Where Westerners Can See The Islamic World Through Their Eyes

Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

4 stars. This is a very good, very useful book of history.

I'm a little disappointed it isn't quite the book I thought it was. But that's sorta my mistake, because it does what it sets out to do.

Lemme explain.

This is, essentially, a history not just of the Islamic world, but a history of that region from the perspective of the Islamic world. That's great. That's most of what I hoped for. The author, as a highly educated man originally from Afghanistan who lives in the US, is a knowledgeable historian and excellent communicator, and the book succeeds as a history for Westerners from another perspective. The concluding chapters, with the history of the last 100 years or so, is especially well done, filling in information I didn't get from other books of this type.

I just thought from the title and the blurb that it would focus on the part that really perplexes me--how, following the Medieval period, did the most advanced, most civilized part of the world, with the biggest cities and the greatest wealth, fall off so much that modern Europeans and Americans (during the 19th and 20th century, for example) could look that direction and think that *they* were uncivilized? What happened to the poets and the scholars and the scientists? The doctors? The explorers? Why wasn't the stuff that ended up giving the West such an advantage over the last 150 years or so invented and built in Egypt or Iraq or Persia instead of England and Germany and the US?

It's not totally missing from the book. Some of that is answered, more or less directly, but it's brief. I was hoping for a much closer look at the Medieval era and the changing fortunes of the West and the Islamic world. So it's in there, but as this really is a survey of history from the 600s to the present (with a short chapter on much earlier history) there isn't a lot of room to focus on what I thought was the central idea of the work.

To be clear, then: this is an excellent history of the Islamic world, told in a clear voice by a knowledgeable educator with lots of helpful, unique insight. I found it very informative. However, IMO, the main title--"Destiny Disrupted"--refers only to a small part of the whole, one of many themes, while the subtitle--"A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes"--is much more accurate in terms of content.

If that's what you want, you absolutely should read this book.

If you were hoping for something different like I was... you still should probably read it, and just be slightly disappointed, because it's still pretty good.

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