Quotes from Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

“Here are two enormous worlds side by side; what's remarkable is how little notice they have taken of each other. If the Western and Islamic worlds were two individual human beings, we might see symptoms of repression here. We might ask, "What happened between these two? Were they lovers once? Is there some history of abuse?”
― Tamim Ansary, quote from Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

“One side charges, 'You are decadent.' The other side retorts, 'We are free.' These are not opposing contentions; they're nonsequiturs.”
― Tamim Ansary, quote from Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

“Justice became a commodity that only the rich could afford.”
― Tamim Ansary, quote from Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

“In 1517, few western Christians worried that Muslims might have a more convincing message to offer than Christianity or that Christian youth might start converting to Islam. The Turks were at the gate, it's true, but they weren't in the living room, and they certainly weren't in the bedroom. The Turks posed a threat to the physical health of Christians, but not to the spiritual health of Christianity.

Muslims were in a different boat. Almost from the start, as I've discussed, Islam had offered its political and military successes as an argument for its doctrines and a proof of its revelations. The process began with those iconic early battles at Badr and Uhud, when the outcome of battle was shown to have theological meaning. The miracle of expansion and the linkage of victory with truth continued for hundreds of years.

Then came the Mongol holocaust, which forced Muslim theologians to reexamine their assumptions. That process spawned such reforms as Ibn Taymiyah. Vis-a-vis the Mongols, however, the weakness of Muslims was concrete and easy to understand. The Mongols had greater killing power, but they came without an ideology. When the bloodshed wound down and the human hunger for meaning bubbled up, as it always does, they had nothing to offer. In fact, they themselves converted. Islam won in the end, absorbing the Mongols as it has absorbed the Turks before them and the Persians before that.
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The same could not be said of the new overlords. The Europeans came wrapped in certainty about their way of life and peddling their own ideas of ultimate truth. They didn't challenge Islam so much as ignore it, unless they were missionaries, in which case they simply tried to convert the Muslims. If they noticed Islam, they didn't bother to debate it (missionaries are not in the debating business) but only smiled at it as one would at the toys of a child or the quaint relics of a more primitive people. How maddening for the Muslim cognoscenti! And yet, what could Muslims do about it?”
― Tamim Ansary, quote from Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

“So the question arose now, as it had in the wake of the Mongol holocaust: if the triumphant expansion of the Muslim project proved the truth of the revelation, what did the impotence of Muslims in the face of these new foreigners signify about the faith?

With this question looming over the Muslim world, movements to revive Islam could not be extricated from the need to resurrect Muslim power. Reformers could not merely offer proposals for achieving more authentic religions experiences. They had to expound on how the authenticity they proposed would get history back on course, how their proposals would restore the dignity and splendor of the Umma, how they would get Muslims moving again toward the proper endpoint of history: perfecting the community of justice and compassion that flourished in Medina in the original golden moment and enlarging it until it included all the world.

Many reformers emerged and many movements bubbled up, but all of them can sorted into three general sorts of responses to the troubling question.

One response was to say that what needed changing was not Islam, but Muslims. Innovation, alterations, and accretions had corrupted the faith, so that no one was practicing the true Islam anymore. What Muslims needed to do was to shut out Western influence and restore Islam to its pristine, original form.

Another response was to say that the West was right. Muslims had gotten mired in obsolete religious ideas; they had ceded control of Islam to ignorant clerics who were out of touch with changing times; they needed to modernize their faith along Western lines by clearing out superstition, renouncing magical thinking, and rethinking Islam as an ethical system compatible with science and secular activities.

A third response was to declare Islam the true religion but concede that Muslims had certain things to learn from the West. In this view, Muslims needed to rediscover and strengthen the essence of their own faith, history and traditions, but absorb Western learning in the fields of science and technology. According to this river of reform, Muslims needed to modernize but could do so in a distinctively Muslim way: science was compatible with the Muslim faith and modernization did not have to mean Westernization.”
― Tamim Ansary, quote from Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

“what the Muslim world has reified over the course of history is the idea that society should be divided into a men’s and a women’s realm and that the point of connection between the two should only be in the private arena, so that sexuality can be eliminated as a factor in the public life of the community.”
― Tamim Ansary, quote from Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

“Privileged men showed off their status by keeping their womenfolk out of public life and hidden from view in the private quarters of their households. The psychology underlying this custom was (I think) the feeling that a man’s honor—which really means his ability to hold his head high among his fellow men—depended on his ability to keep any women associated with him from becoming the objects of other men’s sexual fantasies.”
― Tamim Ansary, quote from Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

“In America, conservative historian Francis Fukuyama wrote that the collapse of the Soviet Union marked not just the end of the Cold War, but the end of history: liberal capitalist democracy had won, no ideology could challenge it anymore, and nothing remained but a little cleanup work around the edges while all the world got on board the train headed for the only truth. …

On the other side of the planet, however, jihadists and Wahhabis were drawing very different conclusions from all these thunderous events [Iran's 1979 revolution and ouster of US presence and the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan]. In Iran, it seemed to them, Islam had brought down the Shah and driven out America. In Afghanistan, Muslims had not just beaten the Red Army but toppled the Soviet Union itself. Looking at all this, Jihadists saw a pattern they thought they recognized. The First Community had defeated the two superpowers of its day, the Byzantine and Sassanid Empires, simply by having God on its side. Modern Muslims also confronted two superpowers, and they had now brought one of them down entirely. On down, one to go was how it looked to the jihadists and the Wahabbis. History coming to an end? Hardly. As these radicals saw it, history was just getting interesting.”
― Tamim Ansary, quote from Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

“The identification of courage with truth pops up often in history, even in our day: talk-show host Bill Maher was kicked off network TV for suggesting that the suicide hijackers of 9/11 were brave. Common decency demands that no positive character traits be associated with someone whose actions and ideas are vicious. Unfortunately, this equation enables people to validate questionable ideas by defending them with courage, as if a coward cannot say something that is true or a brave man something that is false.”
― Tamim Ansary, quote from Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

“Literary scholar Hamid Dabashi notes the curious case of the English language novel The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, written by a traveler named James Morier, who pretended he had merely translated a Persian original. Morier used a ridiculous diction in his novel to lampoon Persian speech and depicted Iranians as dishonest scoundrels and buffoons. Then, in the 1880s, an astounding thing happened. Iranian grammarian Mirza Habib translated Hajji Baba into Persian. Remarkably, what in English was offensive racist trash became, in translation, a literary masterpiece that laid the groundwork for a modernist Persian literary voice and “a seminal text in the course of the constitutional movement.” The ridicule that Morier directed against Iranians in an Orientalist manner, the translator redirected against clerical and courtly corruption in Iranian society, thereby transforming Hajji Baba into an incendiary political critique.2”
― Tamim Ansary, quote from Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

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