Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

New York: PublicAffairs, 2009. 1st ed; 1sd printing (full number line). Hardcover. Fine in fine jacket. Neat owner name and date hand-written in pen to front free endpaper.. xxii, 390 pages: maps; 25 cm; bibliographical references (pages 367-370) and index. Signed by author on title page. Contents: The middle world -- The Hijra -- Birth of the khalifate -- The schism -- Empire of the Umayyads -- The Abassid age -- Scholars, philosophers, and sufis -- Enter the Turks -- Havoc -- Rebirth -- Meanwhile in Europe -- West comes East -- The reform movements -- Industry, constitutions, and nationalism -- Rise of the secular modernists -- The crisis of modernity -- The tide turns.

"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. Tamim Ansary tells the rich story of world history as it looks from that other perspective. With the evolution of the Muslim community at the center, his story moves from the lifetime of Mohammed through a succession of far-flung empires, to the struggles and ideological movements that have wracked the Muslim world in recent centuries, to the tangle of modern conflicts that culminated in the events of 9/11. He introduces the key people, events, ideas, legends, religious disputes, and turning points of world history from that other perspective, recounting not only what happened but how those events were interpreted and understood in that framework. He clarifies why these two great 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 -- had somehow hijacked destiny."-Publisher.

"Mir Tamim Ansary is an Afghan-American author. Born in Afghanistan to an Afghan father and American mother, Ansary moved to the United States as a teenager. He is best known for his memoir, "West of Kabul, East of New York," which chronicles his bicultural perspective growing up in Afghanistan and later living in America. Ansary gained considerable attention after 9/11 when he wrote an email providing his perspective on the tragic events that quickly went viral. In the email, he expressed his concerns about potential repercussions in Afghanistan as the U.S. considered its response to the attacks. He has also written a number of other books, including "Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes," in which he provides a non-Western perspective of world history, focusing particularly on the narrative of Islamic civilization.
Ansary's work often aims to bridge the cultural gap between his Afghan and American identities and to shed light on the complexities and nuances of Afghan and Islamic history for Western readers."

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