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Destiny Disrupted

a History of the World Through Islamic Eyes
Aug 03, 2015wyenotgo rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
This book needs to be required reading for anyone in our western society who wishes to gain some understanding of the Islamic world, our relationship with it and above all how it got to be this way. The insights the book provides are numerous and in some cases surprising. He does not make excuses or assess blame for how badly things have gone wrong. We may draw those conclusions for ourselves. Clearly, terrible mistakes have been made all around and continue being made. For example, in Chapter 12 he explains the insidious process whereby, with the full cooperation of Islamic rulers, Europeans quietly seeped into the Muslim world as traders, consultants and "helpers", eventually morphing into overlords and owners of key resources. We learn how the industrial revolution "worked" for Europeans because their social structures and mores made it easier for them to adapt to the enormous social side effects and economic disruption of their former ways of life. Unlike Muslims, Europeans were not hampered by a deep-set, complex, clan based social and economic arrangement. In the Islamic world, industrialization exacerbated the schism between the ruling class and the common people who were left behind to be easily radicalized by religious extremists and jihadists. Early chapters provide a helpful backdrop for how we got to the present state of the Islamic world, the origins of the various Islamic movements and sects. In so doing, Ansary succeeds in making a case for the story of Islam, its importance and its relevance to all of us being much greater than is generally taught in the west. It's helpful to understand fundamental facts; such as the high ideals with which the Islamic project was begun; the fact that there was originally no division between the secular and the religious because the secular simply didn't exist either in the social structures or in the minds of men at the time; the fact that the conflicts we see today have more to do with antagonism between traditional religious beliefs and the secular, nationalistic leaders who have taken power within the Islamic world than with Islam's objections (if any) to western ideas of freedom. Ansary is at his best in exploring the troublesome misalignment between the historic, ethnic and cultural connections among peoples of the "Middle World" versus the arbitrarily created nation-state boundaries imposed by European powers. Above all, he presents the east-west conflict not as a "clash of civilizations" but rather a series of collisions between two very different historical cycles and two worlds that have so often lacked any meaningful way of talking to each other.