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Name: Destiny Disrupted
Rating: 4.4 (103 reviews)
Author: Tamim Ansary

Tamim Ansary

A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

4.4 (103 ratings)

24 mins

Topics

Eastern Philosophy European History The Middle East

Table of Contents

Destiny Disrupted
Summary of 9 key ideas

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What’s in it for me? Take a walk through history with an Islamic tour guide.

If you’re trying to get a sense of what’s going on today, and want to understand where certain conflicts stem from, you need both sides of the story. If you’re relying solely on the perspective of Western sources, or even Eastern sources, you’re likely missing a great deal of what’s happened in the world over the course of the past two thousand years or so.

These blinks help fill in those history gaps by expertly guiding you through the past from a Muslim perspective. They pay particular attention to the many Muslim empires that have flourished throughout the ages, making clear that, for great stretches of human history, the Islamic world was at the center of it all – leading in fields from trade to art to science.

Read on to discover how this vibrant culture came to such great heights and how it eventually unraveled in the wake of the Industrial Revolution.

In these blinks, you’ll also discover

how Islam was born;
just how far the great Muslim empires stretched; and
how a lust for spices spurred on European exploration.

Sandwiched between West and East, the Islamic world was born amid a commercial and pagan society.

Have you ever wondered where the “middle” in “Middle East” comes from? To find out, let’s travel back in time to the dawn of civilization.

On one side, we have Western civilization, which emerged in the area surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. On the other, around what is now China, we have Eastern civilization. Between these two worlds, we have what the author refers to as the Middle World.

More specifically, this world is the area between the Indus River, which runs along the border of India and Pakistan, and Istanbul, which is located on the northern tip of Turkey and lies between the Black and Aegean Seas. This is the Middle World, resting between East and West – two very different civilizations, with their own distinct histories.

At the heart of the Middle World was Mesopotamia, which lay between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, where modern-day Iraq is located. Around 5,500 years ago, in southern Mesopotamia, the Sumerians developed the first high culture, inventing letters and numbers in the process.

The Sumerians didn’t last and, as history proceeded, several other high cultures came and went. There were the Akkadians, Amorites, Babylonians and, around 550 BCE, the Persians. Then came the Greeks — and the famous conquests of Alexander the Great — which were immediately followed by the rise of the Roman Empire, during which time Christ was born.

All of these empires and cultures came and went in the Middle World – and it all happened before the birth of Islam.

Around the year 570 CE, the Prophet Muhammad was born. His birthplace, Mecca, was a trading hub defined by commercial enterprise. He was raised an orphan and grew up poor among a society of rich Arab merchants.

At the time, these Arabs were pagans who believed in a multitude of gods. But then, one day, Muhammad had a life-changing experience. While meditating in the nearby mountains, he was visited by the angel Gabriel, and a voice commanded him to “recite.”

After this revelation, Muhammad began preaching monotheism to the people of Mecca. And, much to the discomfort of the rich Arab merchants, the message he had was that God wanted to end debauchery and help the poor.

Thus, Islam was born.

Muhammad founded the Muslim community and was followed by the Khalifas.

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.

The four khalifas were followed by the rule of two dynasties, the Umayyads and the Abbasids.

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.

In parallel to the political events, Islamic scholarship, philosophy and mysticism developed.

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.

At the height of its glory, the Islamic world began first to crack and then to crumble.

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.

After havoc came rebirth – but, as the Islamic world was born anew, Europe was also on the rise.

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.

With Europe on the rise came the downfall of the Islamic world.

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.

During the nineteenth century, three European ideals forever changed the Islamic world.

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.

After World War II, deep resentment against Israelis and Americans was felt in the Islamic world.

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.

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What is Destiny Disrupted about?

Destiny Disrupted (2009) tells history from an Islamic perspective. It begins before the emergence of Muhammad and Islam in the seventh century CE and ends with the decline of the Islamic empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. On this epic journey, Tamim Ansary describes the fascinating stories of great Muslim states, scholars and leaders – a perspective on history that is, unfortunately, widely unknown to most Westerners.

Best quote from Destiny Disrupted

Both Arabs and Jews are Semitic, tracing their descent to Abraham and Adam. Before Islam, there was little difference between their lifestyle and culture.

—Tamim Ansary

Who should read Destiny Disrupted?

Historians and students of religion
Westerners curious about the Islamic perspective on world history
Readers eager to learn more about Islamic culture and religion

About the Author

Tamim Ansary has been a major contributing writer to several history textbooks. In addition to publishing several essays and commentaries in the San Francisco Chronicle, Salon and Alternet, he has a monthly column on Encarta.com. Ansary is also the author of the memoir West of Kabul, East of New York and co-author of The Other Side of the Sky.

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