Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

the original Mongol conquests had greater impact: they altered the trajectory of history. First of all, they sparked a crisis for Muslim theology, and some responses to that crisis had ramifications that we are still wrestling with today. The crisis was rooted in the fact that Muslim theologians and scholars, and indeed Muslims in general, had long felt that Islam’s military success proved its revelations true.

Muslims had never before experienced such sweeping defeats,

Intense horrors tend to spawn extreme opinions,

Ibn Taymiyah mythologized the perfection of life in that first community, referring to Mohammed’s companions as al-salaf al-salihin, “the pious (or pristine) originals.” Versions of his doctrines eventually reemerged in India and North Africa as the movement called Salafism, which is with us to this day. The word comes up often in news stories about “Islamists.” It started here, in the shadow of the Mongol holocaust.

There was another response to the centuries of breakdown that climaxed with the Mongol holocaust, a more popular and gentler response than Salafism, and this was the efflorescence of Sufism,

In Islam, however, the emphasis was not on the personal salvation of the isolated soul but on construction of the perfect community.

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 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.

Another Ottoman ruler, Bayazid I (1389-1402) launched a program called the devshirme, which consisted of bringing captured boys from Christian Europe back to his palace, raising them as Muslims, and developing them into crack soldiers. These were really just the familiar mamluks of Islamic history by another name;

mamluks were Turkish boys growing up in Arab or Persian courts, these were Christian boys growing up in a Turkish court.

The soldiers developed by the devshirme were called janissaries, a corruption of the Turkish phrase Yeni ...

The shari’a, however, was not the only law in the land. There was also the sultan’s code, a parallel legal system

Ottomans simply headed south at that point and conquered the old Arab heartland from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean, then conquered Egypt, eliminating the mamluk dynasty from history, and then went on expanding west along the North African coast.

the Safavids of Persia, the ones who blocked Ottoman expansion eastward.

Prophet Mohammed through his daughter Fatima and her husband Ali.

the Hidden Imam will appear again at the end of days, Shi’i sometimes refer to him as the Mahdi “the expected one” (a concept that exists in Sunni Islam too, but less vividly.)

The Turkish chieftains were all resolute Sunnis. Shi’ism, by contrast, had long been identified with Persian resistance to invasive aliens,

Ismail declared himself Shahanshah of Iran. Shahanshah meant “king of kings.” It was the title the Sassanid monarchs had used, and the ancient Persian monarchs before them. In rejecting the titles of “khalifa” and “sultan,” Ismail was rejecting Arab and Turkish historical tradition in favor of a nativist Persian identity.

This fusion of Shi’ism and Persian nationalism became the ideological foundation of their new empire, the core of which later became the modern nation of Iran.

Virtually no other state in the world at this time taxed the nobility, but Akbar broke the mold.

Akbar decided every religion had some truth in it and no religion had the whole truth, so he decided to take the best from each and blend them into a single new religion he called Din-i Illahi, “the God Religion.” The doctrines of this new religion included, first, that God was a single, all-powerful unity; second, that the universe was a single integrated whole reflecting its creator; third, that every person’s first religious obligation was to do no harm to others; and fourth, that people could and should model themselves on Perfect Lives, of which many examples existed—Mohammed provided such a model, said Akbar, and so did the Shi’i imams. Akbar went on to suggest modestly that he himself provided yet another. Ablaze with fervor for his new religion, Akbar built a whole new city dedicated to it. Constructed of red sandstone, Fatehpur Sikri rose in the desert around the grave and shrine of Akbar’s favorite Sufi mystic.

Movements to blend the best of Islam and Hinduism had been percolating on the subcontinent since Babur’s days, with mysticism providing the point of intersection. In 1499, for example, a man named Nanak had a religious experience that led him to declare, “There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim.” Although born Hindu, he reached toward Sufism and devoted his life to rejecting and repudiating the caste system. He launched a tradition of spiritual techniques transmitted directly from master to initiate, echoing both Hindu masters and Sufi saints. Guru Nanak’s followers ended up calling themselves Sikhs, a new religion.

The scholars in these protouniversities came to realize that most would-be students didn’t know enough to even begin studying, so they developed a set of standard courses designed to get students ready to begin, courses in rhetoric, grammar, logic, and arithmetic, for example, that were designed to teach students merely how to read, write, and think. Students who successfully completed this basic course were called baccalaureates, Latin for “beginners”; now they could begin to learn some actual subject such as theology, philosophy, medicine, or law. Today, of course, the baccalaureate is the degree one gets for graduating from a four-year liberal arts college.

Around the time of the Crusades, Catholics began to propound the doctrine that the pope was infallible.

Protestant reformers sought to delegitimize all later accretions of doctrine and go back to the original source: the Bible. The Book.

Protestant Reformers rebelled against the Church and the pope, but in Islam, there was no church or pope to rebel against.

Islam, however, was a plan for how a community should work;

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.

Francis Bacon and René Descartes, for example, overturned the Aristotelian method of inquiry and elaborated the scientific method in its stead.

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.

the Thirty Years’ War, a kind of civil war that raged all over Europe, basically over the issue of which religion was to prevail.

the European penetration of the Muslim world never amounted to a clash of civilizations (to use a term coined in the 1990s). In this period of colonization, “European civilization” never went to war with “Islamic civilization,”

And yet historians looking back can see quite clearly that Suleiman’s failure to take Vienna marked a watershed. At that moment the empire had reached its greatest extent.

The British, the French, the Russians, the Dutch and others kept moving into power vacuums in Persia not so much to conquer Persia as to block other Europeans from conquering Persia. The rivalry eventually boiled down to Russia versus Great Britain,

Urdu, a single new language derived from Hindi, Persian, and Turkish (Urdu literally means something like “soldier-camp lingo” in Turkish).

Islam won in the end, absorbing the Mongols as it had absorbed the Turks before them and the Persians before that.

by the nineteenth century, the challenge to Islam came not so much from Christianity as from a secular, humanistic world-view that evolved out of the Reformation, the mélange now often called “modernity.”

The sunna—the life of the Prophet as revealed through hadith—

In the Ottoman Empire, these modernizing moves were called Tanzimat or “reorganization measures.”

The worst possible case, then, was for moneylending to become the exclusive province of a distinct cultural minority surrounded by a vast majority. In Europe, this dynamic made victims of the Jews. In the Ottoman Empire, it was the Armenians who fell afoul of it.

Between 1894 and 1896, in eastern Anatolia, a series of anti-Armenian pogroms broke out.

the ninth-century revolutionaries who had brought the Abbasids to power called themselves the Hashimites:

Istanbul itself was occupied by British troops. Resistance movements bubbled up throughout Anatolia, coalescing around a hawk-faced general with piercing eyes. He was Mustafa Kemal, later known as Atatürk—Father of the Turks. His forces drove out all the foreigners and in 1923 he declared the birth of a new nation-state: Turkey.

Turkey was thus the first Muslim-majority country to declare itself secular and to make the separation of politics and religion an official policy.

In short, secular modernism surged up throughout the Muslim world in the 1920s, one society after another falling under the sway of this new political creed.

In China, Mao’s communist insurgency began to move against Chiang Kai-shek,

At the exact moment that India was born (August 15, 1947) so was the brand-new two-part country of Pakistan,

It was not only decolonization that came to a head after World War II, but “nation-statism.” It’s easy to forget that the organization of the world into countries is less than a century old, but in fact this process was not fully completed until this period. Between 1945 and 1975, some one hundred new countries were born, and every inch of earth finally belonged to some nation-state or other.2

Arabs who saw the Zionist project as European colonialism in thin disguise were not inventing a fantasy out of whole cloth: Zionists saw the project that way too, or at least represented it as such to the imperialist powers whose support they needed.

Arabs could not agree that both sides had a point and that the truth lay somewhere in the middle: they felt that a European solution was being imposed on them for a European problem, or more precisely that Arabs were being asked to sacrifice their land as compensation for a crime visited by Europeans on Europeans.