What most of our generation learned of the history of civilization, is either about, or at least framed in relation to so-called Western civilization. We certainly didn’t learn much about the evolution of the Muslim community, even though that history interacts with and is very influential on the political and cultural history of Europe. Even now, we perhaps focus more on the origins of Islam and the bases for the internal doctrinal differences which are still manifest in their struggles today.
Our perspective is from the West. We learn of Muslim success or failure in their clashes with the outposts of Christian civilization, as it influences European history. We also learn how they preserved science and art in the Dark Ages, but not much about their substantive contributions to those disciplines and their political history. In short but we really can’t understand World history without a firm grasp of the great civilization created by them, and its influence on the West, as well as its slow-motion collapse.
In Destiny Disrupted, Tamim Ansary captures in a colorful and understandable style the rich story of world history as it looks from the perspective of evolution of the Muslim community. 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 and inform history since that time. 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.
The author grew up in Muslim Afghanistan and is now a writer here in the U.S. He has seen both sides and is well positioned to speak about the intersection, about misunderstandings about both and by both sides. That intersection is, of course, where the conflicts come.
Ansary clarifies why two great civilizations grew up oblivious to each other, what happened when they intersected, and how the Islamic world was ultimately affected by its slow recognition that Europe-a place it long properly perceived as primitive-had somehow hijacked destiny. As he writes in his conclusion, "The conflict wracking the modern world is not, I think, best understood as a 'clash of civilizations.' … it's better understood as the friction generated by two mismatched world histories intersecting."
