact Britain and France had already secretly agreed to carve up the whole promised territory between themselves. Despite the many quibbles, qualifiers, and disclaimers offered over the years about who agreed to what and what was promised to whom, that’s the gist of the situation, and it guaranteed an explosion in the future.

What was his vision? To break the authority of the ulama in Turkey, unseat Islam as the arbiter of social life, and authorize a secular approach to the management of society. In the Western context, this makes him a “moderate.” In the Islamic context, it made him a breathtakingly radical extremist.

What I find interesting about this dress-code policy is that radical Islamists did exactly the same thing fifty years later when they came back into power in Iran and Afghanistan, except that their dress code was the opposite: suddenly, women were forced to wear head scarves and men were beaten for appearing in public without beards. But the principle of beating and imprisoning people for their clothes and grooming—this principle, both sides embraced.

Shade....

Suddenly, Muslim societies knew where they were going: the same way as the West. They were behind, of course, they would have to play desperate catch-up, but that was all the more reason to hurry, all the more reason to steam-roll over nuances and niceties like democracy and get the crash program underway—the core of which crash program was “development.”

Both were eager to make their countries more “Western” but saw no connection between this and expanding their subjects’ freedom. What they promised was not freedom but prosperity and self-respect.

that at this point, Islam as a world-historical narrative came to an end. Wrong but plausible. The Western cross-current had disrupted Muslim societies, creating the deepest angst and the most agonizing doubts.

But secular modernism was not the only reformist current to come out of the nineteenth-century Muslim world. What of the other currents? What of the Wahhabis, for example? What of Sayyid Jamaluddin’s disciples? These movements should not be confused with orthodox Islam or old-fashioned religious conservatism. They were just as new-fangled as secular modernism, just as intent on smashing the status quo.

They could see their own elites drifting away from the Muslim way of life, and boasting about it! They were to blame for Muslim weakness. In fact, if the Wahhabi narrative held water, the poverty of the rural poor was the fault of the urban rich.

Kind of DezNatish again but not

The British obliged them by helping a more compliant member of the old royal clan claim the Afghan throne, a grim despot named Nadir Shah.

The West being bad again propping up dictators

The sight of all this Egyptian envy and subservience offended his pride. He founded the Muslim Brotherhood to help Muslim boys interact healthily with one another, learn about their own culture, and acquire some self respect.

By the late thirties, then, secular leaders throughout the Muslim world, whether they held state power or spearheaded independence movements, found themselves squeezed between two sets of forces: European imperialists still pressed down on them from above; meanwhile, Islamist insurgents were pushing up from below. What was a leader to do?