TAMIM ANSARY
Praise for
DESTINY DISRUPTED
"If you want to put today's headlines about jihadist suicide
bombings into the much larger context of history, you'd be well
advised to settle in with Destiny Disrupted. It's the story of a
civilization that suddenly found itself upended by strangers and
now wants to put itself right. And if author Ansary stops short of
calling the result a clash of civilizations, he feels free to call it two
one-sided views of world history. His book is a valuable tool for
opening up a view of the other side."
-St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"This is a marvelous book. Ansary has written an indispensable
historical account of the last 1,500 years from a perspective that
is all too often ignored in the West. Destiny Disrupted will be
read for generations to come."
-REZA AsLAN, author of No god but God
and How to Win a Cosmic ~r
"A must-read for anyone who wants to learn more about the history
of the Islamic world. But the book is more than just a litany of past
events. It is also an indispensable guide to understanding the politi-
cal debates and conflicts of today, from 9/11 to the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, from the Somali pirates to the Palestinian/Israeli
conflict. As Ansary 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."'
-San Francisco Chronicle
"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
"A lively, thorough, and accessible survey of the history of Islam
(both the religion and its political dimension) that explores many
of the disconnects between Islam and the West."
-ShelfAwareness
"There's not a page where you won't learn something startling in
Destiny Disrupted. Beautifully clear and endlessly engaging, it's
a romp through science, poetry, politics, and religion, in the
company of a wise and charming mind, the perfect antidote to
the Islamophobia that clouds Europe and North America."
-RAJ PATEL, author of Stuffand Starved and visiting scholar,
Center for African Studies, University of California at Berkeley
"Never apologist in tone, meticulously researched and balanced,
often amusing but never glib, Destiny Disrupted is ultimately a
gripping drama that pulls the reader into great, seminal events of
world history, a book which offers a wealth of knowledge and in-
sight to any reader who wants to understand the movements and
events behind the modern-day hostilities wracking Western and
Islamic societies." -Portland Oregonian
DESTINY DISRUPTED
THE ISLAMIC WORLD TODAY
DESTINY
DISRUPTED
~
A History of the World
Through Islamic Eyes
TAMIM ANSARY
PublicAffairs
NEW YORK
Copyright © 2009 by Tamim Ansary
Hardcover edition first published in 2009 in the United States by PublicAffairs'™,
a member of the Perseus Books Group.
Paperback edition first published in 2010 in the United States by PublicAffairs.
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written
permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and
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[Link]@[Link].
Designed by Brent Wilcox
Text set in Adobe Garamond
A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-58648-606-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-58648-813-0
10 9 8 7 6 54 3 2 1
For Amanuddin and Terttu
CONTENTS
List ofMaps IX
Names and Dates XI
Introduction Xlll
The Middle World
2 The Hijra 17
3 Birth of the Khalifate 33
4 Schism 53
5 Empire of the Umayyads 67
6 The Abassid Age 79
7 Scholars, Philosophers, and Sufis 91
8 Enter the Turks 117
9 Havoc 133
10 Rebirth 159
11 Meanwhile in Europe 199
12 West Comes East 217
13 The Reform Movements 247
14 Industry, Constitutions, and Nationalism 269
15 Rise of the Secular Modernists 301
vii
viii CONTENTS
16 The Crisis of Modernity 317
17 The Tide Turns 329
Afterword 349
Appendix: The Structure ofIslamic Doctrine 359
Notes 361
Bibliography 367
Acknowledgments 371
Index 373
LIST OF MAPS
The Islamic World Today 11
Growth of Islam xv1
The Mediterranean World (Defined by Sea Routes) 2
The Middle World (Defined by Land Routes) 2
On the Eve oflslam: The Byzantine and Sassanid Empires 15
Imam Hussein's Route to Karbala 69
The Umayyad Empire 76
Abu Muslim and the Abbasid Revolution 85
The Three Khalifates 121
Seljuk Empire: The Turks Invade the Islamic World 128
The Theater of the Crusades 141
The Mongol Invasions of the Islamic World 154
Constantinople: The World's Most Impregnable City 176
The Three Islamic Empires of the Seventeenth Century 196
The European Quest for a Sea Route to the Indies 201
Western Imperialism: The Global Reach of Sea Power 218
"The Great Game" 23 7
World War I and the Arab Revolt 296
The Sykes-Picot Agreement 297
Division of the Arab World: The Mandates Plan 312
Israel and Palestine 323
ix
NAMES AND DATES
Some writers are scrupulous about the system they use for transliterating
Islamic names and words into English, insisting that one or another system
is correct. I have to confess I am not among them. I have seen my own
name spelled too many different ways in English to be picky. (People often
ask me, which is correct, Ansari or Ansary-is it y or z? Well, neither, re-
ally: it's the letter yaw.) Given the arbitrary nature of transliteration, my
guiding principle in this book has been to go for the simplest spellings and
the most recognizable reductions.
Also many Arabic names include a series of patronymics preceded by
Ibn, meaning "son of." Usually, I use the shortest form of the name by
which a person is most commonly known. The profusion of unfamiliar
names (and words) in this book will challenge many English-speaking
readers; I wish to minimize such difficulties, so if a familiar form of a word
or name exists in English, that's what I go with. Also, following a prece-
dent set by Albert Hourani in A History of the Arab Peoples, I use the pre-
fixal-the first time an Arabic name is used but drop it after that: al-Ghazali
becomes Ghazali.
As for dates, two calendars apply to these events, the Islamic one and
the so-called "common era'' dating system, which actually derives from the
Christian calendar. In the early decades after the birth of the Muslim com-
munity, I generally give the Islamic date (the number of years followed by
AH which stands ''After the Hijra''). I do so because I think that in this
early period it's useful to convey a feel for how many years have passed
since the crucial events oflslam. Later in time, I slide over to the "common
xi
xii NAMES AND DATES
era" system, because that's the framework with which most readers are
familiar-and what's the point of giving a date if it doesn't place an event
in context and situate it relative to other events?
INTRODUCTION
Growing up as I did in Muslim Afghanistan, I was exposed early on to a
narrative of world history quite different from the one that schoolchildren
in Europe and the Americas routinely hear. At the time, however, it didn't
shape my thinking, because I read history for fun, and in Farsi there
wasn't much to read except boring textbooks. At my reading level, all the
good stuff was in English.
My earliest favorite was the highly entertaining Child's History of the
World by a man named V. V. Hillyer. It wasn't till I reread that book as an
adult, many years later, that I realized how shockingly Eurocentric it was,
how riddled with casual racism. I failed to notice these features as a child
because Hillyer told a good story.
When I was nine or ten, the historian Arnold Toynbee passed through
our tiny town of Lashkargah on a journey, and someone told him of a
history-loving little bookworm of an Afghan kid living there. Toynbee was
interested and invited me to tea, so I sat with the florid, old British gen-
tleman, giving shy, monosyllabic answers to his kindly questions. The only
thing I noticed about the great historian was his curious habit of keeping
his handkerchief in his sleeve.
When we parted, however, Toynbee gave me a gift: Hendrick Willem
Van Loon's The Story ofMankind. The title alone thrilled me-the idea
that all of"mankind" had a single story. Why, I was part of"mankind" my-
self, so this might be my story, in a sense, or at least might situate me in
the one big story shared by all! I gulped that book down and loved it, and
the Western narrative of world history became my framework ever after.
xiii
xiv INTRODUCTION
All the history and historical fiction I read from then on just added flesh
to those bones. I still studied the pedantic Farsi history texts assigned to us
in school but read them only to pass tests and forgot them soon after.
Faint echoes of the other narrative must have lingered in me, however,
because forty years later, in the fall of 2000, when I was working as a text-
book editor in the United States, it welled back up. A school publisher in
Texas had hired me to develop a new high school world-history textbook
from scratch, and my first task was to draw up a table of contents, which
entailed formulating an opinion about the overall shape of human history.
The only given was the structure of the book. To fit the rhythm of the
school year, the publisher ordained that it be divided into ten units, each
consisting of three chapters.
But into what ten (or thirty) parts does all of time naturally divide?
World history, after all, is not a chronological list of every damn thing that
ever happened; it's a chain of only the most consequential events, selected
and arranged to reveal the arc of the story-it's the arc that counts.
I tied into this intellectual puzzle with gusto, but my decisions had to
pass through a phalanx of advisors: curriculum specialists, history teachers,
sales executives, state education officials, professional scholars, and other
such worthies. This is quite normal in elementary and high school text-
book publishing, and quite proper I think, because the function of these
books is to convey, not challenge, society's most up-to-date consensus of
what's true. A chorus of advisors empanelled to second-guess a develop-
ment editor's decisions helps to ensure that the finished product reflects
the current curriculum, absent which the book will not even be saleable.
As we went through the process, however, I noticed an interesting tug
and pull between my advisors and me. We agreed on almost everything
except-! kept wanting to give more coverage to Islam in world history,
and they kept wanting to pull it back, scale it down, parse it out as side-
bars in units devoted mainly to other topics. None of us was speaking
out of parochial loyalty to "our own civilization." No one was saying
Islam was better or worse than "the West." All of us were simply express-
ing our best sense of which events had been most consequential in the
story of humankind.
Mine was so much the minority opinion that it was indistinguishable
from error, so we ended up with a table of contents in which Islam consti-
INTRODUCTION XV
tuted the central topic of just one out of thirty chapters. The other two
chapters in that unit were "Pre-Columbian Civilizations of the Americas"
and ''Ancient Empires of Africa."
Even this, incidentally, represented expanded coverage. The best-selling
world history program of the previous textbook cycle, the 1997 edition of
Perspectives on the Past, addressed Islam in just one chapter out of thirty-
seven, and half of that chapter (part of a unit called "The Middle Ages")
was given over to the Byzantine Empire.
In short, less than a year before September 11, 2001, the consensus of
expert opinion was telling me that Islam was a relatively minor phenome-
non whose impact had ended long before the Renaissance. If you went
strictly by our table of contents, you would never guess Islam still existed.
At the time, I accepted that my judgment might be skewed. After all,
I had a personal preoccupation with Islam that was part of sorting out
my own identity. Not only had I grown up in a Muslim country, but I
was born into a family whose one-time high social status in Afghanistan
was based entirely on our reputed piety and religious learning. Our last
name indicates our supposed descent from the Ansars, "the Helpers,"
those first Muslim converts of Medina who helped the Prophet Mo-
hammed escape assassination in Mecca and thereby ensured the survival
of his mission.
More recently, my grandfather's great-grandfather was a locally revered
Muslim mystic whose tomb remains a shrine for hundreds of his devotees
to this day, and his legacy percolated down to my father's time, instilling
in our clan a generalized sense of obligation to know this stuff better than
the average guy. Growing up, I heard the buzz of Muslim anecdotes, com-
mentary, and speculation in my environment and some of it sank in, even
though my own temperament somehow turned resolutely secular.
And it remained secular after I moved to the United States; yet I found
myself more interested in Islam here than I ever had been while living in
the Muslim world. My interest deepened after 1979, when my brother
embraced "fundamentalist" Islam. I began delving into the philosophy of
Islam through writers such as Fazlur Rahman and Syed Hussein Nasr as
well as its history through academics such as Ernst Grunebaum and Albert
Hourani, just trying to fathom what my brother and I were coming from,
or in his case, moving toward.
xvi INTRODUCTION
GROWTH OF ISLAM
Given my personal stake, I could concede that I might be overestimat-
ing the importance of Islam. And yet ... a niggling doubt remained. Was
my assessment wholly without objective basis? Take a look at these six
maps, snapshots of the Islamic world at six different dates:
When I say "Islamic world," I mean societies with Muslim majorities
and/or Muslim rulers. There are, of course, Muslims in England, France,
INTRODUCTION xvii
the United States, and nearly every other part of the globe, but it would be
misleading, on that basis, to call London or Paris or New York a part of the
Islamic world. Even by my limited definition, however, has the "Islamic
world" not been a considerable geographical fact throughout its many cen-
turies? Does it not remain one to this day, straddling the Asian-African
landmass and forming an enormous buffer between Europe and East Asia?
Physically, it spans more space than Europe and the United States com-
bined. In the past, it has been a single political entity, and notions of its
singleness and political unity resonate among some Muslims even now.
Looking at these six maps, I still have to wonder how, on the eve of 9111,
anyone could have failed to consider Islam a major player at the table of
world history!
After 9/11, perceptions changed. Non-Muslims in the West began to
ask what Islam was all about, who these people were, and what was going
on over there. The same questions began to bombinate with new urgency
for me too. That year, visiting Pakistan and Afghanistan for the first time
in thirty-eight years, I took along a book that I had found in a used book-
store in London, Islam in Modern History by the late Wilfred Cantwell
Smith, a professor of religion at McGill and Harvard. Smith published his
book in 1957, so the "modern history" of which he spoke had ended more
than forty years earlier, and yet his analyses struck me as remarkably-in
fact disturbingly-pertinent to the history unfolding in 2002.
Smith shone new light on the information I possessed from childhood
and from later reading. For example, during my school days in Kabul, I
was quite aware of a man named Sayyid Jamaluddin-i-Afghan. Like "every-
one," I knew he was a towering figure in modern Islamic history; but
frankly I never fathomed how he had earned his acclaim, beyond the fact
that he espoused "pan-Islamism," which seemed like mere pallid Muslim
chauvinism to me. Now, reading Smith, I realized that the basic tenets of
"Islamism," the political ideology making such a clatter around us in
2001, had been hammered out a hundred-plus years earlier by this intel-
lectual Karl Marx of"Islamism." How could his very name be unknown to
most non-Muslims?
I plowed back into Islamic history, no longer in a quest for personal
identity, but in an effort to make sense of the alarming developments among
Muslims of my time-the horror stories in Afghanistan; the tumult in
xviii INTRODUCTION
Iran, the insurgencies in Algeria, the Philippines, and elsewhere; the hi-
jackings and suicide bombings in the Middle East, the hardening extrem-
ism of political Islam; and now the emergence of the Taliban. Surely, a
close look at history would reveal how on Earth it had come to this.
And gradually, I came to realize how it had come to this. I came to per-
ceive that, unlike the history of France or Malta or South America, the his-
tory of the Islamic lands "over there" was not a subset of some single world
history shared by all. It was more like a whole alternative world history
unto itself, competing with and mirroring the one I had tried to create for
that Texas publisher, or the one published by McDougall-Littell, for which
I had written "the Islam chapters."
The two histories had begun in the same place, between the Tigris and
Euphrates Rivers of ancient Iraq, and they had come to the same place,
this global struggle in which the West and the Islamic world seemed to be
the major players. In between, however, they had passed through differ-
ent-and yet strangely parallel!-landscapes.
Yes, strangely parallel: looking back, for example, from within the
Western world-historical framework, one sees a single big empire towering
above all others back there in ancient times: it is Rome, where the dream
of a universal political state was born.
Looking back from anywhere in the Islamic world, one also sees a sin-
gle definitive empire looming back there, embodying the vision of a uni-
versal state, but it isn't Rome. It is the khalifate of early Islam.
In both histories, the great early empire fragments because it simply
grows too big. The decaying empire is then attacked by nomadic barbar-
ians from the north-but in the Islamic world, "the north" refers to the
steppes of Central Asia and in that world the nomadic barbarians are not
the Germans but the Turks. In both, the invaders dismember the big
state into a patchwork of smaller kingdoms permeated throughout by a
single, unifying religious orthodoxy: Catholicism in the West, Sunni
Islam in the East.
World history is always the story of how "we" got to the here and now,
so the shape of the narrative inherently depends on who we mean by "we"
and what we mean by "here and now." Western world history traditionally
presumes that here and now is democratic industrial (and postindustrial)
civilization. In the United States the further presumption holds that world
INTRODUCTION xix
history leads to the birth of its founding ideals of liberty and equality and
to its resultant rise as a superpower leading the planet into the future. This
premise establishes a direction for history and places the endpoint some-
where down the road we're traveling now. It renders us vulnerable to the
supposition that all people are moving in this same direction, though some
are not quite so far along-either because they started late, or because
they're moving more slowly-for which reason we call their nations "de-
veloping countries."
When the ideal future envisioned by postindustrialized, Western demo-
cratic society is taken as the endpoint of history, the shape of the narrative
leading to here-and-now features something like the following stages:
1. Birth of civilization {Egypt and Mesopotamia)
2. Classical age {Greece and Rome)
3. The Dark Ages {rise of Christianity)
4. The Rebirth: Renaissance and Reformation
5. The Enlightenment {exploration and science)
6. The Revolutions {democratic, industrial, technological)
7. Rise of Nation-States: The Struggle for Empire
8. World Wars I and II.
9. The Cold War
10. The Triumph of Democratic Capitalism
But what if we look at world history through Islamic eyes? Are we apt
to regard ourselves as stunted versions of the West, developing toward the
same endpoint, but less effectually? I think not. For one thing, we would
see a different threshold dividing all of time into "before" and "after": the
year zero for us would be the year of Prophet Mohammed's migration
from Mecca to Medina, his Hijra, which gave birth to the Muslim com-
munity. For us, this community would embody the meaning of"civilized,"
and perfecting this ideal would look like the impulse that had given his-
tory its shape and direction.
But in recent centuries, we would feel that something had gone awry
with the flow. We would know the community had stopped expanding,
had grown confused, had found itself permeated by a disruptive crosscur-
rent, a competing historical direction. As heirs to Muslim tradition, we
XX INTRODUCTION
would be forced to look for the meaning of history in defeat instead of tri-
umph. We would feel conflicted between two impulses: changing our no-
tion of "civilized" to align with the flow of history or fighting the flow of
history to realign it with our notion of "civilized."
If the stunted present experienced by Islamic society is taken as the
here-and-now to be explained by the narrative of world history, then the
story might break down to something like the following stages:
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
Literary critic Edward Said has argued that over the centuries, the West
has constructed an "Orientalist" fantasy of the Islamic world, in which a
sinister sense of "otherness" is mingled with envious images of decadent
opulence. Well, yes, to the extent that Islam has entered the Western imag-
ination, that has more or less been the depiction.
But more intriguing to me is the relative absence of any depictions at
all. In Shakespeare's day, for example, preeminent world power was cen-
tered in three Islamic empires. Where are all the Muslims in his canon?
Missing. If you didn't know Moors were Muslims, you wouldn't learn it
from Othello.
Here are two enormous worlds side by side; what's remarkable is how
little notice they have taken of each other. If the Western and Islamic
worlds were two individual human beings, we might see symptoms of re-
pression here. We might ask, "What happened between these two? Were
they lovers once? Is there some history of abuse?"
But there is, I think, another less sensational explanation. Throughout
much of history, the West and the core of what is now the Islamic world
INTRODUCTION xxi
have been like two separate universes, each preoccupied with its own in-
ternal 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 be-
neath 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 ef-
fort not to die.
This is the story I tell in the pages that follow, and I emphasize "story."
Destiny Disrupted is neither a textbook nor a scholarly thesis. It's more like
what I'd tell you if we met in a coffeehouse and you said, "What's all this
about a parallel world history?" The argument I make can be found in
numerous books now on the shelves of university libraries. Read it there
if you don't mind academic language and footnotes. Read it here if you
want the story arc. 1 Although I am not a scholar, I have drawn on the
work of scholars who sift the raw material of history to draw conclusions
and of academics who sifted the work of scholarly researchers to draw
meta-conclusions.
In a history spanning several thousand years, I devote what may seem
like inordinate space to a brief half century long ago, but I linger here be-
cause this period spans the career of Prophet Mohammed and his first four
successors, the founding narrative of Islam. I recount this story as an inti-
mate human drama, because this is the way that Muslims know it. Acade-
mics approach this story more skeptically, crediting non-Muslim sources
above supposedly less-objective Muslim accounts, because they are mainly
concerned to dig up what "really happened." My aim is mainly to convey
what Muslims think happened, because that's what has motivated Muslims
over the ages and what makes their role in world history intelligible.
I will, however, assert one caveat here about the origins oflslam. Un-
like older religions-such as Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, even
Christianity-Muslims began to collect, memorize, recite, and preserve
xxii INTRODUCTION
their history as soon as it happened, and they didn't just preserve it but
embedded each anecdote in a nest of sources, naming witnesses to each
event and listing all persons who transmitted the account down through
time to the one who first wrote it down, references that function like the
chain of custody validating a piece of evidence in a court case.
This implies only that the core Muslim stories cannot best be ap-
proached as parables. With a parable, we don't ask for proof that the events
occurred; that's not the point. We don't care if the story is true; we want the
lesson to be true. The Muslim stories don't encapsulate lessons of that sort:
they're not stories about ideal people in an ideal realm. They come to us,
rather, as accounts of real people wrestling with practical issues in the mud
and murk of actual history, and we take from them what lessons we will.
Which is not to deny that the Muslim stories are allegorical, nor that
some were invented, nor that many or even all were modified by tellers
along the way to suit agendas of the person or moment. It is only to say
that the Muslims have transmitted their foundational narrative in the same
spirit as historical accounts, and we know about these people and events in
much the same way that we know what happened between Sulla and Mar-
ius in ancient Rome. These tales lie somewhere between history and myth,
and telling them stripped of human drama falsifies the meaning they have
had for Muslims, rendering less intelligible the things Muslims have done
over the centuries. This then is how I plan to tell the story, and if you're on
board with me, buckle in and let's begin.