Destiny Disrupted summary

When Muhammad took up the call and first began preaching, he quickly gained followers; what had begun as a group of his close friends and relatives soon came to include a large number of the community. It didn’t take long before the pagan merchants in Mecca began to feel threatened by his expanding influence.

Eventually, the elders of the Quraysh tribe began plotting Muhammad’s assassination. He was forced to flee Mecca for the sanctuary of nearby Medina. This migration is known as the Hijrah, and it marks the true beginning of the Muslim community. Similar to the BC and AD (or, BCE and CE) divisions in the Gregorian calendar, the Muslim calendar divides history between BH – before the Hijrah – and AH, after it.

Things got a little complicated at the end of Othman’s reign. There was a power struggle between Ali, who is recognized as the fourth khalifa, and Mu’awiya, who was the governor of Syria and Egypt. Mu’awiya refused to cede power, and Ali was killed by an extremist, making Mu’awiya the next khalifa.

Mu’awiya was a member of the Umayyads, an aristocratic clan within Muhammad’s Quraysh tribe, and his rise to power marks the beginning of the Umayyad dynasty, which lasted from 40 to 120 AH, or 661 to 737 CE.

During his lifetime, the Prophet Muhammad established five pillars of Islam, which are considered the duties every follower is expected to perform. They are:

While these duties were considered very concrete, the other teachings of Muhammad had grown more ambiguous since his death. So, in the years between 10 and 505 AH, or 632 and 1111 CE, Muslims were at work developing a unified agreement about the Muslim doctrine.

There’s a name for land that is being controlled by a Muslim khalifa – a khalifate. So, during the Umayyad dynasty, there was a Umayyad Khalifate, followed by the Abbasid Khalifate, and so on.

During the mid-eighth century, the Abbasid Khalifate was the cultural epicenter of the known world. Yet, at the same time, the khalifate was about to splinter apart.

The Mongol invasion left the Islamic world totally devastated. And it wasn’t until the end of the thirteenth century that it managed to spring back to life.

This rebirth was marked by the rise of three great Muslim empires.

In the years between 905 and 1266 AH, or 1500 and 1850 CE, Europeans were sailing around the world and establishing colonies just about everywhere they landed. Of course, this meant that they were also working their way into the Islamic world. And, as a result, those three great Muslim empires began to unravel.

For the Ottoman Empire, this was largely due to European traders wreaking havoc on the local economy.

Wahhabism wasn’t the only call for reform that emerged during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Another reformer was Sayyid Ahmad of Aligarh, who championed a form of secularism that caught on during the nineteenth century, just as three big European ideals were sweeping into the Islamic world: industry, constitution and nationalism.

As World War II drew to its bloody conclusion, many European Jews who’d escaped the genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany took to refugee boats and left Europe. While some of them would find a home in the United States, a large number of them headed for Palestine.

Prior to World War II, Jewish settlers who were part of the Zionist movement had already moved to Palestine, and, by 1945, this population had built a basic infrastructure. Faced with the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust, Western governments felt a moral obligation to support the call for a separate Jewish state, and increased Jewish immigration in Palestine.