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Destiny Disrupted

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Is there not now and has there not often been some intractable argument about this patch of land: whose world is this a part of? — location: 282 ^ref-50836

Missionary monks had been roaming west from Afghanistan, teaching Buddhism, but the seeds they dropped would not grow in the soil of Zoroastrian Persia, so they turned east, which is why Buddhism spread to China but not Europe. — location: 461 ^ref-29427

Unlike Western Christianity, this church had no pope-like figure. Each city with a sizable Christian population had its own top bishop, a “metropolitan,” and all the metropolitans were supposedly equal, although the top bishop of Constantinople was more equal than most. — location: 475 ^ref-524

The Byzantine Empire lasted almost a thousand years, by few can name five events that took place in the empire during all that time. — location: 483 ^ref-59223

in three years they put an end to an empire that had gone toe-to-toe with Rome for centuries. — location: 1038 ^ref-33195

Othman seemed haunted by the fear that he was not good enough. — location: 1198 ^ref-14218

“Every day is doomsday, — location: 1207 ^ref-59961

Amr ibn al-A’as grumbled that his successor was getting more milk out of the she-camel only by starving the camel’s young. Islamic rule was acquiring hints of possible oppression and corruption. — location: 1230 ^ref-9073

The Prophet thought Mu’awiya especially competent and kept him close after his conversion. — location: 1256 ^ref-9440

perhaps Omar should have paused to consider why Mohammed had kept the man so close: once ensconced in Damascus, Mu’awiya put his brilliance to work assembling a standing army loyal to himself. This would have grim consequences after Othman’s untimely death. — location: 1258 ^ref-63939

the spokesman’s arguments got through to the fierce young woman. First, she admitted that she didn’t really think Ali had anything to do with Othman’s murder. What she blamed him for was failing to arrest the criminals responsible. Then, she agreed that the criminals were part of a mob, and that the mob, which was still in charge, drew its strength from chaos. Next, she admitted that by fighting Ali, she was promoting chaos and so, yes, in a sense she herself was helping the assassins escape justice. By the end of the day, she had agreed to lay down her weapons, disband her army, and join forces with Ali. She would meet with him in the morning to discuss terms. — location: 1343 ^ref-31906

while the other khalifas had made themselves the guardians of Mohammed’s communitarian vision, Ali had established himself as the keeper of the inner flame. — location: 1392 ^ref-64108

After Ali’s death, the khalifate was just an empire. — location: 1418 ^ref-55926

death “surrounds Adam’s offspring as a necklace surrounds a young girl’s neck. — location: 1448 ^ref-9000

“Is this how you Muslims behave? We Christians would never treat a descendant of Jesus in this manner.” The criticism angered Yazid, and he had the “Roman” thrown into prison. — location: 1466 ^ref-43748

Whatever his shortcomings as a saint, Mu’awiya possessed tremendous political skill. — location: 1514 ^ref-28368

it wasn’t just Arab-inspired commercial energy that permeated the Muslim world but also Islam-inspired social ideals. — location: 1593 ^ref-19389

The Shi’ite imams no longer directly challenged the throne very much; they began to separate the meaning of imam from the meaning of khalifa, — location: 1689 ^ref-41061

Just as everyone was getting ready to tie into the meal, however, the waiters threw off their robes to reveal armor underneath. They weren’t waiters, it turned out, but executioners. The Umayyads jumped to their feet, but too late: the doors had all been locked. The soldiers proceeded to club the Umayyads to death. — location: 1756 ^ref-59237

Abbas went by a new title, al-Saffah, which means “the slaughterer.” — location: 1758 ^ref-40622

Islam conquered all the territories ruled by the Sassanids and much that had once been ruled by the Byzantines, but in the end the ghosts of those supplanted empires infiltrated and altered Islam. — location: 1825 ^ref-51857

before Islam had a standing army of professional soldiers, it had a standing army of professional scholars — location: 1895 ^ref-52367

in Muslim society, which is so community oriented, social pressure—the power of shaming—might be the most powerful of all forces, as opposed to political power, which operates through procedural rules, control of money, monopoly control of the instruments of force, and so on. — location: 1972 ^ref-27938

Zahir Baybars, confronted Hulagu at Ayn Jalut, which means “Goliath’s spring. — location: 3032 ^ref-64234

Egypt, therefore, was not ruled by a family, but by a military corporation constantly refreshing its ranks with new mamluks. It was a meritocracy, and the system worked. Under the mamluks, Egypt became the leading nation in the Arab world, a status it has never really relinquished. — location: 3045 ^ref-5024

battle of Chaldiran actually ended up defining the frontier between the Ottoman and Safavid realms, which hardened eventually into the border between the successor states, Iran and Turkey, and remains the border between those countries to this day. — location: 3634 ^ref-41318

“In the sixteenth century of our era, a visitor from Mars might well have supposed that the human world was on the verge of becoming Muslim. — location: 3820 ^ref-35375

Ultimately, it was traders, not soldiers, who took down the Ottoman Empire. — location: 4273 ^ref-14290

it’s always harder to ignore a rock you’re under than a rock you’re on. — location: 4700 ^ref-20937

That’s why Mohammed announced that he was the last of the prophets—he didn’t mean that his rulings about issues in the Mecca and Medina of his day were to be the final word on human conduct throughout the ages. He meant that he had brought the last tools people needed to proceed on the quest for a moral community on their own, without unexplained rulings from God. Islam was the last of the revealed religions because it was the beginning of the age of reason-based religions. — location: 4953 ^ref-45770

The great error of Muslims, the reason for their weakness, said Jamaluddin, was that they had turned their backs on Western science while embracing Western education and social mores. They should have done exactly the opposite: they should have embraced western science but closed their gates to Western social mores and educational systems. — location: 5085 ^ref-40450

industrialization, constitutionalism, and nationalism. — location: 5123 ^ref-16723

It was something working too well that led them into “a high-level equilibrium trap” (to borrow a phrase from historian Mark Elvin.1 — location: 5153 ^ref-57591

In Europe, those who had the means to install industrial machinery had no particular responsibility for those whose livelihood would be destroyed by a sudden abundance of cheap, machine-made goods. Nor were the folks they affected downstream their kinfolk or fellow tribesmen, just strangers whom they had never met and would never know by name. What’s more, it was somebody else’s job to deal with the social disruptions caused by widespread unemployment, not theirs. Going ahead with industrialization didn’t signify some moral flaw in them; it merely reflected the way this particular society was compartmentalized. — location: 5173 ^ref-56708

That is, no one looking at machine-made consumer goods said, “Gee, we, too, should have a Reformation and develop a cult of individualism and then undergo a long period of letting reason erode the authority of faith while developing political institutions that encourage free inquiry so that we can happen onto the ideas of modern science while at the same time evolving an economic system built on competition among private businesses so that when our science spawns new technologies we can jump on them and thus, in a few hundred years, quite independently of Europe, make these same sorts of goods ourselves.” — location: 5234 ^ref-46654

  1. Before that war, people in the United States spoke of their country as “these united states.” After the war, they called it “the United States.” — location: 5380 ^ref-33372

It was a nationalism based on ideas, a nationalism that anyone could embrace because, in theory, it was a nation any person could become a member of, not just those who worn born into it. — location: 5387 ^ref-12173

Britain essentially promised the same territory to the Hashimites, the Saudis, and the Zionists of Europe, — location: 5670 ^ref-18136

But the principle of beating and imprisoning people for their clothes and grooming—this principle, both sides embraced. — location: 5758 ^ref-47430

Anyone who knows what the Taliban did in Afghanistan at the end of the century will recognize an eerily precise preview of their carnage in the career of the Water Carrier’s Son. By the time he was finished, Afghans were so sick of chaos, they were eager to accept a strongman. — location: 5815 ^ref-36673

By the mid- 1930s, the brotherhood had outgrown its origins as a club for boys and become a fraternal organization for men. — location: 5841 ^ref-22783

meanwhile, Islamist insurgents were pushing up from below. What was a leader to do? — location: 5860 ^ref-54703

The trouble was, most of the new nation-states were rather artificial. — location: 5869 ^ref-38138

How on earth could secular modernist leaders use nationalism to bind together their dubious nations, especially since some of their own were calling for an Arab nation transcending existing boundaries—while at the same time Islamists and Wahhabis were saying to hell with nations; to hell with ethnic identity politics; we’re all Muslims; let’s rebuild the khalifate? — location: 5930 ^ref-26180

internal combustion engines ran strictly on refined petroleum. — location: 5959 ^ref-38917

By 1923, according to Winston Churchill, Great Britain had earned 40 million pounds from Iranian oil, while Iran had earned about 2 million from it. — location: 5967 ^ref-38785

The deal ensures the U.S. unfettered access to Saudi oil; in exchange, the Saudi royal family gets as much U.S. military equipment and technology as it needs to stay in power against all comers. — location: 5982 ^ref-32406

this understanding partnered the United States with the Wahhabi clerical establishment and made American military prowess the guarantor of the Wahhabi reform movement. — location: 5983 ^ref-35197

Algeria’s eight-year war of independence from France claimed over a million Algerian lives, out of a starting population of fewer than 9 million, a staggering conflict. — location: 6011 ^ref-60010

It was not only decolonization that came to a head after World War II, but “nation-statism.” It’s easy to forget that the organization of the world into countries is less than a century old, — location: 6022 ^ref-7597

Between 1945 and 1975, some one hundred new countries were born, and every inch of earth finally belonged to some nation-state or other. — location: 6024 ^ref-45615

What happened just before and during World War II in Palestine resembled what happened earlier in Algeria when French immigrants bought up much of the land and planted a parallel economy there, rendering the original inhabitants irrelevant. — location: 6059 ^ref-64368

As early as 1862, a German Zionist, Moses Hess, had drummed up support for political Zionism by proposing that “the state the Jews would establish in the heart of the Middle East would serve Western imperial interests and at the same time help bring Western civilization to the backward East. — location: 6064 ^ref-17384

What looks, from one side, like a campaign to secure greater rights for citizens irrespective of gender, looks from the other side, like powerful strangers inserting themselves into the private affairs of families and undercutting people’s ability to maintain their communal selves as familial and tribal networks. In short, what looks from one side like empowering each individual looks, from the other side, like disempowering whole communities. — location: 6655 ^ref-54942

The conflict wracking the modern world is not, I think, best understood as a “clash of civilizations,” if that proposition means we’re-different-so-we-must-fight-until-there’s-only-one-of-us. It’s better understood as the friction generated by two mismatched world histories intersecting. Muslims were a crowd of people going somewhere. Europeans and their offshoots were a crowd of people going somewhere. When the two crowds crossed paths, much bumping and crashing resulted, and the crashing is still going on. — location: 6658 ^ref-44532

What struck me, however, was that such ideas were voiced at all in the Muslim world. I wondered if it could only happen in a place where Muslims were struggling with themselves and each other, not with the West. — location: 6700 ^ref-35557

until recent centuries, it made more sense to speak of Judeo-Muslim than of Judeo-Christian culture. — location: 6714 ^ref-37431

Rethinking World History — location: 6818 ^ref-10934

Righteous Victims: — location: 6873 ^ref-19770

The Jewish State: — location: 6874 ^ref-29548