Though the claim that history is written by the victors is too glib to be entirely true -- the vanquished always have their say so long as they are not exterminated --, the triumphant certainly dominate and control history's narrative. Every great deed, every wonderful invention, every significant event, is filtered through the lens of the preeminent culture which, as its power waxes, lays claim to more and more of the virtues that once belonged to the societies it bested or even consumed. This isn't conscious plagiarism; this is the result of the dominant culture's attempt to explain and justify its primacy. After all, how else does one reach the top but through being the best?
Good fortune. For the tides of history are as fickle as they are tempestuous. A lost battle, a devastating storm, a chance encounter, could all, in their own ways, change the course of local events which ripple out to impact on broader trends which, in turn, decide the fate of our world. This is at least the contention of Mr. Ansary in his fascinating history of the world through Islamic eyes. His is a most compelling case.
Before the West was lifted out of darkness by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the printing press and the longbow, Newton and Galileo, the Islamic world thrived. Emerging in the wake of the collapse of the Roman Empire, Arab civilization arose to conquer and command the majority of what we now refer to as the Middle East. Organized around a faith that taught its practitioners as much about law and morality as it did about god, the Islamic world quickly flourished, producing scholars of religion, astronomy, mathematics and philosophy whose thirst for knowledge was unquenchable. This earnest desire to understand drove them to recover and then preserve Roman and Greek texts then lost to a West drowning in barbarism. In might and wisdom, in numbers and in learning, they had no peer save for perhaps the Chinese of the far east.
For 300 years, the Islamic world was civilization. But then disaster struck. Off the Asian step came the Mongols, an indomitable wave of horse-mounted warriors who smashed the Islamic armies raised against them. These defeats re-opened deep wounds long festering in the body of the Islamic world, accentuating the extent to which corruption, political rivalry and decadence had divided and fractured the people who called themselves Muslims. Within 200 years,withered by misrule and misfortune, there remained but the faintest traces of this golden civilization, its peoples either co-opted or returned to the deserts, leaving behind only a legacy of literature and light to sustain the remnants while the West ponderously rose to shake the world with a succession of industrial, philosophical and technological revolutions.
Penned by an Afghan-American academic, Destiny Disrupted is an enlightening and enchanting journey through the history of Islamic civilization. From the birth of the Prophet to 9/11, Mr. Ansary describes, with loving care, 14 centuries of Islamic life. From the wonders of its golden age to the horrors of its fall, he winningly captures its virtues while carefully exhibiting the fundamental flaws which contributed to its decline and subsumption by western Europe. But as much as the author impresses with his breadth of scope and his engaging prose, the extent to which he compares the Islamic world with the West provides his account most of its highlights.
Mr. Ansary contends that, though the Islamic world possessed all of the key ingredients necessary to ignite the Industrial Revolution, centuries before the West managed this feat, it failed to capitalize on its advantages mainly because it lacked a centralized church. The author argues that it was rebellion against the authoritarian bureaucracy of Roman Catholicism that inadvertently instilled in Europeans that particular strain of individualism that catalyzed philosophical, political and economic thought in the west. Islam, meanwhile, lacking an domineering church, had no means of instilling in its own people that same freedom of the individual. Without this, it simply could not produce, educate and properly position the key innovators necessary to spark the same revolutions that would energize the western world. Though this is a long bow to draw, it remains, nonetheless, a compelling argument.
This is not an academic history. Mr. Ansary freely opines on his subject. Moreover, he injects his account with personality and anecdote, elements which raise the specter of bias. However, the clarity of his thought and the thoroughness of his account allow his forthrightness to be an asset, not a drawback. Stimulating stuff... (4/5 Stars)
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