The Roman Empire is a footnote in this story the universal state which defined the classical age is the early united Khalifate. As such, it features a very different set of actors and key events than the more familiar world history given above. His book is part of that resolution.ĭestiny Disrupted is a world history, but it’s a world history as understood by the Islamic world. According to the very brief autobiography in the book’s introduction, Ansary was raised in a traditional Islamic household, but all of his formal schooling was in Western-style schools, giving him a bifurcated view of the world which he struggled to integrate. But by conflating our history with the history of the whole world, we not only marginalize and insult those whose historical narratives are different, but we make ourselves incapable of understanding the interactions that we have with the other worlds around us.Īnd so we come to Destiny Disrupted, Tamim Ansary’s attempt to write an Islamic history of the world accessible to Western readers. This is the historical narrative of a particular civilization in a particular time, and it clashes and competes with alternate historical narratives told by people from outside our cultural milieu. Now the First World has reached the pinnacle of human development, and all that remains is for the rest of the world to finally bring itself up to our level. Shortly thereafter we discovered science, democracy, and industrialization.
Then the Roman Empire fell, plunging the world into an age of superstition and darkness, from which we finally emerged during the Renaissance. First there was the ancient world, from whose murky depths emerged the cultural brilliance of the Greeks and the political might of the Romans. Most people with a basic college education feel that they know how history works.
It therefore always includes an implicit notion of who "we" are, and what our current place in the history of the world is. World History, says Tamim Ansary in his introduction, is always the story about how we got to be where we are. Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary
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