After three decades as a U.S. military leader--rising to the highest levels leading in the counternarrative fight--and half of that spent STUDYING Islam, I kinda thought I had a decent grasp of the Muslim world's historical narrative. Having taught War College, I knew Islam's history of expansion as the faith grew. I knew many of the great names--some, like the Rashidun Caliphs, through spiritual study; some, like Saladin and Tamerlane, through their military prowess. I even knew that several of the great philosopher-scientists of "our" history, like Averroes & Avicenna were, in fact, the great Islamic theologians & jurists Ibn Rushd & Ibn Sina. So when I bought this book a few years back, I was mainly looking for a tool to help me TEACH OTHERS that world history isn't just the set of objective facts we learn in Western schools, but instead more like a play rewritten again & again to cast each of its characters in turn as the lead. I got that--but I also learned a lot MYSELF--and I just completed my SECOND read through.
Perhaps most important, this book overviews the CONNECTIVE TISSUE tying all those HISTORICAL EVENTS that I knew into HISTORY--through which I learned a lot about HOW the Muslim world got from what it was at one point in its journey, to what it was at another, and WHY Islamic culture and Western culture progressed in very different directions after each point at which their paths intersected. In some cases, I also learned that I'd completely misunderstood the relationship between key pieces of the narrative--for example, that three of the great Islamic empires (the Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Moghuls) existed somewhat CONCURRENTLY, rather than one after the other, and interacted (or didn't) in ways that significantly shaped our world. And I got a sharp and detailed reminder that imperfect men and their baser motives have wreaked as much havoc on a world guided by Islam (and how the Message of that faith was carried down through history) as they have on OUR world guided by Christianity, and how CHRIST'S message got handed down.
In short, whether you're only a casual student of OUR OWN history, or one who's delved pretty extensively into the Muslim world, this is a really useful book for helping a Western reader escape the blinders of what, more than likely, we simply learned as a timeline of objective facts and events, to understand how seeing the same events through a Muslim lens can endow particular themes & crosscurrents with very different cognitive meaning and emotional weight. And this, in turn, is of enormous value in trying to understand the ways that 'Islamic' history and our 'Western' history have wandered into one another--Ansary uses the metaphor of two crowds of people, each going somewhere, crossing paths...to "much bumping and crashing" (p. 353)--including how each culture, while condemning the actions and beliefs of groups like Da'esh (ISIS) and al-Qa'ida just as strongly--can yet view our "War on Terrorism" quite differently...as well as how we might BETTER proceed, from those distinct viewpoints, to overcome the evil that is enemy to us both.
That said, the book also has significant flaws that will be evident to advanced readers--of which those new to this material should also be aware. Ansary is NOT a scholar of Islam, and shortcomings in his own knowledge (and/or his personal biases) often lead him to conclusions that obscure equally- or even MORE valid lessons. For example, in discussing al-Ghazali's "The Incoherence of the Philosophers," he misses a core point about the relationship between reason & revelation, arguing that Ghazali's conclusion that God is the ONLY true cause of anything robbed science in the Muslim world of its purpose--when Ghazali was more properly arguing that the value of science (observing that cause in action) lay in helping us holistically understand our world and its relationship to our Creator: This, in turn, weakens his comparison of the Protestant Reformation to the Islamic history of the same time: while a STRENGTH of his book is generally its stance outside the Western (or 'Orientalist') cultural perspective, Ansary is clearly enamored of the Protestant Reformation, and credits it with unchaining the Western mind to inquire, using its emerging tools of science, in directions and at a speed that a mind simultaneously seeking to understand the same physical world AND HOW IT RELATES TO GOD AND FAITH would not. Yet, in an era when we're creating all sorts of feats of science (like armed drones & cloned embryos), making national decisions based solely on our own perceived interests, and plowing ahead into a changing climate with little regard for how it might CHANGE US BACK, we might do well to ask ourselves what OUR culture might have to learn from the ISLAMIC perspective as well.
My recommendation: give it a read, with these things in mind. Then, if your interests focus inward, on detailed understanding of how these different 'histories' impact Islamic and Western views of specific events, look at works like Maalouf's
The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (Saqi Essentials)
or Cobb's
The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades
. Or, if your interests focus OUTWARD, toward better understanding of alternative, non-Western ways of looking at our world--past, present & future--in general, consider works like Wael Hallaq's
Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge
.
- Amazon Business : For business-only pricing, quantity discounts and FREE Shipping. Register a free business account
