Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes (Ansary, Tamim)

Notes from relevant books on Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Defence, Development and Humanitarian Action.

Ansary, Tamim. Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes. PublicAffairs, 2009.

These are my personal notes from this book. They try to give a general idea of its content, but do not in any case replace reading the actual book. Think of them as teasers to encourage you to read further!

Introduction

In short, less than a year before September 11, 2001, the consensus of expert opinion was telling me that Islam was a relatively minor phenomenon whose impact had ended long before the Renaissance. If you went strictly by our table of contents, you would never guess Islam still existed.

In both histories, the great empire fragments because it simply grows too big. The decaying empire is then attacked by nomadic barbarians 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.

The story might break down to something like the following stages:

·      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

Here are two enormous worlds side by side; what’s remarkable is how little notice they have taken of each other.

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.

Unlike other religions, 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

1 - The Middle World

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 that 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.

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.

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.” His empire was smaller than New Jersey.

Religion permeated the Persias world. It wasn’t the million-gods idea of Hinduism, nor was it anything like the Egyptian pantheon of magical creatures with half-human and half-animal shapes, nor was it like Greek paganism, which saw every little thing in nature as having its own god, a god who looked human and had human frailties. No, in the Persian universe, Zoroastrianism held pride of place.

Alexander cut deep and made a mark. He appears in may Persian Myths and stories, which give him an outsize heroic quality, though not an altogether positive one (but not entirely villainous, either). A number of cities in the Muslim world are named after him. Alexandria is the obvious example, but a less obvious one is Kandahar—famous now because the Taliban consider it their capital. Kandahar was originally called “Iskandar,” which is how “Alexander” was pronounced in the East.

2 - The Hijra

Quite definitely, Islam is a religion, but right from the start (if “the start” is taken as the Hijra) it was also a political entity. Yes, Islam prescribes a way to be good, and yes, every devoted Muslim hopes to get into heaven by following that way, but instead of focusing on isolated individual salvation, Islam presents a plan for building a righteous community.

Mohammed put the whole tribe on trial and appointed one of their former associates among the Medina tribes as judge. When the tribe was found guilty, the judge declared that the crime was treason, the punishment for which was death. Some onlookers protested against this sentence, but Mohammed confirmed the sentence, whereupon some eight hundred Jewish men were executed in the public square, and the women and children of the tribe were sent to live with the two tribes exiled earlier.

He led fourteen hundred Muslims on the two-hundred-mile trek to Mecca. They came unarmed, despite the recent history of hostilities, but no battle broke out. The city closed its gates to the Muslims, but Quraysh elders came out and negotiated a treaty with Mohammed: the Muslims could not enter Mecca this year but could come back and perform their rites of pilgrimage next year. Clearly, the Quraysh knew the game was over.

3 - Birth of the Khalifate

THE FIRST KHALIFA (12 - 14 AH)

When Prophet Mohammed died, it was like a saint dying but it was also like a king dying. He was irreplaceable, yet someone had to take his place.

THE SECOND KHALIFA: 14 - 24 AH

Omar’s decision to call a war of conquest a “jihad” has obvious ramifications for modern times and has been much debated. In Mohammed’s day, the word jihad did not loom large. Etymologically, as I said, it didn’t mean “fighting” but “striving,” and though it could be applied to fighting an enemy, it could also be used to discuss striving against temptation, struggling for justice, or trying to develop one’s compassion.

Omar had no tolerance for slackards. For example, he banned drinking outright, even though the Qur’an had been somewhat ambiguous on this question,

he mandated stoning for adulterers, which is not mentioned in the Qur’an but does appear in the law of Moses, dating to pre-Qur’anic times

The chairman of the shura interviewed both men in front of an assembly of the people, posing one key question to each: “If you become khalifa, will you be guided by the Qur’an, the sunna, and the precedents set by Abu Bakr and Omar?” Ali said yes to the Qur’an and yes to the sunna (the example set by Mohammed’s life), but as for the decisions of his predecessors—no: Ali said he had a mind of his own and would consult his own conscience and best judgment for his decisions. Othman, by contrast, said yes to everything: “I am not an innovator.” So the chairman declared him the right man to head the Umma, the people approved, and Ali, not wanting to rock the boat, took the oath of loyalty.

4 - Schism

THE THIRD KHALIFA (22-34 AH, 642-656 CE)

Othman Ghani, “Othman the wealthy.”

On questions of personal morality such as drinking and sex, Othman’s asceticism put him beyond criticism. If piety consisted of penance and prayer, he had to rank among the top ten most pious men of his time, but Othman saw no ethical ambiguity in people making money, so long as their moneymaking promoted overall well being.

Outside his palace, the rioters worked themselves into a frenzy, broke down palace doors, and burst in with a roar. They found the khalifa in his study, and there in the flickering twilight of the old man’s lamp, in year 34 of the Muslim era, they beat their own leader to death. Suddenly, the succession conundrum had turned into a horrifying crisis that threatened the very soul of Islam.

THE FOURTH KHALIFA (35-41 AH, 656 - 661 CE)

The members of the Umayyad clan, Othman’s close relatives, had fled to Damascus, where their kinsman Mu’awiya had quietly been assembling his military force.

When Mu’awiya began his ruckus, Ayesha threw in with him, in part because there had always been bad blood between her and Ali.

And so the Umayyad dynasty began.

Ali’s death ended the first era of Islamic history. Muslim historians came to call the first four post-Mohammed leaders the Rightly Guided Khalifas. Life in their time was certainly not undiluted sweetness and wonder, but in calling them the Rightly Guided Ones, I don’t think responsible Muslim historians mean to suggest such perfection. Rather, they’re saying that the evolution of the community from the time of the Hijra to the assassination of Ali was a religious drama.

The Prophet’s immediate successors were like the six blind men trying to discern whether the elephant was more like a rope, a wall, a pillar, or what. All the struggles over the khalifate in the period of the Rightly Guided Ones had theological meaning because the issues they struggled with were essentially theological. After Ali’s death, the khalifate was just an empire.

5 – Empire of the Umayyads

OF COURSE, MU’AWIYA did not present himself as the man who ended the religious era. He titled himself khalifa and said he was continuing the same great mission as his predecessors.

Omar had done them a great favor by sanctifying offensive warfare as jihad so long as it was conducted against infidels in the cause of Islam. This definition of jihad enabled the new Muslim rulers to maintain a perpetual state of war on their frontiers, a policy with pronounced benefits.

Then there were precedents bequeathed to the Umayyads by Khalifa Othman, who allowed Muslims to spend their money in way they wanted, so long as they followed Islamic strictures. Based on Othman’s rulings, the Umayyads allowed Muslims to purchase land in conquered territory with money borrowed from the treasury. Of course one had to be very well connected to get such loans, even more so than in Othman’s time, and since Islam outlawed usury, these loans were interest-free, which is nice financing if you can get it.

6 - The Abbasid Age

A direct descendant of Ali and Fatima would certainly have been better, but none of the Alids—that is, Ali’s real and putative descendants—would make common cause with the Hashimites, so Abu al-Abbas would have to do. Sometimes you have to go into battle with the figurehead you have, not the figurehead you wish you had. Abu Muslim didn’t have much trouble tapping into the Shi’ite and Persian discontent seething in Khorasan, the province that stretched from Iran through Afghanistan. At key points in his speeches, Abu Muslim became a little vague about who exactly would become the khalifa once the revolution succeeded.

12 - West Comes East

By 1850, Europeans controlled every part of the world that had once called itself Dar al-Islam. They lived in these countries as an upper class, they ruled them directly or decided who would rule, they controlled the resources, they dictated the policies, and they circumscribed the daily lives of their people. In places such as Egypt, Iran, and India, there were clubs that the native people could not enter because they were Egyptian or Iranian or Indian. Europeans had achieved this dominance without any grand war or broadscale assault. The Europeans were scarcely even aware that there had been a struggle and that they had won. But Muslims noticed, because it’s always harder to ignore a rock you’re under than a rock you’re on.

14 - Industry, Constitutions, and Nationalism

In Istanbul, the most tightly organized group just then was the ultranationalist Committee for Union and Progress. On January 23, 1913, the CUP seized control in a coup d’etat, assassinated the incumbent vizier, deposed the last Ottoman sultan, ousted all other leaders from the government, declared all other parties illegal, and turned Ottoman Turkey into a one-party state. A triumverate of men emerged as spearheads of this single party: Talaat Pasha, Enver Pasha, and Djemal Pasha, and it was these “three Pashas” who happened to be ruling the truncated remains of the Ottoman empire in 1914, when the long-anticipated European civil war broke out. In Europe, it was called the Great War; to the Middle World, however, it looked like a European civil war at first

AFTERWORD

But did the perpetrators of 9/11 see themselves as striking a blow against freedom and democracy? Is hatred of freedom the passion that drives militantly political Islamist extremists today? If so, you won’t find it in jihadist discourse, which typically focuses, not on freedom and its opposite, nor on democracy and its opposite, but on discipline versus decadence, on moral purity versus moral corruption, terms that come out of centuries of Western dominance in Islamic societies and the corresponding fragmentation of communities and families there, the erosion of Islamic social values, the proliferation of liquor, the replacement of religion with entertainment, and the secularization of the rich elite along with the ever-hardening gap between rich and poor.