A sweeping narrative history that retells the story of the world through Islamic eyes, tracing the Muslim world from the era before Muhammad through the caliphates, the great empires, and the collision with rising European power up to the present day. Ansary argues that Islamic and Western civilizations grew as two overlapping but distinct world-historical narratives, and shows how their intersection shaped the modern Middle East.
Books mentioned in Destiny Disrupted (9)
The Story of Mankind by Hendrik Willem van Loon: “When we parted, however, Toynbee gave me a gift: Hendrick Willem Van Loon's The Story of Mankind.”
A Child's History of the World by V. M. Hillyer: “My earliest favorite was the highly entertaining Child's History of the World by a man named V.”
A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle: “Conan Doyle, for example, uses “Parthian shot” to mean “parting shot” in his 1886 novel A Study in Scarlet.”
Shahnameh by Ferdowsi: “the poet Firdausi, who was writing Shahnama (The Book of Kings), an epic history of the Persian nation from the beginning of time to the birth of Islam, all in rhyming couplets.”
The Aims of the Philosophers by Abu Hamid al-Ghazali: “Then he wrote a book about Greek philosophy called The Aims of the Philosophers.”
Jami al-Tawarikh (Compendium of Chronicles) by Rashid al-Din Hamadani: “Rashid al-Din Fazlullah, a Jewish convert to Islam, wrote an epic Collection of All Histories, which included the history of China, India, the Turks, the Jews, the pre-Islamic Persians, Mohammed...”
Islam in Modern History by Wilfred Cantwell Smith: “I took along a book that I had found in a used bookstore in London, Islam in Modern History by the late Wilfred Cantwell Smith, a professor of religion at McGill and Harvard.”
The Travels of Marco Polo by Marco Polo: “they called Marco Polo's book about his adventures “The Millions,” referring to the number of lies they thought he had packed into it.”
Muqaddimah by Ibn Khaldun: “Ibn Khaldun. (Ansary discusses Ibn Khaldun's theory of history; candidate context was a bare reference.)”