Destiny Disrupted by Tamim Ansary

Full title 'Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes'. Really good book, I highly recommend and I think it would do the world a load of good if everybody read it, Muslims and non-Muslims alike.


First of all, let me say that I am a devout atheist, but that I have friends who are Christian and friends who are Muslim and friends who are Buddhists and Hindus and atheists and agnostics etc. etc. Basically, I look in a religious debates as an outsider and 99% of the time it sounds like everyone is spouting complete rubbish and not listening to each other. So it was nice to read a book as balanced and informative as Destiny Disrupted.


Ansary takes the reader from the birth of Islam and the life of the Prophet through to our post-9/11 world. All the major and many minor events in the history of the Arab peoples and Islam are covered, from the original khalifas (Mohammed's immediate successors and trusted followers) through the Crusades and the Mongol invasion, from the Abassids and Umayyads to the Turks and Persians, from Akbar the Great to Ahmadinejad, from the house of Ibn Saud to the Ottomans to the Secular Modernists, from Jamaluddin-i-Afghan to Osama bin Laden.


Not everything in this book sits comfortably; I'm British and a lot of the railing against European Colonialism touched a socially-conditioned nerve of mine, but every point that Ansary made about this was valid, and there was an equal amount of railing against Arab mistakes too. I didn't agree with everything in the book, and I wish that Ansary had touched a bit more on current conflicts, the rise of the Taliban and Muslim Brotherhood, etc, as well as the life of women in the Arab world. However, the book was balanced (between Arab and Western, and between 'moderate' and 'fundamentalist' Islamic sensibilities) and written wonderfully. Ansary has a real feel for the interconnectedness of events and a sensitivity to both the 'Middle World' and the 'West', having lived in both. Also, he's a pretty good story teller, making even the driest of religious doctrines readable and understandable to your average outsider. After reading this book, I understand so much better what the Islamic faith is about, what makes it different from and similar to Christianity, and how history has led our two civilisations to the conflicts that are now raging.

Ansary refrains from calling the current conflicts raging around the world and the events leading up to them as a 'clash of civilisations', instead making a convincing argument for calling them two mismatched world views. This isn't the only book to read on the subject of Islam, or the 'mismatch' of our two cultures, but it's a brilliant place to start, and I wish that more people would read it. Maybe that way we'd understand each other a little bit more.

The next book I want to see is a collaboration between both Western and Arabic/Islamic historians, comparing within the same book these two mismatched world views. If any historians read this....