Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

Islam in Modern History by the late Wilfred Cantwell Smith, a professor of religion at McGill and Harvard. Smith published his book in 1957, so the “modern history” of which he spoke had ended more than forty years earlier, and yet his analyses struck me as remarkably—in fact disturbingly—pertinent to the history unfolding in 2002.

Sayyid Jamaluddin-i-Afghan.

he espoused “pan-Islamism,”

World history is always the story of how “we” got to the here and now, so the shape of the narrative inherently depends on who we mean by “we” and what we mean by “here and now.” Western world history traditionally presumes that here and now is democratic industrial (and postindustrial) civilization. In the United States the further presumption holds that world history leads to the birth of its founding ideals of liberty and equality and to its resultant rise as a superpower leading the planet into the future. This premise establishes a direction for history and places the endpoint somewhere down the road we’re traveling now. It renders us vulnerable to the supposition that all people are moving in this same direction, though some are not quite so far along—either because they started late, or because they’re moving more slowly—for which reason we call their nations “developing countries.”

When the ideal future envisioned by postindustrialized, Western democratic society is taken as the endpoint of history, the shape of the narrative leading to here-and-now features something like the following stages:

1. Birth of civilization (Egypt and Mesopotamia) 2. Classical age (Greece and Rome) 3. The Dark Ages (rise of Christianity) 4. The Rebirth: Renaissance and Reformation 5. The Enlightenment (exploration and science) 6. The Revolutions (democratic, industrial, technological) 7. Rise of Nation-States: The Struggle for Emp...

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. For one thing, we would see a different threshold dividing all of time into “before” and “after”: the year zero for us would be the year of Prophet Mohammed’s migration from Mecca to Medina, his Hijra, which gave birth to the Muslim community. For us, this community would embody the m...

But in recent centuries, we would feel that something had gone awry with the flow. We would know the community had stopped expanding, had grown confused, had found itself permeated by a disruptive crosscurrent, a competing historical direction. As heirs to Muslim tradition, we would be forced to look for the meaning of history in defeat instead of triumph. We would feel conflicted between two impulses: changing our notion of “civilize...

If the stunted present experienced by Islamic society is taken as the here-and-now to be explained by the narrative of world history, then the story might break ...

1. Ancient Times: Mesopotamia and Persia 2. Birth of Islam 3. The Khalifate: Quest for Universal Unity 4. Fragmentation: Age of the Sultanates 5. Catastrophe: Crusaders and Mongols 6. Rebirth: The Three-Empires Era 7. Permeation of East by West 8. The Reform Mo...

Literary critic Edward Said has argued that over the centuries, the West has constructed an “Orientalist” fantasy of the Islamic world, in which a sinister sense of “otherness” is ...

Throughout much of history, the West and the core of what is now the Islamic world have been like two separate universes, each preoccupied with its own internal affairs, each assuming itself to be the center of human history, each living out a different narrative—until the late seventeenth century when the two narratives began to intersect. At that point, one or the other had to

give way because the two narratives were crosscurrents to each other. The West being more powerful, its current prevailed and churned the other one under.

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.

Destiny Disrupted is neither a textbook nor a scholarly thesis.

accounts, because they are mainly concerned to dig up what “really happened.” My aim is mainly to convey what Muslims think happened, because that’s what has motivated Muslims over the ages and what makes their role in world history intelligible.

Asia Minor (what we now call Turkey),

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.

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.

It worked for a while, but not forever. 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. They were terrific urban planners and arc...

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 ...

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 rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,” comes from ancient Persia.

The Persians also employed a lot of...

citizens of the empire found Persian rule basically benign. The well-oiled imperial machinery kept the peace, which let ordinary folks get on with the business of raising families, growing crops, and making useful goods.

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 tw...

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.

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.

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 the hostility toward representation in religious art that reemerged forcefully in Islam.

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 deities with equal power inhabited the universe, and human beings were the rope in a tug of war between them.

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 the civilized world, cities that implicitly belonged to the Persians, even though they were too far away to rule directly. Empero...

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 dimwitted son Xerxes decided to avenge...

Alexandria is the obvious example, but a less obvious one is Kandahar—famous now because the Taliban consider it their capital. Kandahar was originally called “Iskandar,” which is how “Alexander” was pronounced in the east, but the “Is” dropped away, and “Kandar” softened into “Kandahar.”

The eastern portion of the Roman Empire, headquartered in Constantinople, continued to hang on. The locals still called this entity Rome but to later historians it looked like something new, so retrospectively they gave it a new name: the Byzantine Empire.

Orthodox Christianity was centered here. Unlike Western Christianity, this church had no pope-like figure. Each city with a sizable Christian population had its own top bishop, a “metropolitan,” and all the metropolitans were supposedly equal, although the top bishop of Constantinople was more equal than most. Above them all, however, stood the emperor.

once eastern Rome became the Byzantine Empire it more or less passed out of Western history.

Many will dispute this statement—the Byzantine Empire was Christian, after all. Its subjects spoke Greek,

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

Compared to ancient Rome, the Byzantine Empire didn’t wield much clout, but in its own region it was a superpower, largely because it had no competition and because its walled capital of Constantinople was probably the most impregnable city the world had ever known.

IN THE LATE sixth century of the Christian age, a number of cities flourished along the Arabian coast as hotbeds of commerce. The Arabians received goods at Red Sea ports and took camel caravans across the desert to Syria and Palestine, transporting spice and cloth and other trade goods. They went north, south, east, and west; so they knew all about the Christian world and its ideas, but also about Zoroaster and his ideas. A number of Jewish tribes lived among the Arabs; they had come here after the Romans had driven them out of Palestine. Both the Arabs and the Jews were Semitic and traced their descent to Abraham (and through him to Adam). The Arabs saw themselves as the line descended from Abraham’s son Ishmael and his second wife, Hagar. The stories commonly associated with the Old Testament—Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and his ark, Joseph and Egypt, Moses and the pharaoh, and the rest of them—were part of Arab tradition too. Although most of the Arabs were pagan polytheists at this point and the Jews had remained resolutely monotheistic, the two groups were otherwise more or less indistinguishable in terms of culture and lifestyle: the Jews of this area spoke Arabic, and their tribal structure resembled that of the Arabs. Some Arabs were nomadic Bedouins who lived in the desert, but others were town dwellers. Mohammed, the prophet of Islam, was born and raised in the highly cosmopolitan town of Mecca, near the Red Sea coast.

Meccans were wide-ranging merchants and traders, but their biggest, most prestigious business was religion. Mecca had temples to at least a hundred pagan deities

Pilgrims streamed in to visit the sites, perform the rites, and do a little business on the side, so Mecca had a busy tourist industry with inns, taverns...

Mohammed was born around the year 570. The exact date is unknown because no one was paying much attention to him at the time. His father was a poor man who died when Mohammed was still in the womb, leaving Mohammed’s mother virtually penniless. Then, when Mohammed was only six, his mother died too. Although Mohammed was a member of the Quraysh, the most powerful tribe in Mecca, he got no status out of it because he belonged to one of the tribe’s poorer clans, the Banu (“clan” or “house of ”) Hashim. One gets the feeling that this boy grew up feeling quite keenly his uncertain status as an orphan. He was not abandoned, however; his close relatives took him in. He lived with his grandfather until the old man died and then with his uncle Abu Talib, who raised him like a son—yet the fact remained that he was a ...

When Mohammed was twenty-five, a wealthy widowed businesswoman named Khadija hired him to manage her caravans and conduct business for her. Arab society was not kind to women as a rule, but Khadija had inherited her husband’s wealth, and the fact that she held on to it...

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 be...

As an adult, then, the orphan built quite a successful personal and business life. He acquired a reputation for his diplomatic skills, and quarreling parties often called upon him to act as an arbiter. Still, as Mohammed approached the age of forty, he began to suffer what we might now call a midlife crisis. He grew troubled about the meaning of life. Looking around, he saw a society bursting with wealth, and yet amid all the bustling prospe...