Destiny Disrupted A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

By Tamim Ansary

(PublicAffairs; 390 pages; $26.95)

In the introduction to his new book, "Destiny Disrupted," San Francisco author Tamim Ansary tells a story about meeting illustrious British historian Arnold Toynbee as a child. On his way through Ansary's tiny Afghan village, Toynbee heard word of a "history-loving little bookworm of an Afghan living there" and invited the 9-year-old Ansary to tea. At the conclusion of their interview, he presented Ansary with a gift: Hendrik Willem Van Loon's "The Story of Mankind."

More than half a century later, Ansary has paid that gift forward with a history book of his own. An engaging and easy-to-read "history of the world through Islamic eyes," "Destiny Disrupted" is a great introduction to the history of the faith more than a billion humans profess. With friendly, conversational prose and a keen eye for revealing anecdotes, Ansary leads us through nearly 1,500 years of Islamic history, from the revelation of the Quran and the early life of the Islamic community, through the Abbasids, the Ottomans, the Mughals, and up to the beginnings of the 21st century.

World history, Ansary writes "is not a chronological list of every damn thing that ever happened ... it's the arc that counts." With an intuitive understanding of this arc, honed over 14 years of editing high school history textbooks, Ansary sketches the rise of Islam as a religion and a political community, condensing almost 15 centuries into a bit more than 350 pages. Certain key moments, such as the years immediately following Muhammad's death and early Muslim encounters with the industrialized West, are given a blow-by-blow treatment, while other, less essential periods are painted only in broad strokes.

Although the book is primarily a political history, Ansary does a good job of depicting the fundamental societal and cultural changes that have shaped the history of Islamic civilization. Charting the effect of major political developments on various social movements and classes, he treats the reader to a greatest hits of Muslim philosophers and jurists, from al-Ghazali and Ibn Taymiyah to Sayyid Qutb, Muhammad Abduh and Jamaluddin-i-Afghan.

The early history of the Islamic world might not be familiar to most readers, but Ansary's colloquial style gives these long-ago events a sense of immediacy and freshness. He tells the story of the schism that split the Muslim world into Sunni and Shiite as if it happened just the other day. Presenting tensions between Ali and the first three caliphs in human as well as ideological terms, Ansary gives the reader insight into the profound grief caused by Muhammad's death as well as the divisions caused through the process by which his immediate successors were chosen.

Although "Destiny Disrupted" is written in a highly accessible style - with lines like "between 1500 and 1800 CE, western Europeans sailed pretty much all over the world and colonized pretty much everything" - Ansary's history credentials are ironclad. He knows his stuff, and isn't afraid of wading into the middle of contentious academic debates such as the cause of the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the impact of the Crusades on the Islamic world.

Ansary's most revolutionary supposition, however, is the basic premise behind the book. "In the United States," Ansary writes, we tend to presume that "world history leads to the birth of (our country's) founding ideals of liberty and equality and to its resultant rise as a superpower leading the planet into the future." By tracing the arc of history from an Islamic perspective, Ansary presents "a whole alternative world history unto itself." Even in later chapters - which deal with the reverberations of Western Europe's exploration, renaissance, reformation, enlightenment and industrialization - Ansary tells a history most readers will not be familiar with, a history of intellectual soul-searching, sputtering reforms and rising fundamentalism.
