READING: Ansary, Destiny Disrupted

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

THE first thing that strikes you about Tamim Ansary’s whistlestop tour through 1400 years of Islamic history is the title. Destiny Disrupted implies an unfulfilled entitlement co-opted by western hegemony, while boldly suggesting that this destiny is back on track and on course to be fulfilled.

As an Afghan-born author living in America, Ansary is well placed to analyse this “destiny” from both an Eastern and Western perspective, but as he outlines the circumstances that made the Islamic world the bastion of culture and knowledge for almost a millennium - and of its decline - he refrains from explicitly predicting how this supremacy could be achieved again.

“Although history is not over, the period since 9/11 has not mulched down enough to enter history yet: it still belongs to the journalists. It is not too soon, however, to reflect on this period as a manifestation of two great out-of-synch narratives intersecting.”

Speculation over the Islamic world’s possible resurgence is clearly, therefore, for other authors, but for Ansary the lessons are in the history.

In the course of 350-odd pages, in his own informal conversational style, he tells how a 6th century Arabian businessman in the middle of a “mid-life crisis” started a religion which, with a small band of followers, converted Mecca, conquered Medina and, through a mixture of theological persuasion and a series of unlikely military victories, spawned an empire that would stretch from the Atlantic coast to the borders of China.

In relating this period Ansary relegates some of the greatest events in Western history – the Crusades, the discovery of America [incidentally a voyage to find trade routes to the east], the Christian reformation and the resultant wars in Europe – to mere footnotes taking part in one small corner of the Eurasian continent while the great Ottoman, Safavid and Moghul Islamic empires held sway over much of the rest.

The closest Ansary comes to articulating the Islamic world’s disrupted “destiny” actually comes from university of Chicago historian Marshall Hodgson:

“In the sixteenth century of our era, a visitor from Mars could well have supposed that the human race was on the verge of becoming Muslim.”

However, Ansary shows how the Islamic world then went into a period of decline, largely through stagnation and mismanagement. Much of its territory fell to empires built on Judeo-Christian foundations, while the rest tried to adapt to the new world order.

However, Ansary’s unspoken implication is that the last 500 years of Judeo-Christian dominance in world history was just an interlude, that normal service will shortly be resumed. According to Ansary’s thesis, backed up by a wealth of undisputed historical facts, this resurgence has already begun and has been gathering pace for the last century.

From this point on Ansary’s simple, straightforward narration really begins to illuminate by boiling down the often impenetrable world of Middle East politics and Islamist aspirations in the last century into a series of simple fundamentals.

He declares the notion of “nation-statism”, the skeleton upon which most of the world’s principals of cooperation (The United Nations) and discord (from Arab nationalism right down to Scottish Nationalist backbiting) hangs, to be a modern-day invention, a phantom almost, and far from an established fact.

“It’s easy to forget that the organisation of the world into countries is less than a century old...Unfortunately, the ideology of ‘nationalism’ and the reality matched up only approximately if at all.”

But what does all this mean for Western hegemony?

Under the principles of “nation-statism” the United States of America, the chief exporter of Western hegemony today, is a unified entity, with a shared economy, military, official language and a constitution based on the principles of “one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all”.

However, once the veil of nationalism is stripped away and its status as the established locus of organisation and control is removed, other networks of co-operation become apparent.

Today, “nation-statism” and Islamism are already combining. Countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran are already fully fledged Islamic States, where Sharia law and the law of the land are indistinguishable, but beneath the level of nationalism and statehood there is already a shared Islamic economy, military and common constitution.

Groups like the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), which promotes Muslim values within the United Nations on behalf of its 57 member countries with Islamic majorities, and the Organisation of Petrolium Exporting Countries (OPEC), which fixes oil prices on behalf its member countries, most with Islamic majorities, form the basis of a quasi-governmental constitution and shared economy. Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, imports British and American arms by the bucketload, while militant groups like Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, to name but a few, work towards similar ends and form the basis of a unified paramilitary force with international reach. Finally, the insistence that the Quran be read exclusively in Arabic ensures a common language across all Islamic and Islamic-majority states.

To cobble these links together and call them The United States of Islam would be a gross over-simplification, but it is clear that Islam fosters a common link between these nations that is 1000 years older than the nationalist glue that holds the United States of America together.

However, according to Ansary this reawakening of Islamic identity to re-establish its place in world history isn’t something to be feared. Some may find it unpalatable [and I’m going to nail my colours to the mast and state that I find all theocracies unpalatable whether Muslim, Jewish, Christian or other] but it’s not necessarily dangerous or incompatible with liberty:

“The conflict wracking the modern world is not, I think, best understood as a ‘clash of civilisations’, if that proposition means we’re-different-so-we-must-fight-until-there’s-only-one-of-us. It’s better understood as the friction generated by two mismatched world histories intersecting. Muslims were a crowd of people going somewhere. Europeans and their offshoots were a crowd of people going somewhere. When the two crowds crossed paths much bumping and crashing resulted, and the crashing is still going on...

“Islam is not the opposite of democracy; it’s a whole other framework. Within that framework there can be democracy, there can be tyranny, there can be many states in between.”