Afghan-American writer, lecturer, and teacher Tamim Ansary is man ideally placed to help Westerners see the history of our world through another set of eyes. Growing up in Afghanistan as a young history buff, Ansary had an opportunity to read and learn about the world from dual perspectives. A decade ago, when he was working as a textbook editor, a publisher in Texas hired him to develop a new world history textbook for high school students.
“What that meant was that I had to select and arrange the most events to reveal the arc of history, not a chronological list of every damn thing that ever happened,” Ansary said. What emerged was a narrative of civilization that included both “the West” and “Islam.” From his textbook, Ansary went on to write another book, this time for adults – : . That book is about to be re-published in paperback edition.
Ansary begins with two lists of the pivotal periods in human history – as seen both through Western eyes and through Islamic eyes. For both, it is the year 3500 BC (before Christ in the Western calendar) – or 3500 BCE (before the Common Era, as it’s known in both Muslim and Jewish traditions). “The first traces of what you might call ‘civilization’ emerged along the Tigris and Euphrates River and a little later in Egypt,” Ansary said. “Writing is part of it; cities are part of it; irrigation systems and inventions like the wheel.”
In the Middle East, a pattern recurred again and again, Ansary explains. “A city would be built up; the nomads would take over that city and become the civilized people. They would expand the empire the city had once ruled; then, new nomads would come and expand the empire again. That process came to a climax with the Persian Empire, which ruled a realm stretching from the Indus River to Egypt.” In the Mediterranean region, Ansary notes, this period roughly overlaps the Western civilization of Greece and Rome.
In terms of cultural identity, the most critical historical period for Muslims is the birth of Islam – specifically the , the flight of the Prophet Mohammed from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE. “About 610," Ansary recounts, “the Prophet went to a cave and meditated. And he felt he had been visited by the angel Gabriel, who told him he was the messenger of Allah. That message was that there is only one God. You shouldn’t worship idols. This one God has given humanity freedom of choice, but will hold them responsible for their choices. Time will end and there will be a day of judgment, and people will be sorted into those who have done good, who will go to heaven, and those who have done evil, who will go to hell – for eternity.”
“When the Prophet fled to Medina because he was being persecuted in Mecca,” Ansary said, “he became not only a preacher but also the leader of a community, the Muslim community, and that marks the of history.”
About the same time as the rise of Christianity in the West and its subsequent “Dark Ages,” Ansary noted, Islam was experiencing a quest for unity, represented by the Caliphate. “At that time, the Muslim empire was civilized empire that was in its Golden Age,” he said.
The core of the religious conflict, Ansary explains, was the division between Sunni Islam and Shi’a Islam. “Many different ethnic groups had come under the umbrella of Islam, and a question arose as to how they should all be integrated into one community whose fundamental premise was the brotherhood and equality of all.”
By the end of the 11th century of the Common Era, the dream of a universal Muslim community at the political level had failed, according to Ansary. “It crumbled because the Caliphate got too big. The technology of the time was not sufficient to have one capital administering a realm that stretched from India to Spain,” he said.
As the Caliphate fragmented, a similar thing that had happened to the Roman Empire in the West, happened to the Muslim world, Ansary suggests. “The Seljuk Turks were the first of the nomadic tribes from the north to enter the Muslim realm,” he explained. “They were very mobile, and they set up something different from the Caliphate,” he said. “But, most important, the culture of the Islamic world changed after that invasion,” Ansary noted.
Then came a period of about three centuries in which the Islamic world was attacked by Crusaders from the west and by Mongols from the east, Ansary said. The Crusaders came to the eastern Mediterranean and set up three small Crusader kingdoms. “Although the Crusader destruction was not so widespread, within that area the destruction was at times horrifying. For example, the conquest of Jerusalem was quite a slaughter,” Ansary said.