Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

  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 imagination, 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 centered 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 repression 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 have been like two separate universes, each preoccupied with its own internal 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  But the superseded history never really ended.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 beneath 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 effort 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 because this period spans the career of Prophet Mohammed and his first four successors, the founding narrative of Islam. I recount this story as an intimate human drama, because this is the way that Muslims know it. Academics 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 of Islam. Unlike older religions—such as Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, even Christianity—Muslims began to collect, memorize, recite, and preserve 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 approached 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 Marius 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.

  1

  The Middle World

  LONG BEFORE ISLAM was born, two worlds took shape between the Atlantic Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. Each coalesced around a different network of trade and travel routes; one of them, mainly sea routes; the other, land routes.

  If you look at ancient sea traffic, the Mediterranean emerges as the obvious center of world history, for it was here that the Mycenaeans, Cretans, Phoenicians, Lydians, Greeks, Romans, and so many other vigorous early cultures met and mingled. People who lived within striking distance of the Mediterranean could easily hear about and interact with anyone else who lived within striking distance of the Mediterranean, and so this great sea itself became an organizing force drawing diverse people into one another’s narratives and weaving their destinies together to form the germ of a world history, and out of this came “Western civilization.”

  If you look at ancient overland traffic, however, the Grand Central Station of the world was the nexus of roads and routes connecting the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, the Iranian highlands, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, roads that ran within a territory ringed by rivers and seas—the Persian Gulf, the Indus and Oxus rivers; the Aral, Caspian, and Black seas; the Mediterranean, the Nile, and the Red Sea. This eventually became the Islamic world.

  THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD (Defined by Sea Routes)

  THE MIDDLE WORLD (Defined by Land Routes)

  Unfortunately, common usage assigns no single label to this second area. A portion of it is typically called the Middle East, but giving one part of it a name obscures the connectedness of the whole, and besides, the phrase Middle East assumes that one is standing in western Europe—if you’re standing in the Persian highlands, for example, the so-called Middle East is actually the Middle West. Therefore, I prefer to call this whole area from the Indus to Istanbul the Middle World, because it lies between the Mediterranean world and the Chinese world.

  The Chinese world was, of course, its own universe and had little to do with the other two; and that’s to be expected on the basis of geography alone. China was cut off from the Mediterranean world by sheer distance and from the Middle World by the Himalayas, the Gobi Desert, and the jungles of southeast Asia, a nearly impenetrable barrier, which is why China and its satellites and rivals barely enter the “world history” centered in the Middle World, and why they come in for rare mention in this book. The same is true of sub-Saharan Africa, cut off from the rest of Eurasia by the world’s biggest desert. For that matter, the A
mericas formed yet another distinct universe with a world history of its own, which is for geographic reasons even more to be expected.

  Geography, however, did not separate the Mediterranean and Middle worlds as radically as it isolated China or the Americas. These two regions coalesced as different worlds because they were what historian Philip D. Curtin has called “intercommunicating zones”: each had more interaction internally than it had with the other. From anywhere near the Mediterranean coast, it was easier to get to some other place near the Mediterranean coast than to Persepolis or the Indus River. Similarly, caravans on the overland routes crisscrossing the Middle World in ancient times could strike off in any direction at any intersection—there were many such intersections. As they traveled west, however, into Asia Minor (what we now call Turkey), the very shape of the land gradually funneled them down into the world’s narrowest bottleneck, the bridge (if there happened to be one at the given time) across the Bosporus Strait. This tended to choke overland traffic down to a trickle and turn the caravans back toward the center or south along the Mediterranean coast.

  Gossip, stories, jokes, rumors, historical impressions, religious mythologies, products, and other detritus of culture flow along with traders, travelers, and conquerors. Trade and travel routes thus function like capillaries, carrying civilizational blood. Societies permeated by a network of such capillaries are apt to become characters in one another’s narratives, even if they disagree about who the good guys and the bad guys are.

  Thus it was that the Mediterranean and Middle worlds developed somewhat distinct narratives of world history. People living around the Mediterranean had good reason to think of themselves at the center of human history, but people living in the Middle World had equally good reason to think they were situated at the heart of it all.

  These two world histories overlapped, however, in the strip of territory where you now find Israel, where you now find Lebanon, where you now find Syria and Jordan—where you now, in short, find so much trouble. This was the eastern edge of the world defined by sea-lanes and the western edge of the world defined by land routes. From the Mediterranean perspective, this area has always been part of the world history that has the Mediterranean as its seed and core. From the other perspective, it has always been part of the Middle World that has Mesopotamia and Persia at its core. Is there not now and has there not often been some intractable argument about this patch of land: whose world is this a part of?

  THE MIDDLE WORLD BEFORE ISLAM

  The first civilizations emerged along the banks of various big slow-moving rivers subject to annual floods. The Huang Ho valley in China, the Indus River valley in India, the Nile Valley in Africa—these are places where, some six thousand years ago or more, nomadic hunters and herders settled down, built villages, and became farmers.

  Perhaps the most dynamic petri dish of early human culture was that fertile wedge of land between the Tigris and Euphrates known as Mesopotamia—which means, in fact, “between the rivers.” Incidentally, the narrow strip of land flanked by these two rivers almost exactly bisects the modern-day nation of Iraq. When we speak of “the fertile crescent” as “the cradle of civilization,” we’re talking about Iraq—this is where it all began.

  One key geographical feature sets Mesopotamia apart from some of the other early hotbeds of culture. Its two defining rivers flow through flat, habitable plains and can be approached from any direction. Geography provides no natural defenses to the people living here—unlike the Nile, for example, which is flanked by marshes on its eastern side, by the uninhabitable Sahara on the west, and by rugged cliffs at its upper end. Geography gave Egypt continuity but also reduced its interactions with other cultures, giving it a certain stasis.

  Not so, Mesopotamia. Here, early on, a pattern took hold that was repeated many times over the course of a thousand-plus years, a complex struggle between nomads and city dwellers, which kept spawning bigger empires. The pattern went like this:

  Settled farmers would build irrigation systems supporting prosperous villages and towns. Eventually some tough guy, some well-organized priest, or some alliance of the two would bring a number of these urban centers under the rule of a single power, thereby forging a larger political unit—a confederation, a kingdom, an empire. Then a tribe of hardy nomads would come along, conquer the monarch of the moment, seize all his holdings, and in the process expand their empire. Eventually the hardy nomads would become soft, luxury-loving city dwellers, exactly the sort of people they had conquered, at which point another tribe of hardy nomads would come along, conquer them, and take over their empire.

  Conquest, consolidation, expansion, degeneration, conquest—this was the pattern. It was codified in the fourteenth century by the great Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun, based on his observations of the world he lived in. Ibn Khaldun felt that in this pattern he had discovered the underlying pulse of history.

  At any given time, this process was happening in more than one place, one empire developing here, another sprouting there, both empires expanding until they bumped up against each other, at which point one would conquer the other, forging a single new and bigger empire.

  About fifty-five hundred years ago, a dozen or so cities along the Euphrates coalesced into a single network called Sumer. Here, writing was invented, the wheel, the cart, the potter’s wheel, and an early number system. Then the Akkadians, rougher fellows from upriver, conquered Sumer. Their leader, Sargon, was the first notable conqueror known to history by name, a ferocious fellow by all accounts and the ultimate self-made man, for he started out poor and unknown but left records of his deeds in the form of clay documents stamped with cuneiform, which basically said, “This one rose up and I smote him; that one rose up and I smote him.”

  Sargon led his armies so far south they were able to wash their weapons in the sea. There he said, “Now, any king who wants to call himself my equal, wherever I went, let him go!” meaning, “Let’s just see anyone else conquer as much as I have.”1 His empire was smaller than New Jersey.

  In time, a fresh wave of nomadic ruffians from the highlands came down and conquered Akkad, and they were conquered by others, and they by others—Guttians, Kassites, Hurrians, Amorites—the pattern kept repeating. Look closely and you’ll see new rulers presiding over basically the same territory, but always more of it.

  The Amorites clocked a crucial moment in this cycle when they built the famous city of Babylon and from this capital ruled the (first) Babylonian Empire. The Babylonians gave way to the Assyrians, who ruled from the even bigger and grander city of Nineveh. Their empire stretched from Iraq to Egypt, and you can imagine how enormous such a realm must have seemed at a time when the fastest way to get from one place to another was by horse. The Assyrians acquired a nasty reputation in history as merciless tyrants. It’s hard to say if they were really worse than others of their time, but they did practice a strategy Stalin made infamous in the twentieth century: they uprooted whole populations and moved them to other places, on the theory that people who had lost their homes and lived among strangers, cut off from familiar resources, would be too confused and unhappy to organize rebellion.

  It worked for a while, but not forever. The Assyrians fell at last to one of their subject peoples, the Chaldeans, who rebuilt Babylon and won a lustrous place in history for their intellectual achievements in astronomy, medicine, and mathematics. They used a base-12 system (as opposed to our base-10 system) and were pioneers in the measurement and division of time, which is why the year has twelve months, the hour has sixty minutes (five times twelve), and the minute has sixty seconds. They were terrific urban planners and architects—it was a Chaldean king who built those Hanging Gardens of Babylon, which the ancients ranked among the seven wonders of the world.

  But the Chaldeans followed the Assyrian strategy of uprooting whole populations in order to divide and rule. Their king Nebuchadnezzar was the one who first smashed Jerusalem and dragged the Hebrews into captivity. It was also
a Chaldean king of Babylonia, Balshazzar, who, while feasting in his palace one night, saw a disembodied hand write on his wall in letters of fire, “Mene mene tekel upharsin.”

  His sycophants couldn’t make heads or tails of these words, probably because they were blind drunk, but also because the words were written in some strange tongue (Aramaic, as it happens.) They sent for the Hebrew captive Daniel, who said the words meant “Your days are numbered; you’ve been weighed and found wanting; your kingdom will be divided.” At least so goes the Old Testament story in the book of Daniel.

  Balshazzar barely had time to ponder the prophecy before it came true. A sudden blistering bloodbath was unleashed upon Babylon by the newest gang of ruffians from the highlands, an alliance of Persians and Medes. These two Indo-European tribes put an end to second Babylonia and replaced it with the Persian Empire.

  At this point, the recurrent pattern of ever-bigger empires in the heart of the Middle World came to an end or at least to a long pause. For one thing, by the time the Persians were done, there wasn’t much left to conquer. Both “cradles of civilization,” Egypt and Mesopotamia, ended up as part of their realm. Their suzerainty stretched west into Asia Minor, south to the Nile, and east through the Iranian highlands and Afghanistan to the Indus River. The perfumed and polished Persians probably saw no point in further conquest: south of the Indus lay steaming jungles, and north of Afghanistan stretched harsh steppes raked by bitter winds and roamed by Turkish nomads eking out a bare existence with their herds and flocks—who even wanted to rule that? The Persians therefore contented themselves with building a string of forts to keep the barbarians out, so that decent folks might pursue the arts of civilized living on the settled side of the fence.

  By the time the Persians took charge, around 550 BCE, a lot of consolidation had already been done: in each region, earlier conquerors had drawn various local tribes and towns into single systems ruled by one monarch from a central capital, whether Elam, Ur, Nineveh, or Babylon. The Persians profited from the work (and bloodshed) of their predecessors.