Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

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...

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 i...

When Hussein went to Karbala, he had no chance of winning. His only hope lay in the possibility of God producing a miracle—but then, the continuing possibility of miracle was the principle he embodied. He and his band chose death as symbolic refusal to disavow this possibility, and, in the final analysi...

To this day, Shi’i around the world commemorate the anniversary of Hussein’s death with a day of cathartic mourning. They gather in “lamentation houses” to recount the story of the martyrdom, a religious narrative that casts Husse...

By his martyrdom, Hussein has gained a place next to God and earned the privilege of interceding for sinners. Those who embrace him and believe in him will be saved and go to heaven, no matter what transgressions may foul their record. Hussein gave Shi’i this back door to the miracle they had hoped for all along. Believing in Hussein could not get you...

The Umayyad ascension may have ended the birth of Islam as a religious event, but it launched the evolution of Islam as a civilization and a political empire. In the annals of conventional Western history, the Umayyads marked the beginning of Muslim greatness. They put Islam on the map by kicking off a golden age that lasted long after they themselves had fallen.

Whatever his shortcomings as a saint, Mu’awiya possessed tremendous political skill. The very qualities that helped him defeat the tormented Ali made him a successful monarch, and his reign institutionalized practices and procedures that would hold an Islamic empire together for centuries.

This is all very ironic because, let us not forget, when Mohammed’s prophetic career began, the Umayyads were a leading clan among the rich elite of Mecca. 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. When Mohammed still lived in Mecca, the Umayyads outdid each other in harassing his followers. They helped plot the assassination of Mohammed...

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...

among the elite of a city. Now, they were the top elite of a global empire. I’m sure many among them were scratching their heads, trying to remember what th...

As rulers, the Umayyads possessed some powerful instruments of policy inherited from their predecessors, especially Omar and Othman. 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 ...

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 (everythin...

Perpetual war on the frontiers helped to reify this concept of war and peace, first of all, by making the narrative seem true—the frontier was generally a violent place, while the interior was generally a place of peace and security—and second, by helping to make it actually be true. By unifying the Arab tribes against a surrounding Other, this concept of jihad reduced the incessant internecine warfare that marked ...

Perpetual war also worked to confirm Islam’s claim to divine sanction, so long as it kept leading to victory. From the start, astonishing military and political success had functioned as Islam’s core confirming miracle.

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.

His one supernatural feat, really, was ascending to heaven on a white horse from the city of Jerusalem, and this was not a miracle performed for the multitudes. It happened to him unseen by any public, and he reported it later to his companions. People could believe him or not, as they wished; it didn’t impact his mission, because he wasn’t offering his ascent to heaven as proof that his message was true.

No, Mohammed’s miracle (aside from the Qur’an itself and the persuasive impact it had on so many who heard it) was that Muslims won battles even when outnumbered three to one. This miracle continued to unfold under the first khalifas as Muslim-ruled territory kept expanding at a breathtaki...

The miracle continued under the Umayyads. The victories didn’t come as fast, nor as dramatically, but then, the opportunity for truly dramatic victories diminished over time simply because Muslims rarely found themselves as outnumbered as they were at first. The bottom line was that the victories kept coming and the territory kept expanding—it never shrank. So long as this was true, perpetual war continued to confirm the truth of Islam, which fed the fervor that enabled the victories, which...

philanthropic religious foundations called waqfs.

In theory, a waqf could not be shut down by its founder. Once born, it owned itself and had a sovereign status. Think of it as a Muslim version of a nonprofit corporation set up for charitable purposes. Under Muslim law, the waqfs could not be taxed. They collected money from donors and distributed it to the poor, built and ran mosques, operated schools, hospitals, and orphanages, and generally provided the burgeoning upper classes with a means for expressing their religious and charitable urges and to feel good about themselves even while lolling in wealth.

Of course, someone had to administer a waqf. Someone had to conduct its business, set its policies, and manage its finances, and it couldn’t be just anyone. To possess religious credibility, a waqf had to be staffed by people known for piety and religious learning. The more famously religious its staff, the more prestigious the waqf and the more respect accrued to its founders and donors. Since the waqfs ended up controlling real estate, buildings, and endowment funds, their management offered an avenue of social mobility in Muslim society (even though many waqfs became a device by which rich families protected their wealth from taxation). If you acquired a reputation for religious scholarship, you might hope to gain a position with a waqf, which gave you status if not riches, and you didn’t have to hail from a famous family to become a famous religious scholar. You just had to have brains and a willingness to practice piety and study hard.

On the other hand, you did have to know Arabic, because it was the sacred language: to Muslims, the Qur’an itself, in Arabic, written or spoken, is the presence of God in the world: translations of the Qur’an are not the Qur’an. Besides, all the pertinent scholarly books were written in Arabic. And you did, of course, have to be Muslim. What’s more, the Umayyads soon declared Arabic the official language of government, replacing Persian in the east and Greek in the wes...

When I say Islamification, I mean that growing numbers of people in territories ruled by the khalifa abandoned their previous faiths—Zoroastrian, Christian, pagan, or whatever—and converted to Islam. Some no doubt converted to evade the poll tax on non-Muslims, but this probably wasn’t the whole story, because after conversi...

Some may have converted in pursuit of career opportunities, but this, too, can be overstated, because conversion really only opened up the religion-related careers. The unconverted could still own land, operate workshops, sell goods, and pursue business opportunities. They could work for the government too, if they had skills to offer. The Muslim elite did not hesitate to take from each according to his abilities. If you knew medicine, you could be a doctor; if you knew building, you could be an architect. In the Islamic empire, you could become rich and famous even if you were a Christian or a Jew, the “Abrahamic” religions, or eventually Zoroastrian, even though this was more distant from Islam. But most people, I think, in the world Muslims came to rule, converted to Islam because it looked like the Truth. Certainly, no other force or movement in the Middle World at this time had the muscular self-confidence and the aura of inexorable success of Islam. Who would not want to joi...

But the core creed was much more loaded than it may have looked at first blush. “No god but God”—that phrase alone has engendered countless thousands of volumes of commentary, and no one has yet come to the end of what it means. And on top of that: “Mohammed is his messenger!” Sign on to that one, and you’ve accepted everything Mohammed prescribed as Messenger. You’ve committed yourself to five daily prayers; ...

Mohammed established the primacy of five broad duties, now called the five pillars of Islam: shahadah, to attest that there is only one God and Mohammed is his messenger; salaat (or namaz), to perform a certain prayer ritual five times every day; zakat, to give a certain percentage of one’s wealth to the poor each year; sawm (or roza), to fast from dawn to dusk during the month of Ramadan each year; and hajj, to make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in a lifetime, if possible.

Notice both the simplicity and “externalness” of this program. Only one of the five pillars is a belief, a creed, and even that is given in terms of an action: “to attest.” The other four pillars are very specific things to 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.

If a scholar had exhausted Qur’an, hadith, qiyas, and ijma, then and only then could he move on to the final stage of ethical and legislative thinking, ijtihad, which means “free independent thinking based on reason.” Scholars and judges could apply this type of thinking only in areas not derived directly from revelation or covered by established precedents. And over the centuries, even those cracks grew narrower, because once an eminently qualified scholar weighed in on some subject, his pronouncements also joined the canon. Scholars who came later had to master not just Qur’an, hadith, authentication, qiyas, and ijma, but also this ever-growing corpus of precedents. Only then were they qualified to exercise ijtihad!

Here, the Muslims discovered the works of Plotinus, a philosopher who had said that everything in the universe was connected like the parts of a single organism, and all of it added up to a single mystical One, from which everything had emanated and to which everything would return.

In this concept of the One, Muslims found a thrilling echo of Prophet Mohammed’s apocalyptic insistence on the oneness of Allah. Better yet, when they looked into Plotinus, they found that he had constructed his system with rigorous logic from a small number of axiomatic principles, which aroused the hope that the revelations of Islam might be provable with logic.

Plato had described the material world as an illusory shadow cast by a “real” world that consisted of unchangeable and eternal “forms”: thus, every real chair is but an imperfect copy of some single “ideal” chair that exists only in the realm of universals. Following from Plato, the Muslim philosophers proposed that each human being was a mixture of the real and the illusory. Before birth, they explained, the soul dwelt in a realm of Platonic universals. In life, it got intertwined with body, which was made up of matter. At death, the two separated, the body returning to the world of all matter while the soul returned to Allah, its original home.

For all their devotion to Plato, the Muslim philosophers had tremendous admiration for Aristotle, as well: for his logic, his techniques of classification, and his powerful grasp of particularities. Following from Aristotle, the Muslim philosophers categorized and classified with obsessive logic.

Then around 560 AH (1165 CE) the brilliant and charismatic Temujin was born. History knows him as Chengez Khan (in the West, Genghis Khan), which means “universal ruler,” a title he did not take on until he was about forty years old.

In Islam, however, the emphasis was not on the personal salvation of the isolated soul but on construction of the perfect community. People were not sinners to be saved but servants enjoined to obedience. They were born

innocent and capable of ascent to the highest nobility but also of descent to the lowest depravity.2 The mureeds in a Sufi order joined up not to be saved but to attain a higher state; their rituals were aimed not at punishing their bodies but at focusing their energies on Allah alone; if they fasted, for instance, it was not to mortify their flesh but to strengthen their self-discipline. They saw no equation between celibacy and spirituality and did not separate from the world. Sufis and would-be Sufis usually plied trades, bought and sold, married, reared children, and went to war.

one could have found you and brought you back. Why did you return?” “Because I said I would, and I am a Muslim,” the young man replied. “How could I give the world cause to say that Muslims no longer keep their promises?” The crowd turned to Abu Dharr. “Did you know this young man? Did you know of his noble character? Is this why you agreed to be his proxy?” “No,” said Abu Dharr, “I never met him before in my life, but how could I be the one to let the world say Muslims are no longer compassionate?” The victim’s relatives now dropped to their knees. “Don’t execute him,” they pleaded. “How can we be the ones to make the world say there is no forgiveness in Islam?”

Jalaludin and the beggar became inseparable. These two bonded passionately but on a purely spiritual level, bonded so utterly that Rumi began to sign his poetry with his master’s name: his lyrics from this period have been collected as The Works of Shams-i Tabrez. Before Rumi met Shams, he was a respected writer whose work might have been read for a hundred years. After he met Shams, he became one of the greatest mystic poets in the history of literature. After a number of years, Shams mysteriously disappeared, and Rumi went on to compose a single thousand-page poem called Mathnawi Ma’nawi (The Spiritual Manuscript). In the famous opening passage, Rumi poses a question: why is the melody of the flute so piercingly sad? Then he answers his own question: because the flute started out as a reed, growing by the river bank, rooted in soil. When it was made into a flute, it was severed from its roots. The sorrow keening in its song is the reed’s wistful memory of its lost connection to the source. In the next thirty thousand couplets, Rumi delivers hundreds of stories in a language thrumming with eroticized religiosity, illustrating how we human flutes can recover our connection to the source. Rumi remains influential, even in the English-speaking world, where translations of his work outsell those of every other poet.

In 1258 CE, the very year Hulagu destroyed Baghdad, a boy named Othman was born to a leading ghazi family in Anatolia. Othman’s descendants were called the Othmanlis, or Ottomans, as people in the West pronounced it, and they ended up building a mighty empire.

at odds with the attitudes fostered by the church since the fall of Rome, for in the Christendom of the Middle Ages, the prevailing doctrine declared the material world to be evil. The only point of being here was to get out of here,

On Halloween night, 1517, Luther nailed an inflammatory document to the door of a church in Wittenberg in which he set forth ninety-five “theses,” ninety-five objections to the Church and its doings. Luther’s paper was an overnight sensation, and it sparked the Protestant Reformation.

• Salvation could be a palpable, right-here/right-now experience.

Salvation could be achieved through faith alone. • No person needed an intermediary to connect with God. • People could get everything they needed to know about religion from the Bible; they didn’t need to know Latin or the conclusions of church councils or the pronouncements of priests and scholars.

In some ways, the Protestant Reformation came out of the same sorts of dissatisfactions and hungers that had given birth to Sufism. In the West, however, no Ghazali appeared to synthesize orthodox dogmas with the quest for personal religious breakthrough.

In other regards, the Protestant Reformation resembled the movements of Ibn Hanbal and Ibn Taymiyah—the exact opposite of Sufism. Like those Muslim theologians, Protestant reformers sought to delegitimize all later accretions of doctrine and go back to the original source: the Bible. The Book.

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. In the West, the religious reformers who broke the hegemony of the Catholic Church didn’t do so to raise up some monolithic new church but to empower the individual. Such a quest in no way pitted them against Christianity itself, because 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 s...

Separating inquiries about nature from the framework of faith enabled Europeans to come up with a dazzling array of scientific concepts and discoveries in the two centuries following the Reformation.

In 1488, the Portuguese explorer Bartholomew Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope, proving at last that a ship could sail from the Atlantic Coast to the Indian Ocean.

In this period of colonization, “European civilization” never went to war with “Islamic civilization,” and that’s one key to understanding all that followed. In fact, after 1500, western Europeans arrived in the eastern Islamic world mainly as traders. What could be less threatening? Trade is what people do instead of making war. Trade—why, it’s practically a synonym for peace!

Nor did the Europeans come in great numbers. The first European expedition to reach India by sea was led by Portuguese aristocrat Vasco da Gama and consisted of four ships and a total crew of 171 men. They arrived at

Calicut on the west coast of India in 1498 and asked the local Hindu ruler if they might set up a trading post along the coast there and do a little buying, maybe a little selling. The ruler said sure. Why wouldn’t he? If these strangers wanted to buy cloth, or raw cotton, or sugar or whatever, why would he say no? His ...