Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

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 Movements 9. Triumph of the Secular Modernists 10. The Islamist Reaction

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.

Settled farmers would build irrigation systems supporting prosperous villages and towns. Eventually some tough guy, some well-organized priest, or some alliance of the two would bring a number of these urban centers under the rule of a single power, thereby forging a larger political unit—a confederation, a kingdom, an empire. Then a tribe of hardy nomads would come along, conquer the monarch of the moment, seize all his holdings, and in the process expand their empire. Eventually the hardy nomads would become soft, luxury-loving city dwellers, exactly the sort of people they had conquered, at which point another tribe of hardy nomads would come along, conquer them, and take over their empire.

Yet the Persian Empire stands out for several reasons.

Religion permeated the Persian world. It wasn’t the million-gods idea of Hinduism, nor was it anything like the Egyptian pantheon of magical creatures with half-human and half-animal shapes, nor was it like Greek paganism, which saw every little thing in nature as having its own god, a god who looked human and had human frailties. No, in the Persian universe, Zoroastrianism held pride of place.

Zoroaster lived about a thousand years before Christ, perhaps earlier or perhaps later; no one really knows. He hailed from northern Iran, or maybe northern Afghanistan, or maybe somewhere east of that; no one really knows that, either. Zoroaster never claimed to be a prophet or channeler of divine energy, much less a divinity or deity. He considered himself a philosopher and seeker. But his followers considered him a holy man.

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...

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 thought by others (and sometimes themselves claimed) to possess miraculous powers.

Around the time the Parthians began their rise, China was unified for the first time. In fact, the glory years of China’s seminal Han dynasty coincide almost exactly with the period of Parthian dominance. In the West, the Romans began their great expansion near the beginning of the Parthian era. Just as Rome was beating Carthage for the first time, the Parthians were taking Babylonia.

Over time, imperial power leaked away into this ever more fragmented feudalism. In the third (Christian) century, a provincial rebel overthrew the last of the Parthians and founded the Sassanid dynasty, and this quickly expanded to occupy all the same territory as the Parthians and a little more besides. The Sassanids didn’t alter the direction of cultural change; they only organized the empire more effectively, erased the last traces of Hellenic influence, and completed the restoration of the Persian fabric.

The Roman Empire, meanwhile, was falling apart. In 293, the emperor Diocletian divided the empire in four parts for administrative purposes: it had grown just too huge and cumbersome to run from a single center. But Diocletian’s reform ended up splitting the empire in two. The wealth was all in the east, it turned out, so the western part of the Roman Empire crumbled. As nomadic German tribes moved into the empire, government services shrank, law and order broke down, and trade decayed. Schools foundered, western Europeans stopped reading or writing much, and Europe sank into its so-called Dark Ages.

In response to a political crisis, Abu Bakr established a religious principle that haunts Islam to this day—the equation of apostasy with treason. Braided into this policy was the theological concept that the indissoluble singleness of God must be reflected in the indissoluble singleness of the Umma. With this decision Abu Bakr even more definitively confirmed Islam as a social project and not just a belief system.

One August day, two years into his khalifate, Abu Bakr stepped out of a hot bath into a blast of chill wind, and by nightfall he was running a high fever. Realizing that death was near, he called in a few of the community’s top notables and told them he wanted to nominate Omar as his successor so there wouldn’t be any arguments about it later.

At that critical moment, however, Ali stepped forward to endorse Omar, and his word tipped the scales: the Umma accepted their second post-Mohammed leader.

Omar directed the Umma for ten years, and during that time he set the course of Islamic theology, he shaped Islam as a political ideology, he gave Islamic civilization its characteristic stamp, and he built an empire that ended up bigger than Rome. Any one of these achievements could have earned him a place in a who’s who of history’s most influential figures; the sum of them make him something like a combination of Saint Paul, Karl Marx, Lorenzo di Medici, and Napoleon.

Omar had never been a rich man, but Ali and others urged him to take a suitable salary from the public treasury, arguing that since Islam now included all of Arabia, the Umma could no longer afford a part-time khalifa who milked a cow for extra cash. Omar agreed but appointed a commission to calculate how much he needed to live like the average Arab, no better and no worse, and supposedly set this amount as his salary. (Imagine the CEO of a modern multinational corporation doing that.)

Once, somebody who saw him at this labor offered to carry the bag for him, but Omar said, “You can carry my burden for me here on Earth, but who will carry it for me on the Day of Judgment?”

As a big-picture military strategist, Omar ranked with Alexander and Julius Caesar, but how he acquired such savvy is hard to fathom. Until Islam came along, he was just another small-town merchant. He took part in those iconic early battles of Muslim history, but in military terms those were little more than skirmishes. Now, suddenly, he was studying “world” (i.e., Middle World) maps, calculating the flow of Byzantine or Sassanid resources, gauging what geography dictated for strategy, deciding where to force a battle and where to retreat—he was operating on a global scale.

Fortuitously, at this historical moment, the Umma produced an extraordinary array of brilliant field commanders such as Khaled bin al-Walid, hero of the Apostate Wars, Amr ibn al-A’as, conqueror of Egypt, and Sa’d ibn Abi Waqqas, who beat the Persians.

Abu Bakr had sent men to keep them at bay, but even before his death the Muslims had pushed the Byzantines back into their own territory. Shortly after Omar took the helm, they set siege to the city of Damascus.

From that time on, Muslims had the Byzantines on the run, and in 636 CE, at a place called Yarmuk, they destroyed the main Byzantine army.

Instead of swatting at individual Persian agents, Omar decided to throttle the threat at its source. He called on Muslims to topple the Sassanid empire, a proposal of breathtaking audacity: ants vowing to fell a mastiff.

Omar’s decision to call a war of conquest a “jihad” has obvious ramifications for modern times and has been much debated.

They were connected through an idea that originated in Mohammed’s time and that Muslim thinkers began fleshing out during Abu Bakr and Omar’s khalifates: the idea that the world was divided into the mutually exclusive realms of Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, “the realm of peace” and “the realm of war.”

Having survived the shock of Prophet Mohammed’s death, they had regrouped, and Omar probably understood that setting them a heroic quest at this juncture would consolidate and deepen their unity. In 15 AH (or thereabouts), near a town called Qadisiya, an Arab force traditionally numbered at thirty thousand warriors found itself facing a Sassanid army of sixty thousand crack troops. Only a river separated them. Several times, the Arab commander Waqqas sent envoys to negotiate with Rustum, the commander of the Sassanid force. As the story goes, General Rustum asked one envoy if he headed up the Muslim army. The man replied, “No, we’re Muslims. Among us, there is no highest and lowest.” Rustum said, “Look, I know you Arabs are hungry and poor, and I’m sure you’ve been causing trouble out of desperation. So I tell you what, I’ll give each of you two suits of clothing and a bag of dates. Will that convince you to go back where you came from?” The Muslim envoy said, “We’re not here to take anything from you, General. We’re here to give you Islam! You are headed to hell; we offer you an opportunity to go to heaven.” Rustum just laughed. “You remind me of the mouse that crept into the granary through a hole in the wall and ate till he could eat no more. Then he tried to go home, but he had grown too fat to fit back through the hole. His greed trapped him in the granary and the cat killed him. Now, you greedy Arabs have stolen into our granary and you’re trapped. All of you will di...

One of the most famous Omar stories took place after this city fell. The khalifa made his way to Jerusalem to accept its surrender in person. He traveled with a servant, and since they had only one donkey between them, they took turns riding and walking. When they reached Jerusalem, the servant happened to be riding. The people of Jerusalem mistook him for the khalifa and hastened to pay him obeisance. They had to be told, “No, no, that’s nobody; it’s the other guy you should be saluting.”

Christians assumed that the khalifa of Islam would want to perform the Muslim prayer in their most hallowed church as a token of his triumph, but Omar refused to set foot in there. “If I do,” he explained, “some future Muslim will use it as an excuse to seize the building and turn it into a mosque, and that’s not what we’ve come here to do. That’s not the sort of thing we Muslims do. Continue to live and worship as you please; just know that from now on we Muslims will be living among you, worshipping in our way, and setting a better example. If you like what you see, join us. If not, so be it. Allah has told us: no compulsion in religion.”

Christians found that under Muslim rule they would be subject to a special poll tax called the jizya. That was the bad news. The good news: the jizya would generally be less than the taxes they had been paying to their Byzantine overlords—who did interfere with their religious practices

The idea of lower taxes and greater religious freedom struck Christians as a pretty good deal, and so Muslims faced little or no local resistance in former Byzantine territory. In fact, Jews and Christians sometimes joined them in fighting the Byzantines.

By the time Omar died, Islamic rule covered more than 2 million square miles.

Religious Muslims offer the simple explanation that Muslims had the irresistible supernatural aid of Allah. Academic historians explain that the Byzantine and Sassanid empires had just fought a ruinous war with each other, and despite their se...

People have proven time and again that they will attack extraordinary obstacles and endure tremendous hardships if they think the effort will impart meaning to their lives. The human hunger for meaning is a craving as fundamental as food and drink.

Let me not minimize a final factor intertwined with the hunger for meaning. War gave Muslims opportunities for plunder. Under Omar, however, soldiers had no permission to seize the fixed property of common citizens. They got battlefield loot and the treasuries of the monarchs they conquered—which, incidentally, was plenty. Four-fifths of whatever they won was divided equally among the soldiers, supposedly with no distinction among commanders and foot soldiers, generals and privates—that was the Muslim way.

One-fifth of the plunder went back to Medina.

Conquest led the surge but conquest was kept separate from conversion. There was no “conversion by the sword.” Muslims insisted on holding political power but not on their subjects being Muslims. Instead, wherever Muslim armies flowed, cultural transmission followed. News of the Muslim social project proliferated quickly because the expansion covered pretty much exactly the world historical area sewn together by those ancient trade routes running between major seas and waterways. In its first fifty years, Islam expanded to the western edge of the Indian Ocean, to the eastern lip of the Mediterranean Sea, to the Nile, to the Caspian Sea, to the Persian Gulf.

Omar formalized this by declaring a new calendar that began, not with the birth of Mohammed, nor with the first revelations, but with the Hijra, the migration of Muslims to Medina.

During Abu Bakr’s khalifate, at Omar’s suggestion, all the pieces of the Qur’an were compiled in one place. It was a miscellaneous collection at first, because when the revelations were coming in, people recorded them on anything that came to hand—a sheet of parchment, a piece of leather, a stone, a bone, whatever. As khalifa, Omar began a sorting process. In his presence, each written verse was checked against the memorized version kept by the professional reciters whom this society regarded as the most reliable keepers of information. Scribes then recorded the authorized copy of each verse before witnesses, and these verses were organized into one comprehensive collection.

Omar funded a body of scholars to spend all their time steeping themselves in the revelations, the stories of Mohammed’s life, and other pertinent data, so that when he needed expert advice he could get it from these “people of the bench,” a seed that grew into one of Islam’s major social institutions, the ulama, or “scholars.”

For example, he banned drinking outright, even though the Qur’an had been somewhat ambiguous on this question, seeming in some early verses to disapprove more of drunkenness than of drinking per se (although later verses ban it more definitely).

This mode of argument by analogy (qiyas) created a stencil used prolifically by later Muslim legal thinkers.

Dreading the destructive power of unlicensed sex, Omar enforced the sternest measures against adultery. In fact, he mandated stoning for adulterers, which is not mentioned in the Qur’an but does appear in the law of Moses, dating to pre-Qur’anic times (Deuteronomy 22:22). He also banned the Arab custom of temporary marriage, which allowed men to marry women for a few days: the khalifa recognized prostitution when he saw it. (Shi’ite jurists later relegitimized this practice in their codes.)

To defuse the disruptive power of sexuality, Omar took measures to regulate and separate the roles of men and women, mandating, for example, that women and men pray separately, presumably so they wouldn’t be thinking about sex during that ritual.

In Omar’s day, however, education was compulsory for both boys and girls in the Muslim community. Women worked alongside men; they took part in public life; they attended lectures, delivered sermons, composed poetry for public orations, went to war as relief workers, and sometimes even took part in fighting. Important decisions facing the community were discussed in public meetings, Omar participated in those meetings as just another citizen of the community, and women as well as men engaged him fearlessly in debate. In fact, Omar appointed a woman as head of the market in Medina, which was a position of great civic responsibility, for it included duties such as regulating construction, issuing business permits, and policing the integrity of weights and measures.

Islam did not ban the practice, but it did limit a master’s power over a slave, and Omar enforced these rulings strictly. No Muslim could be a slave. If a man impregnated a slave, he had to marry her, which meant that her child would be born a Muslim and therefore free. Slavery could not result in breaking up a family, which limited a master’s options: he could only buy or sell whole families. Masters could not abuse or mistreat slaves, who had the same human rights as free folks, a theme stressed in the Qur’an and specifically reaffirmed in Prophet Mohammed’s final sermon. Omar ruled a master had to give his slaves the same food he was eating and in fact had to have his slaves eat with his family. If Omar’s rulings had been carried to their logical conclusions, slavery might have ended in the Muslim world in the early days of the khalifate. (Instead, Muslim societies regressed in this matter.)

Ironically, Omar’s own career ended when an emotionally unstable Persian slave drove a knife into his belly at the mosque. On his deathbed, some of the community’s notables asked him to nominate his successor as Abu Bakr had done, in order to ensure a smooth transition. “How about your son?” they suggested. Omar flew into his last rage: “Do you think I did this job to benefit myself and my family?” He died later that day, but before his death he established another consequential precedent. He named a six-man consultative committee (a shura) to select a new khalifa and seek the consensus of the Umma on their choice. Many later Muslim thinkers looked to the shura as the basis for democratic institutions in Islam. The shura discovered that two men, Ali and Othman, were everybody’s first and second choices, some favoring Ali and some Othman. (Ali, remember, was Mohammed’s son-in-law who had already been passed over twice.)

The chairman of the shura interviewed both men in front of an assembly of the people, posing one key question to each: “If you become khalifa, will you be guided by the Qur’an, the sunna, and the precedents set by Abu Bakr and Omar?” Ali said yes to the Qur’an and yes to the sunna (the example set by Mohammed’s life), but as for the decisions of his predecessors—no: Ali said he had a mind of his own and would consult his own conscience and best judgment for his decisions. Othman, by contrast, said yes to everything: “I am not an innovator.” So t...

Othman was Mohammed’s fifth cousin once removed, and he took office as Islam’s third khalifa at the age of sixty-eight.

Reputedly, Othman had stopped someplace for the night and was lying under the stars, looking up at the black dome of the sky, when the immensity of the universe suddenly overwhelmed him. Along with a crushing sense of his own insignificance came a conviction that somebody was in control, that this universe had a master, and what a master He must be! At that moment, even though he was alone, Othman heard a penetrating voice announce out loud that the Messenger of God was in the world. As soon as he got home, the story goes, Othman went to his friend Abu Bakr, who told him the curious tale of Mohammed and his message about a single, omnipotent God. Othman immediately announced himself a believer. His conversion enraged his family. After all, his clan, the aristocratic Umayyads, was the most rabidly anti-Muslim faction of the Quraysh tribe.

Othman’s uncle Abu Sufyan would soon emerge as the leader of the anti-Muslim forces. Othman’s stepfather had once attacked Mohammed in an alley and would have strangled him if Abu Bakr had not intervened. Othman’s two wives reviled him for embracing Mohammed’s faith. They would not convert, so Othman divorced them and married the Prophet’s famously beautiful daughter Ruqayya. When she died, Othman married another daughter of Mohammed’s, Um Kulthum.

Once, when abuse of Muslims was peaking in Mecca, Mohammed decided that a group of his followers should emigrate to Abyssinia, and Othman helped finance that. He himself emigrated with the group as well and in Abyssinia forged fruitful business connections that made him even richer than before. A few years later he returned to Mecca, where his Abyssinian connections—yes—served him so well he grew even richer.