Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

We in the west share a common narrative of world history. But our story largely omits a whole civilization whose citizens shared an entirely different narrative for a thousand years.In Destiny Disrupted, Tamim Ansary tells the rich story of world history as the Islamic world saw it, from the time of Mohammed to the fall of the Ottoman Empire and beyond. He clarifies why our civilizations grew up oblivious to each other, what happened when they intersected, and how the Islamic world was affected by its slow recognition that Europe—a place it long perceived as primitive and disorganized—had somehow hijacked destiny.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Islam, Religion, Middle East, Politics, World History

432 pages, Paperback

First published April 28, 2009

About the author

Mir Tamim Ansary is an Afghan-American author and public speaker. Ansary gained prominence in 2001 after he penned a widely circulated e-mail that denounced the Taliban but warned of the dangers of a military intervention by the United States. The e-mail was a response to a call to bomb Afghanistan "into the Stone Age." His book West of Kabul, East of New York published shortly after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, is a literary memoir recounting his bicultural perspective on contemporary world conflicts. Ansary writes about Islam, Afghanistan, and history. His book Destiny Disrupted retells the history of the world through Islamic eyes. His new book The Invention of Yesterday explores the role of narrative as a force in world history Ansary directed the San Francisco Writers Workshop for 22 years.