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Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes 1st Edition, Kindle Edition
In Destiny Disrupted, Tamim Ansary tells the rich story of world history as it looks from a new perspective: with the evolution of the Muslim community at the center. His story moves from the lifetime of Mohammed through a succession of far-flung empires, to the tangle of modern conflicts that culminated in the events of 9/11. He introduces the key people, events, ideas, legends, religious disputes, and turning points of world history, imparting not only what happened but how it is understood from the Muslim perspective.
He clarifies why two great civilizations-Western and Muslim-grew up oblivious to each other, what happened when they intersected, and how the Islamic world was affected by its slow recognition that Europe-a place it long perceived as primitive-had somehow hijacked destiny.
With storytelling brio, humor, and evenhanded sympathy to all sides of the story, Ansary illuminates a fascinating parallel to the world narrative usually heard in the West. Destiny Disrupted offers a vital perspective on world conflicts many now find so puzzling.
- ISBN-13978-1586486068
- Edition1st
- PublisherPublicAffairs
- Publication dateApril 28, 2009
- LanguageEnglish
- File size6701 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Ansary has written an informative and thoroughly engaging look at the past, present, and future of Islam. With his seamless and charming prose, he challenges conventional wisdom and appeals for a fuller understanding of how Islam and the world at large have shaped each other. And that makes this book, in this uneasy, contentious post-9/11 world, a must read."
-- "Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns""Since the history of the Islamic peoples has been generally ignored or glossed over quickly by Western nations, Ansary, a Muslim American, rectifies this lack. Beginning with the life of Mohammed and the quarrel over his rightful successor, the author lays out a fascinating panoply of Islamic religious ideals, culture, doctrinal variations, and struggles for power over the following centuries, often in conjunction with familiar events taking place in the West. The rise of European civilizations, formerly considered by Muslims as practically barbaric, and their subsequent domination of much of the world is treated at length as the "destiny disrupted." The tone of the book is reasonably fair and firm but not hostile. The author is an excellent narrator, with a clear and pleasant voice. Since Islam is a major force in today's world, studying its history and way of life should be a priority for Americans."
-- "SoundCommentary.com (starred review)""This is the audiobook about Islam you've been waiting for. Ansary's presentation of Islamic history, ideas, and values, explained from an American point of view, makes clear material that can seem opaque in a lengthy textbook or lecture series. Ansary's strong, warm voice adds enormously to his powerful discourse. His matter-of-fact tone prevents the listener from being overwhelmed by his apparently effortless authority regarding the early Khalifa, Mongol dynasties, Liebnitz, and 9/11. His slight Afghan accent makes his presentation more personal."
-- "AudioFile"About the Author
Tamim Ansary is the award-winning author of Destiny Disrupted and West of Kabul, East of New York. He has been a major contributing writer to several secondary-school history textbooks offering an Islamic perspective.
From AudioFile
Product details
- ASIN : B005EYEPB2
- Publisher : PublicAffairs; 1st edition (April 28, 2009)
- Publication date : April 28, 2009
- Language : English
- File size : 6701 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 416 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #384,360 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #24 in History of Central Asia
- #56 in Islamic History
- #88 in Central Asia History
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Tamim Ansary was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, and came to the United States as a junior in high school. Culture and cultural perspective have been among his lifelong preoccupations. His new book, The Invention of Yesterday, looks at world history as the story of ever-increasing human interconnectedness: history from the perspective of the emerging global "we". Ansary has also written a history of the world through Islamic eyes, a history of Afghanistan from an insider's point of view, a literary memoir about straddling a cultural fault line in the world (Islam and the West), a historical novel set against the background of the First Anglo-Afghan war, and some 30 nonfiction books for children. In Road Trips, he tells the story of morphing from an Afghan into an American just as the sixties were giving way to the seventies. Ansary's Destiny Disrupted won the Northern California Book Award for nonfiction in 2009, and his first memoir West of Kabul, East of New York was selected as a One City One Book pick by both San Francisco and Waco, Texas. In 2001, an email he sent to 20 friends reputedly became the first viral phenomenon of the Internet Age, reaching tens of millions around the world within days.
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We soon learned that those nineteen men who hijacked four airliners and destroyed the lives of thousands were self-proclaimed Muslims. They did not represent any one nation. Their common bond was the culture of radical Islam. Upon learning that, Americans then wanted to know what it was about the terrorists' religion that led them to believe that their actions were justified. Did they represent only the lunatic fringe? Or were their convictions and deeds much closer to the heart of Islam?
President George W. Bush gave his answer when he told Americans, "These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith." But not everyone was so sure. In a 1996 book titled The Clash of Civilizations, Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington had claimed that the cultures of the Muslim world and of the West were inherently at odds with each other, and that the lines between them were what he called "the battle lines of the future." In the post-9/11 discussion, many observers suggested that the Huntingdon thesis anticipated those unspeakable events that had now come to pass. So who was right?
Enter the latest book by Tamim Ansary, Destiny Disrupted. As it is with so many non-fiction books these days, once the title catches your attention, it's the subtitle that tells you what the book is actually about: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes. Ansary might just be the very best person to write a book like this. He was born in 1948 in Kabul, Afghanistan, his father an Afghan and his mother an American. At age sixteen, he came to the United States where he graduated from Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, in 1970. Later, he traveled extensively in the Islamic world before settling on the American west coast where he has lived and worked as a writer ever since. Not only does he know both hemispheres, he describes himself as "resolutely secular" from a very early age.
Ansary's basic argument suggests that the relationship between the Islamic East and the Christian West is never going to be simple. Why? Because their back stories are long and complicated and now tangled. As the author explains,
"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.
"But the superseded history never really ended. It kept on flowing beneath the surface, like a riptide, and it is flowing down there still. 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" (pp. xx-xxi).
As you might have guessed, Ansary gives no easy answers to the question I raised at first. What he does, however, is much more significant. Starting with the civilization that flourished in ancient Mesopotamia and bringing the reader right up to September 11, 2001, the author provides a masterful, engaging overview of Islamic history. He includes, of course, the story of the life of Mohammed, the careers of his successors, the Crusades of Christians from the west and invasions of Mongols from from the east, the complex Ottoman Empire which eventually crumbled, and the rise of modern, secular Islamic states, followed by a conservative reaction, the evidence of which we see today. But beyond that, he explains how the Muslim story impacts and fits into the larger picture called world history. Here and there, Ansary takes the time to explicitly state what his storytelling implies. Here are a few of his most significant points:
First, any credible account of world history will give appropriate space to the story of Islam. And as the author reveals, not only is that story significant, it is also fascinating. Most Westerners would never guess, for example, that in the 13th century Muslims were able make a stand against the invading Mongols by using a prototype gun they called a "hand cannon"; or that when William Shakespeare was writing his plays, the superpowers of the world were three Muslim empires; or that the steam engine was invented in the Islamic world three centuries before its development in the West.
Second, although the West has traditionally ignored Islam, quite often a knowledge of Muslim history sheds light on our well-known western version of world history. A good example of this is the anti-philosophy project taken up by the great Muslim scholar Ghazali. Ansary tells how this man, by all accounts a towering academic, wrote a book explaining the Greek philosophical tradition, giving special attention to Aristotle. In a second book, according to his plan Ghazali set out to dismantle the system he had described in the first book. But, as fate would have it, the first one traveled far and wide, sometimes unaccompanied by the all-important refutation contained in the second. Consequently, and ironically, Ghazali's excellent description of Aristotelian thought led to a boom in its popularity most everywhere the first book was read. Fast forward to more than a century later, when an Italian Dominican priest named Thomas Aquinas set out to square the Church's teaching with Aristotle's philosophy. How many westerners realize that that influential work of Aquinas, which runs to dozens of volumes, owed so much of its inspiration to a Muslim?
Third, the common American notion that Islamic terrorists hate the freedom of the United States is just plain wrong. Contrary to the rhetoric of George W. Bush, for example, those who plan to carry out a literal jihad against the U.S. do not resent the liberty of America. Instead, their rage is directed against what they regard as the boundless decadence and imperialism of the West, especially the United States. Along this line, Ansary relates what has to be one of the great geo-political tragedies of the twentieth century. In August 1953, the Central Intelligence Agency funded the violent ousting of Mohammed Mosaddeq, the recently-elected prime minister of Iran. Mosaddeq, who took a secular modernist approach to governing, looked to be the ideal Muslim leader. However, upon coming to power, he canceled Iran's lease with British Petroleum and announced that Iran would take control of its oil. As Ansary remarks, "Nice try." Eventually, the world learned that the United States actually sponsored the bloody coup that toppled Mosaddeq. Ansary observes that it would be hard to overstate "the shudder of anger it sent through the Muslim world" (p. 334). Since the end of World War II, the memory of a handful of events like the one just described has convinced a large percentage of the world's Muslims that the United States is, again, not only morally decadent, but hopelessly imperialistic.
Fourth, when the West and the Muslim world address each other, their messages almost always miss the target. The two sides often speak past, rather than with each other. Ansary explains: "One side charges 'You are decadent.' The other side retorts, 'We are free.' These are not opposing contentions; they're nonsequiters. Each side identifies the other as a character in its own narrative. In the 1980s, Khomeini called America 'the Great Satan,' and other Islamist revolutionaries have echoed his rhetoric. In 2008, Jeffrey Herf, a history professor at the University of Maryland, suggested that radical Islamists are the Nazis reborn, motivated at core by anti-Semitism and hatred of women. It's a common analysis." (p. 350).
Fifth, although Islam certainly is a religion, comparable to other religions like Hinduism and Christianity, it is many more things than that. Ansary says that Islam is also "a social project," belonging to the same category as communism, parliamentary democracy, and fascism. One can also think of Islam as a civilization, in the same class as Chinese, Indian, or Western civilization. And, Islam can also be seen "as one world history among many that are unfolding simultaneously, each in some way incorporating all the others" (p. 356).
To summarize, in Destiny Disrupted, Tamim Ansary has presented the English-speaking world with an understanding of the sweep of history--and, therefore, an understanding of the way things are--from an Islamic point of view. By doing that, he has opened up a door that can lead at least "our side" towards a much-needed mutual tolerance. Anyone who wants to understand Islam and how it relates to world history and the present situation should read this book.
Perhaps most important, this book overviews the CONNECTIVE TISSUE tying all those HISTORICAL EVENTS that I knew into HISTORY--through which I learned a lot about HOW the Muslim world got from what it was at one point in its journey, to what it was at another, and WHY Islamic culture and Western culture progressed in very different directions after each point at which their paths intersected. In some cases, I also learned that I'd completely misunderstood the relationship between key pieces of the narrative--for example, that three of the great Islamic empires (the Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Moghuls) existed somewhat CONCURRENTLY, rather than one after the other, and interacted (or didn't) in ways that significantly shaped our world. And I got a sharp and detailed reminder that imperfect men and their baser motives have wreaked as much havoc on a world guided by Islam (and how the Message of that faith was carried down through history) as they have on OUR world guided by Christianity, and how CHRIST'S message got handed down.
In short, whether you're only a casual student of OUR OWN history, or one who's delved pretty extensively into the Muslim world, this is a really useful book for helping a Western reader escape the blinders of what, more than likely, we simply learned as a timeline of objective facts and events, to understand how seeing the same events through a Muslim lens can endow particular themes & crosscurrents with very different cognitive meaning and emotional weight. And this, in turn, is of enormous value in trying to understand the ways that 'Islamic' history and our 'Western' history have wandered into one another--Ansary uses the metaphor of two crowds of people, each going somewhere, crossing paths...to "much bumping and crashing" (p. 353)--including how each culture, while condemning the actions and beliefs of groups like Da'esh (ISIS) and al-Qa'ida just as strongly--can yet view our "War on Terrorism" quite differently...as well as how we might BETTER proceed, from those distinct viewpoints, to overcome the evil that is enemy to us both.
That said, the book also has significant flaws that will be evident to advanced readers--of which those new to this material should also be aware. Ansary is NOT a scholar of Islam, and shortcomings in his own knowledge (and/or his personal biases) often lead him to conclusions that obscure equally- or even MORE valid lessons. For example, in discussing al-Ghazali's "The Incoherence of the Philosophers," he misses a core point about the relationship between reason & revelation, arguing that Ghazali's conclusion that God is the ONLY true cause of anything robbed science in the Muslim world of its purpose--when Ghazali was more properly arguing that the value of science (observing that cause in action) lay in helping us holistically understand our world and its relationship to our Creator: This, in turn, weakens his comparison of the Protestant Reformation to the Islamic history of the same time: while a STRENGTH of his book is generally its stance outside the Western (or 'Orientalist') cultural perspective, Ansary is clearly enamored of the Protestant Reformation, and credits it with unchaining the Western mind to inquire, using its emerging tools of science, in directions and at a speed that a mind simultaneously seeking to understand the same physical world AND HOW IT RELATES TO GOD AND FAITH would not. Yet, in an era when we're creating all sorts of feats of science (like armed drones & cloned embryos), making national decisions based solely on our own perceived interests, and plowing ahead into a changing climate with little regard for how it might CHANGE US BACK, we might do well to ask ourselves what OUR culture might have to learn from the ISLAMIC perspective as well.
My recommendation: give it a read, with these things in mind. Then, if your interests focus inward, on detailed understanding of how these different 'histories' impact Islamic and Western views of specific events, look at works like Maalouf's The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (Saqi Essentials) or Cobb's The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades . Or, if your interests focus OUTWARD, toward better understanding of alternative, non-Western ways of looking at our world--past, present & future--in general, consider works like Wael Hallaq's Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge .
Top reviews from other countries
As an outsider to the Middle-East history and culture, this book is a revelation that educates the layman how the religion and the culture has evolved over centuries. It also provides a useful perspective to understand our world a little bit better.
This is a book about the view on history from Islamic eyes. Of course thinks will be written in a different way when you tell the story out of a pov.
In conclusion: this book is amazing.
I really enjoyed reading it and learnt a lot about Islam and the Middle East itself.
It really made me question a lot about what I thought of „history“ so far.
If you like it or not, people will always write and tell things differently when it benefits them. Do your fact checks through multiple sources and get your own understanding.
Simply perfect.
○今日のイスラムを理解するうえで大切だと思ったことは、次のようなことだ。すなわち、キリスト教は来世における幸福を願うが、イスラム教はほんらい来世ではなく現世の政治経済の改善向上を目指すものらしい。だから、コーランには世俗的なトラブルの解決策などが豊富に盛り込まれている、この世の政治も経済も生活もコーランによって規律されることになる。もちろん、コーランが書いていない事象も多いのだが、そのようなコーランの空白部分はイスラム法学者の解釈によって埋められる。こうしてイスラム法学者は世俗的事項についても支配力をふるうに至る(イランが良い例であろう)。