I wish I could have liked Destiny Disrupted better than I did. This is a book with its heart most definitely in the right place. Born in Afghanistan but now an American, Tamim Ansary emphatically prefers the tolerant, modern and scientific over the punitive, primitive and unreasoning. The question he seeks to answer is the same as that which baffles so many non-Muslim observers of contemporary Islam: how did a culture once so advanced and cosmopolitan fall behind its neighbors and competitors? Why does that culture now incubate violence and extremism across half the world? What went wrong?

Ansary has yoked that meditation to an amusing and anecdotal survey of Islamic history. Ansary writes well, and I was glad to listen to the audio version of his book during the insomnia I suffered as a side effect of the medications to accelerate healing of my facial paralysis. I particularly enjoyed his short biographical sketches that conferred personality upon writers I’d known only for their intellectual impact: ibn Taymiyyah, Sayyid Ahmad, Jamaluddin-i-Afghan.

But the book is very much an introduction, intended for readers making their first acquaintance with Islamic history. And those readers will find themselves ill-served and misled in some important ways.

  • Ansary’s book unhelpfully blurs the line between history and myth. You would not open a history of England with the story of Camelot, or the history of Rome with Romulus and Remus. You might study those stories for insights into the mentality of the people who repeated and believed them in historical times. You might stipulate that the stories contained some element of historical truth: maybe there really was an Artorius in the 400s who led Roman Britons in battle against the Saxons, maybe the Palatine Hill really was the first settled area of Rome. But you wouldn’t exert a lot of effort trying to decide whether Guinevere was a good or bad queen.In the same way, a historian of Islam needs to understand what the legends of Umar and Ayisha and Muhammad himself meant to later Muslims. But since our first sources on those stories are written down 200 and 300 years after they occur, considerable skepticism is warranted about the biographical facts supposedly contained in these legends.
  • Ansary opens his book with a charming account of meeting Arnold Toynbee in Afghanistan. Very understandably, Toynbee’s ideas pervade this book — and especially his idea of cultural development as “challenge and response.” Thus: Mongols wreck the Baghdad caliphate; Muslim intellectuals respond by seeking to regain God’s favour by abandoning skeptical reasoning in favor of a more dogmatic and backward-looking version of the faith. The Toynbee method produces some interesting answers. It can also produce apologetics, in which everything that goes wrong inside a culture becomes a reaction to the actions of others.
  • Ansary’s story becomes less and less detailed and reliable the closer it approaches the present, the period most interesting to his non-specialist readers. It is quite stunning to read a history of Islam that can find no room to mention the Pakistani army’s rampage through East Pakistan in 1971: the most terrible massacre suffered by any Muslim population in the 20th century, and inflicted by fellow Muslims. It’s depressing that the Pakistani state’s turn toward authoritarianism and extremism is shrugged off in a single sentence that pins the blame on U.S. Cold War politics. And it’s irritating to encounter little mistakes that alter the larger picture — like the claim that the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem was the work of the mainstream Jewish army in Palestine, not of a splinter group almost universally reviled and condemned by Jewish political leaders.
  • Ansary’s subtitle is misleading: This is not a history of “the world” through Islamic eyes, but of the European-Islamic encounter. The penetration of sub-Saharan Africa (and the enslavement of African populations) — the overthrow of Hindu principalities — the wars upon China by Turkish nomads — these subjects all get short shrift. Yet a point of view from the center of the Islamic world would have to do justice to all of them as well. And even the European-Islamic encounter is only very partially considered. The wave of Muslim migration into Europe since 1945 and especially since 1980 goes undiscussed — a very large omission you might think. We hear a great deal about what this movement of peoples has meant to Europeans. What has it meant to Muslims? How is it that migration has pushed so many toward a more reactionary and violent interpretation of their faith? These urgent questions would seem to command attention. It’s hard to escape the feeling however that they have been omitted precisely because they are urgent. Of course historians are experts on the past, not the present. But Destiny Disrupted is not a historian’s book, it is the work of a generalist who is inspired by the desire to understand the present, not the past. The topics that obviously matter most to the book’s author are precisely those excluded from the discussion. And the result is a history that leaves behind a feeling of a void at its core, of the unsaying and uncommunicating of the things of greatest interest and the problems of greatest importance.

David Frum is a writer, columnist and editor of FrumForum.com, where this first appeared.