There he starts spouting words of wisdom–or is it nonsense? Is he a vagrant, an idiot, an advance scout for a band of marauders–or a malang, a man so intoxicated by God he has left all ordinary concerns behind? Should the villagers drive him away or convince him to settle in? These are the questions that face village headman Ibrahim, his fragile wife Soraya, his widowed sister-in-law Khadija, and village tough-guy Ghulam Dastagir. A mysterious old man comes over the mountain and parks himself on the slope above the village. The time is 1840 the place a tiny village in Afghanistan. Most readers are familiar with an arc of world history that runs from Egypt and Mesopotamia through Greece and Rome, to the Dark Ages, the Renaissance and Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and the rise of nation states.
The shape of that story necessarily depends, therefore, on who the “we” is, and where these tellers of the story are situated. World history is the story of how we got to where we are today. He poses the question at the heart of the Afghan riddle: why does every great power going into Afghanistan make exactly the same mistakes as the previous great power going into Afghanistan, even though each one comes to grief in pretty much the same way and for pretty much the same reasons? It is not the first time this question has been posed but Ansary’s vivid account is the first time it has been answered.ĭestiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes Here, Ansary presents the epic, tragic (and yet sometimes strangely comical) two-century story of Afghanistan from the inside looking out.
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