Destiny Disrupted

xviii INTRODUCTION Iran, the insurgencies in Algeria, the Philippines, and elsewhere; the hi- jackings and suicide bombings in t ...

INTRODUCTION xix history leads to the birth of its founding ideals of liberty and equality and to its resultant rise as a superp ...

XX INTRODUCTION would be forced to look for the meaning of history in defeat instead of tri- umph. We would feel conflicted betw ...

INTRODUCTION xxi have been like two separate universes, each preoccupied with its own in- ternal affairs, each assuming itself t ...

xxii INTRODUCTION their history as soon as it happened, and they didn't just preserve it but embedded each anecdote in a nest of ...

I ~ The Middle World TONG BEFORE ISLAM was born, two worlds took shape between the LAtlantic Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. Each c ...

2 The Mediterranean World (Defined by Sea Routes) The Middle World (Defined by Land Routes) ...

THE MIDDLE WORLD 3 of it a name obscures the connectedness of the whole, and besides, the phrase Middle East assumes that one is ...

4 DESTINY DISRUPTED capillaries are apt to become characters in one another's narratives, even if they disagree about who the go ...

THE MIDDLE WORLD 5 itable Sahara on the west, and by rugged cliffs at its upper end. Geography gave Egypt continuity but also re ...

6 DESTINY DISRUPTED Sargon led his armies so far south they were able to wash their weapons in the sea. There he said, "Now, any ...

THE MIDDLE WORLD 7 feasting in his palace one night, saw a disembodied hand write on his wall in letters of fire, "Mene mene tek ...

8 DESTINY DISRUPTED Canaan. The Persian emperors pursued a multicultural, many-people- under-one-big-tent strategy. They control ...

THE MIDDLE WORLD 9 Mesopotamia, libraries so extensive that we know more about daily life in this area three thousand years ago ...

10 DESTINY DISRUPTED and icons, laying the basis for the hostility toward representation in reli- gious art that reemerged force ...

THE MIDDLE WORLD 11 It didn't end there, however. About 150 years later, Alexander the Great took the battle the other way. We o ...

12 DESTINY DISRUPTED light cavalry sometimes pretended to have been routed; in the hot middle of the fighting, they would sudden ...

THE MIDDLE WORLD 13 naires and killing Crassus who, along with Caesar and Pompey, had been coruler of Rome. Thirty years later, ...

14 DESTINY DISRUPTED foundered, western Europeans stopped reading or writing much, and Eu- rope sank into its so-called Dark Age ...

THE MIDDLE WORLD 15 On the Eve oflslam: The Byzantine and Sassanid Empires east to the foothills of the Himalayas. Between the t ...