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Destiny Disrupted:
A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes
By Tamim Ansary
There are several ways to look at the not entirely frictionless interaction of the West with the Islamic world over the past few decades. The most common, perhaps, is Samuel Huntington's “Class of Civilizations” model. Like most exercises in cultural comparison, it has many merits, but tends to view the cultures in question as static entities. Destiny Disrupted takes a somewhat different approach: the West and the Islamic world are different histories. They look back on different pasts, even when those pasts record many of the same events, and they have different ideas about how the world works and where it is going. According to this book, these systems have bounced off each other often in the past, but without deflecting the historical narrative of either to any important degree. That is, not until the latter 17th century, when Western influence began to seriously interfere with Muslim self-confidence and historical expectations. This disruption sparked movements dedicated to renaissance and reaction (sometimes both in the same movement) that met with a measure of success, but also led to the asymmetric conflicts of the early 21st century. This approach to history will remind many readers of the Arnold Toynbee of the early volumes of his Study of History, in which he defined a civilization as the intelligible unit of historical study; that is, the context sufficient for understanding a historical event. There are other Toynbean touches in the book, too, not least the hints that echo the later Toynbee's conclusion that the more important historical unit may well be the Higher Religions. Curiously, though, Toynbee does not appear in this book, except in person: when the author was a boy in Afghanistan, we are told, the old historian dropped by the author's home on a trip through the region to check out the rumors of a budding history buff. Since then, the author has spent most of his professional life in the United States, with a day job as a textbook writer but also the author and coauthor of several books, including the memoir West of Kabul, East of New York. This book is especially valuable for its account of the First Community of Islam, the society founded at Medina by Mohammed of the Quraysh tribe of Mecca. Mohammed fled Mecca for Medina in A.D. 622, year 1 of the Muslim calendar. The first four rulers of that community after Mohammed are called the Rightly Guided. In the author's view, only they may properly be called “khalifa” (usually “caliph” in English) which he renders “deputy”; though later rulers used the term into the 20th century, he demotes them to mere “emperors.” This reviewer notes that the mythographer Mircea Eliade used the term “in illo tempore,” “in that time,” to describe the time of myth, the story template that is supposed to define ritual and, as much as possible, the affairs of everyday life. “Myth” in this context need not mean imaginary or fictional. When history becomes myth, it becomes binding precedent and a conceptual tool for viewing profane events. That is very much what happened with the events of the First Community, or at any rate with accounts of the First Community as they were received by later generations. First, of course, there was Mohammed's revelation itself, later compiled into the Koran. Its semantic content was hardly irrelevant, but it converted through the very sound of the Arabic words. To hear those words forever after has been to be in the divine presence. What they created, however, was not only a facility for personal salvation, but also a community, a social project. It was highly egalitarian, with considerable attention to the support of its members unable to care for themselves. It was populist if not quite democratic: the Rightly Guided Caliphs were chosen by committee or popular acclamation. The First Community was commercially minded. It was also militarily aggressive: first for defensive reasons, and then in the interests of spreading the Word and the revenues to be derived from that enterprise, the First Community began the process of the Islamization of the world that is the motor of history from the Muslim perspective. The author has no patience with those apologists who say that “jihad” means “spiritual struggle,” or that it refers only to defensive war. From the beginning it meant war to expand the borders of Islam, though from the beginning it could also mean other things. Readers will have often heard that the distinction between Shia (the author prefers “Shi'i”) and Sunni Islam was occasioned by the dispute about whether Ali, Mohammed's cousin and son-in-law, should be his successor. Actually, he was Mohammed's successor, but the fourth. The dispute is about whether he should have been the first, and more importantly, just what it meant to be Mohammed's successor. Ali had a spiritual charisma that promised a continuing personal link to the transcendent, something that has become a feature of Shia Islam. To the Sunnis, this feature seemed to qualify the finality of Mohammed's revelation. The distinction between Sunni and Shia gelled only much later, but the template for the dispute and the issues involved, which go beyond the Shia – Sunni controversy, were present in the First Community. Other aspects of the era of the First Community have also been found relevant in later times. Thus, though history is ultimately on the Muslims' side, they lost battles when the community failed to follow the Mohammed's instructions. On the other hand, they may tactically withdraw when it seems prudent; Mohammed and the caliphs were quite capable of making truces and other accommodations with their enemies. Even mere historical context can be suggestive. It has not gone unremarked, for instance, that Islam was able to expand so quickly in the 7th century in part because the Byzantine and Sassanid empires, the great powers of the Near East, had just fought each to destitution; the analogy is widely felt to be not without application to the post-Cold War world. If we jump a thousand years ahead of the First Community to about A.D. 1600 (something the book spares its readers; the exposition is lucidly chronological), we would find a world that conformed more or less to that community's expectations for the future. It was possible at that time to travel from the North African Atlantic Coast to what is now Indonesia through three great Muslim empires, the Ottoman, the Iranian (or Persian; usage has always varied) and the Moghul. All of them were wealthy for pre-industrial societies and culturally lively, if not by that point particularly innovative. Their populations were not everywhere overwhelmingly Muslim; Moghul India in particular was ruled by a Muslim minority, but that, too, repeated a pattern set early in Muslim history. Islamization required only the creation of an Islamic political context, not necessarily the conversion of the whole population. To be sure, there were ways in which the world of 1600 would have disconcerted the First Community. For one thing, though Arabic was everywhere a language of learning and ritual, Arabs were no longer an imperial people. At that point, the ruling dynasties of all the Three Empires were of Turkic origin. The Ottoman Empire, of course, was explicitly, even chauvinistically “Turkish” (the designation can be misleading, since there were different kinds of Turk). The primordial tradition of social equality was perhaps honored chiefly in the breach. All of the empires were despotisms, if not necessarily tyrannies. Muslim often fought Muslim, sometimes for dynastic reasons and sometimes for points of doctrine. The great expansions of Muslim territory had recently stalled. The Ottoman domain extended far into Europe but had not quite succeeded in taking Vienna; the Moghuls seemed to be approaching a condition of homeostasis with India rather than complete conquest. Still, as the author notes, a visitor from space at about that time could have reasonably concluded that Earth was becoming a Muslim planet. This condition of nearly universal success was arrived at, however, after a great inflection in Islam's fortunes. The great age of Muslim cultural and intellectual creativity extended from the early 8th to the late 12th centuries. It coincided, as is the way of these things, with economic expansion and political turmoil, so that at the height of Muslim civilization there were three caliphates, or “Muslim empires,” if you prefer: the most venerable and legitimate Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad, a city created to be a world capital; the Fatimid caliphate in Egypt, which was a Shia polity; and the Umayyid caliphate of what is now Spain, descended from survivors of the dynasty that immediately succeeded to the Rightly Guided Caliphs before being overthrown by the Abbasids. As time went by, Baghdad's control of the major regions of its empire became more and more notional. Turkic peoples from Central Asia made their presence felt. First they came as heathen plunderers, and then as empire builders, though in the beginning they tended to make figureheads of Arab rulers rather than to replace them. Their advent was not unrelated to the advent of the First Crusade. The author recognizes that the immediate cause for that enterprise was the Battle of Manzikert in 1071. A Turkic army defeated the Byzantine emperor in a battle that caused the empire's immemorial position in Asia Minor to collapse. It seemed to put the empire itself in danger. After a bout of civil war, a new emperor appealed to the Pope Urban II, who duly exhorted the Latin West to save the empire and secure Christian access to Jerusalem. Everyone involved was surprised at the enthusiasm of the response. The author cautions readers at the beginning of the book that not everything in it may be factually accurate, but that even the inaccuracies are important to know, because they are the view of events taken by educated Muslims. Fair enough, and if educated Muslims really believe that the Crusaders were cannibal savages who left no hovel unburnt from the Bosporus to Sinai, then maybe it is important to record that as a kind of urban legend. However, it really is time to put a stake through Lord Runciman's hypothesis that the Crusades were a make-work program for the younger sons of European nobility. In any case, some references to Bernard Lewis's The Muslim Discovery of Europe would have been helpful throughout. Far the greatest external disasters were the Mongol incursions. The Horde of Hulagu did not just sack but erase Baghdad in 1258, maybe the largest city in the world at the time. The Muslim Turkic (but not “Turkish”) Tamerlane did a comparable amount of damage at the end of the next century. Nonetheless, Islamic civilization did regroup and reemerge in somewhat novel forms. The Ottoman Turks of Anatolia during this time of upheaval created an intricate and interlocking social system that satisfied its subjects and seemed infinitely expandable. (The author says it compares only to modern America.) They finally completed the jihad against the Byzantine Empire in 1453 by capturing Constantinople. They went on to create a polity that included Muslin heartlands, the European Balkans and North Africa, and which came to an end only after it chose the wrong side in the First World War. The author gives commendable attention to the scientific and intellectual evolution of Abbasid times. This evolution was never entirely divorced from theology, which in the case of Islam meant close attention to the text and ontological status of the Koran. To put a complicated matter very briefly, the period began with an epistemologically optimistic appropriation of Aristotelianism; pure reason and empirical observation were believed capable of producing a high degree of reliable knowledge. This optimism was increasingly called into question by controversy over the interpretation of scripture, notably the issue of the degree to which the statements of the Koran can be applied analogically to address new situations. The dispute is sometimes formulated as the question whether the Koran is Allah's substance or one of his creatures. The prevailing conclusion was that the Koran was “uncreated,” and so had a higher ontological status than any analysis of it. (Compared to their Muslim analogues, the strictest Christian literalists view the Bible as a collection of helpful hints.) The tradition of philosophical enquiry ended with a skepticism of the power of reason that David Hume might envy. The motive, however, was more like that of Immanuel Kant: to make room for faith by restricting the scope of intellectual critique. The result was a kind of pious skepticism with a quite postmodern flavor (this is the reviewer's characterization, not the author's). In any religion with scriptures, naïve fundamentalism is possible in which the believer clings to the literal interpretation of the text because the text is all he knows. Late classical Islamic thought, however, expressed a fundamentalism that had tried a variety of ways of knowing but found them wanting; it returned to the text, or rather to the traditional interpretations of the text, because the text was the one foundation of certainty remaining. Meanwhile, though pure reason had been found wanting on technical grounds, rational religion had also been increasingly wanting for psychological purposes. There was a great market for religious experience which the emerging Sufi orders met, just at the time the political order was falling to pieces. So, in at least one interpretation of history (and not necessarily one the author endorses), one might say that the over-refined world of the Abbasids had come to an end for its dissention and impiety, just as the Muslims of the First Community had lost battles when they failed to obey Mohammed. The situation righted itself with the new orthodoxy of the Turkish revival. History failed to end, however. Suddenly there were Europeans everywhere, as technical experts in the Ottoman lands, as military advisers in Persia, as traders in Moghul India. At first they were not militarily overwhelming, but they did have know-how and financial resources that put venal and foolish Muslim rulers under their influence, and indeed in their power. From this account, it is not at all clear how this happened, which suggests that it is not really clear to most Muslims. Nonetheless, over the course of two centuries, the typical Western-Muslim interaction went from Venetian merchants cadging favors from the Divine Porte in Istanbul to the British holding durbars at Delhi. Why, then did the Muslim world fail to adapt to modernity, or to develop a technological and political revolution of its own? The author is aware that part of the answer lies in the deep structure of Muslim societies. For instance, Muslim reformers in the 19th century tried to introduce constitutions in Muslim states, but with mixed success. The problem was that the arbitrary nature of Muslim rule was reflected all the way down. Every man could be a whimsical tyrant in his own home if he so chose, subject only to the whim of his superiors, who were subject to the whim of their superiors, and so on up to the sultan (who might, as the saying goes, have a whim of iron). In discussing the technological and commercial conservatism of Muslim societies, the author has a great deal to say about gender roles, the Sufic sanction of artisanal industry, and even the difficulty of adapting to clock time. These are all interesting points, but more attention might have been given to issues such as responsible government and the rule of law. The fundamentally arbitrary nature of power may, perhaps, be an insistence of Islam itself. This was the point that Benedict XVI was making in the Regensburg Address: Allah may incorporate a text, but apparently not the Logos. If so, this has important consequences not just for politics but also for science. A universe informed by a Supreme Being without Divine Reason would imply whimsical government at the human level and whimsical physics at the natural. One could in fact argue that there is a deep connection in Western thought from Christology to constitutionalism to science. (On the other hand, as the author notes, Muslim apologists have argued that reason is precisely the element that Islam adds to the Abrahamic religions.) The dismissal in this book of the Latin Middle Ages may be significant in ways the author does not appreciate. Here is what he has to say about the intellectual life of the period, before contact with Muslim Spain brought rumors of sophisticated learning:
During the Dark Ages, hardly anyone in Europe knew how to read except clerics, and clerics learned the skill just to read the Bible and conduct services. Among Germanic Christians, in Charlemagne's time for example, clerics revered Latin, the language in which Christian services were performed, because they thought of it as the language God spoke. They worried that if their Latin deteriorated, God would not understand their prayers, so they preserved and studied a few ancient books written by pagans such as Cicero purely as an aide to mastering the grammar and structure and pronunciation of the old tongue. They wanted to ensure that they would be able to continue reading out syllables that would reach God. When reading writers such as Cicero, they tried assiduously to ignore what they were saying and focus only on their style so as not to be contaminated by their pagan sensibilities. Their efforts to preserve Latin petrified it into a dead language suitable only for ritual and incantatory purposes, incapable of serving as a vehicle for discussion or thought. There is a strange projection here of the Islamic attitude toward Arabic onto the medieval view of Latin. Though the 9th century really was genuinely primitive in many ways, the notion of “trilingualism” (the idea that Latin, Greek, and Hebrew are the only possible liturgical languages) was quickly dismissed as a heresy. As for Carolingian times, the presence of men like Alcuin and John Erigena testifies that even that period was quite capable of dispute and speculation in Latin. In any case, the author tries to make out that the mind of the West was drowned in violent obscurantism not just in the 9th century but until pretty much the Reformation, when the Western world divorced Church from State and freed the mind of the West from its Christian trappings. Where to begin? It simply is not true that the Crusades of the 11th and 12th centuries came from a land where “warfare never stopped.” Actually, in large measure it had stopped because of the Peace of God Movement in the 11th century, which was also about the time that Church declared its independence from State when the pope faced down the emperor at Canossa. Not incidentally, that act of defiance was the template for the assertion of all future civil liberties. The point is that the aspects of the West that Muslim reformers wished to graft onto Muslim societies as the world of the Three Empires decayed were not the secularized products of a newly post-Christian West, but were continuous with the ancient traditions of Christendom. That is not the same as saying, for instance, that in order to establish a postal system you first must accept the Filioque Clause. The provenance of the attractive features of modernity does imply, however, that in other societies they may not mean quite what they mean in the West; and that in any case, they cannot be established simply by royal proclamation. The author has a lively sense this indeed proved to be the case. The author suggests that the Islamist eruption that began in the last quarter of the 20th century was quite as much a disruption of the Western historical narrative as the appearance of a newly potent early modern West was to the Three Empires. One can pick on Francis Fukuyama too much, but it is true that the model of history he proposed at the end of the Cold War had singularly little to say about such a development. As things stand, the West keeps talking about freedom and looking for another Cold War to win, while the Islamists preach about decadence and look for another Byzantine emperor to defeat. Both of the world histories these enterprises assume are true, the author suggests. A genuinely universal history that unites them is possible, but the time is not yet.
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