Evento

Berkeley Arts & Letters: Tamim Ansary on Destiny Disrupted

The acclaimed author of West of Kabul, East of New York brings a sweeping, narrative history, illuminating how Muslims have seen the history of the world and what western world history leaves out.

In the west, we share a common narrative of world history that runs from the Nile Valley and Mesopotamia, through Greece and Rome and the French Revolution, to the rise of the secular state and the triumph of democracy. Its one that largely omits a whole civilization that until quite recently saw itself at the center of world history, and whose citizens shared an entirely different narrative for a thousand years. In Destiny Disrupted, Tamim Ansary tells the rich story of world history as the Islamic world saw it, from the time of Mohammed to the fall of the Ottoman Empire and beyond. He clarifies why our civilizations grew up oblivious to each other, what happened when they intersected, and how the Islamic world was affected by its slow recognition that Europe a place it long perceived as primitive and disorganized had somehow hijacked destiny.

Tamim Ansary is the author of the memoir West of Kabul, East of New York, co-author with Farah Ahmadi of the New York Times bestseller The Other Side of the Sky, and has been a major contributing editor to several secondary school history textbooks. Ansary is director of the San Francisco Writers Workshop, and writes for Encarta.com, the San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, Alternet, Edutopia, Parade the Los Angeles Times, and other publications.