Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

one of the most seminal events of modern history, at least as seen through Islamic eyes: Israel’s Six Day War against her Arab neighbors.

In the first twenty-four hours, Israel destroyed virtually the entire Egyptian air force on the ground.

hardcore revolutionaries should properly be called “jihadists” rather than simply “Islamists.” Their ideology was plainly off the charts for the vast majority of Muslims, hardly even recognizable as Islam to most: it was a sliver of Islamism, itself a sliver of political Islam, itself one branch of Islam as a whole.

jihadist discourse, which typically focuses, not on freedom and its opposite, nor on democracy and its opposite, but on discipline versus decadence, on moral purity versus moral corruption,

what looks from one side like empowering each individual looks, from the other side, like disempowering whole communities.

The conflict wracking the modern world is not, I think, best understood as a “clash of civilizations,” if that proposition means we’re-different-so-we-must-fight-until-there’s-only-one-of-us. It’s better understood as the friction generated by two mismatched world histories intersecting.