Tamim Ansary > Quotes

“We need solitude, because when we're alone, we're free from obligations, we don't need to put on a show, and we can hear our own thoughts.”
― Tamim Ansary, West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Story

“Here are two enormous worlds side by side; what's remarkable is how little notice they have taken of each other. If the Western and Islamic worlds were two individual human beings, we might see symptoms of repression here. We might ask, "What happened between these two? Were they lovers once? Is there some history of abuse?”
― Tamim Ansary, Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

“One side charges, 'You are decadent.' The other side retorts, 'We are free.' These are not opposing contentions; they're nonsequiturs.”
― Tamim Ansary, Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

“In America, conservative historian Francis Fukuyama wrote that the collapse of the Soviet Union marked not just the end of the Cold War, but the end of history: liberal capitalist democracy had won, no ideology could challenge it anymore, and nothing remained but a little cleanup work around the edges while all the world got on board the train headed for the only truth. …

On the other side of the planet, however, jihadists and Wahhabis were drawing very different conclusions from all these thunderous events [Iran's 1979 revolution and ouster of US presence and the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan]. In Iran, it seemed to them, Islam had brought down the Shah and driven out America. In Afghanistan, Muslims had not just beaten the Red Army but toppled the Soviet Union itself. Looking at all this, Jihadists saw a pattern they thought they recognized. The First Community had defeated the two superpowers of its day, the Byzantine and Sassanid Empires, simply by having God on its side. Modern Muslims also confronted two superpowers, and they had now brought one of them down entirely. On down, one to go was how it looked to the jihadists and the Wahabbis. History coming to an end? Hardly. As these radicals saw it, history was just getting interesting.”
― Tamim Ansary, Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

“World history is always the story of how “we” got to the here and now, so the shape of the narrative inherently depends on who we mean by “we” and what we mean by “here and now.”
― Tamim Ansary, Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

“Zoroaster preached that the universe was divided between darkness and light, between good and evil, between truth and falsehood, between life and death. The universe split into these opposing camps at the moment of creation, they had been locked in struggle ever since, and the contest would endure to the end of time.”
― Tamim Ansary, Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

“The problem is not that Afghans unite and then cannot be conquered; the problem is that Afghans fragment and then cannot be governed”
― Tamim Ansary, Games Without Rules: The Often Interrupted History of Afghanistan

“In 1517, few western Christians worried that Muslims might have a more convincing message to offer than Christianity or that Christian youth might start converting to Islam. The Turks were at the gate, it's true, but they weren't in the living room, and they certainly weren't in the bedroom. The Turks posed a threat to the physical health of Christians, but not to the spiritual health of Christianity.

Muslims were in a different boat. Almost from the start, as I've discussed, Islam had offered its political and military successes as an argument for its doctrines and a proof of its revelations. The process began with those iconic early battles at Badr and Uhud, when the outcome of battle was shown to have theological meaning. The miracle of expansion and the linkage of victory with truth continued for hundreds of years.

Then came the Mongol holocaust, which forced Muslim theologians to reexamine their assumptions. That process spawned such reforms as Ibn Taymiyah. Vis-a-vis the Mongols, however, the weakness of Muslims was concrete and easy to understand. The Mongols had greater killing power, but they came without an ideology. When the bloodshed wound down and the human hunger for meaning bubbled up, as it always does, they had nothing to offer. In fact, they themselves converted. Islam won in the end, absorbing the Mongols as it has absorbed the Turks before them and the Persians before that.
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The same could not be said of the new overlords. The Europeans came wrapped in certainty about their way of life and peddling their own ideas of ultimate truth. They didn't challenge Islam so much as ignore it, unless they were missionaries, in which case they simply tried to convert the Muslims. If they noticed Islam, they didn't bother to debate it (missionaries are not in the debating business) but only smiled at it as one would at the toys of a child or the quaint relics of a more primitive people. How maddening for the Muslim cognoscenti! And yet, what could Muslims do about it?”
― Tamim Ansary, Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

“Every foreign force that comes crashing in thinks it's intervening in a country, but it's actually taking sides in an ongoing contest among Afghans about what this country is.”
― Tamim Ansary, Games Without Rules: The Often Interrupted History of Afghanistan

“Justice became a commodity that only the rich could afford.”
― Tamim Ansary, Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

“So the question arose now, as it had in the wake of the Mongol holocaust: if the triumphant expansion of the Muslim project proved the truth of the revelation, what did the impotence of Muslims in the face of these new foreigners signify about the faith?

With this question looming over the Muslim world, movements to revive Islam could not be extricated from the need to resurrect Muslim power. Reformers could not merely offer proposals for achieving more authentic religions experiences. They had to expound on how the authenticity they proposed would get history back on course, how their proposals would restore the dignity and splendor of the Umma, how they would get Muslims moving again toward the proper endpoint of history: perfecting the community of justice and compassion that flourished in Medina in the original golden moment and enlarging it until it included all the world.

Many reformers emerged and many movements bubbled up, but all of them can sorted into three general sorts of responses to the troubling question.

One response was to say that what needed changing was not Islam, but Muslims. Innovation, alterations, and accretions had corrupted the faith, so that no one was practicing the true Islam anymore. What Muslims needed to do was to shut out Western influence and restore Islam to its pristine, original form.

Another response was to say that the West was right. Muslims had gotten mired in obsolete religious ideas; they had ceded control of Islam to ignorant clerics who were out of touch with changing times; they needed to modernize their faith along Western lines by clearing out superstition, renouncing magical thinking, and rethinking Islam as an ethical system compatible with science and secular activities.

A third response was to declare Islam the true religion but concede that Muslims had certain things to learn from the West. In this view, Muslims needed to rediscover and strengthen the essence of their own faith, history and traditions, but absorb Western learning in the fields of science and technology. According to this river of reform, Muslims needed to modernize but could do so in a distinctively Muslim way: science was compatible with the Muslim faith and modernization did not have to mean Westernization.”
― Tamim Ansary, Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

“what the Muslim world has reified over the course of history is the idea that society should be divided into a men’s and a women’s realm and that the point of connection between the two should only be in the private arena, so that sexuality can be eliminated as a factor in the public life of the community.”
― Tamim Ansary, Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

“Once the ruling elite stopped depending on the traditional economy for tax revenues, they no longer needed allies in that world. Even in totalitarian dictatorships, the power elite have to propitiate some domestic constituency. But in these oil-rich Muslim states, they could diverge from the masses of their people culturally without consequence. The people they did need to get along with were the agents of the world economy coming and going from their countries. Thus did “modernization” divide these “developing” societies into a “governing club” and “everyone else.” The governing club was not small. It included the technocracy, which was not a mere group but a whole social class. It also included the ruling elite who, in dynastic countries, were the royal family and its far-flung relatives and in the “republics” the ruling party and its apparatchik. Still, in any of these countries the governing club was a minority of the population as a whole, and the border between the governing classes and the masses grew ever more distinct.”
― Tamim Ansary, Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

“The first great Greek powers were the Mycenaeans who were basically pirates at first: they sacked Phoenician boats, rammed Cretan ships, and soon had enough goods to go into business for themselves. Around 1500 BCE, they destroyed the Minoan civilization on Crete. Their stories describe this as a war with an evil king Minos who kept demanding that the Greeks deliver virgins to him every year until finally the great Greek hero Theseus went over and crushed the bastard and, just to salt the wound, made off with his (virgin) daughter. The Cretan version of this event would probably be different, if we but knew it.”
― Tamim Ansary, The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

“When the Common Era began—by the year one, that is—eight out of every ten humans lived between the Atlantic coast of Europe and the shores of the South China Sea.”
― Tamim Ansary, The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

“Privileged men showed off their status by keeping their womenfolk out of public life and hidden from view in the private quarters of their households. The psychology underlying this custom was (I think) the feeling that a man’s honor—which really means his ability to hold his head high among his fellow men—depended on his ability to keep any women associated with him from becoming the objects of other men’s sexual fantasies.”
― Tamim Ansary, Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

“The identification of courage with truth pops up often in history, even in our day: talk-show host Bill Maher was kicked off network TV for suggesting that the suicide hijackers of 9/11 were brave. Common decency demands that no positive character traits be associated with someone whose actions and ideas are vicious. Unfortunately, this equation enables people to validate questionable ideas by defending them with courage, as if a coward cannot say something that is true or a brave man something that is false.”
― Tamim Ansary, Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

“But there is a distinction to be made between tools and machines. The line may be murky, but it’s there. Think of it this way: tools help us humans do stuff; machines do stuff and we humans help them do it, by shoveling coal into their bellies, by replacing their worn-out parts when necessary, by feeding lumber into their saw teeth, whatever they need.”
― Tamim Ansary, The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

“In the year 800, traditional estimates say that about 90 percent of our species lived in the temperate belt of Africa and Eurasia, somewhere north of the equator, and another 6 percent lived in sub-Saharan Africa, mostly along the perimeter of the continent. The Americas supposedly had about 3 percent of the world’s population, although that number is pretty speculative and much disputed.”
― Tamim Ansary, The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

“Omar directed the Umma for ten years, and during that time he set the course of Islamic theology, he shaped Islam as a political ideology, he gave Islamic civilization its characteristic stamp, and he built an empire that ended up bigger than Rome. Any one of these achievements could have earned him a place in a who’s who of history’s most influential figures; the sum of them make him something like a combination of Saint Paul, Karl Marx, Lorenzo di Medici, and Napoleon.”
― Tamim Ansary, Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

“The fact is, we humans don’t live directly in the physical universe. We live in a model of the world we have created collectively through language and which we maintain communally. That model was already in existence when we were born; we merely made our way into it as we matured. Becoming an adult meant gaining the ability to imagine the same world as everyone else.”
― Tamim Ansary, The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

“If everyone were allowed to interpret the ambiguous passages for themselves, their conclusions might diverged wildly. People would move apart in as many different directions as there were people, the community would fragment, and the world swallow up the pieces and who was to say the great revelation would not then vanish as if it had never been?”
― Tamim Ansary

“True language begins when words can join with other words to form an infinite variety of meaningful combinations.”
― Tamim Ansary, The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

“Necessity, it turns out, isn’t really the mother of invention; it’s the mother of the process that turns an invention into a product, and in late-eighteenth-century Europe, that mother was ready.”
― Tamim Ansary, Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

“One of the few things we do know for sure about Teotihuacan is that its name was not Teotihuacan. That name means “city of the gods,” and it’s what the Aztecs called the place centuries later when they stumbled across its deserted ruins—for like so many other great Mesoamerican urban centers, this city was flourishing and then it wasn’t.”
― Tamim Ansary, The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

“The argument between Christian and Muslim "fundamentalists" comes down to: Is there only one God or is Jesus Christ our saviour? Again, that's not a point-counterpoint; that's two people talking to themselves in separate rooms.”
― Tamim Ansary, Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

“Life is like a constellation, then, the stars of which are molecules. The constellation is not any of its stars but the order among them all.”
― Tamim Ansary, The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

“Divine support was not an entitlement; Muslims had to earn the favor of Allah by behaving as commanded and submitting to His will.”
― Tamim Ansary, Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

“What Is The Best Shisha Bowl?
A hookah bowl is the top of the hookah. It is normally made out of clay, marble or glass and it works by holding the shisha under the coals. So, the heat will be given from the burn coals to the shisha and then will create smoke. Picking the right bowl is required for perfect heat control. If you don’t control the temperature of the bowl you will get dry shisha or burn fast your hookah tobacco. There are many youtube video or social media photo that you see people are using fruits instead of hookah bowls. As a result, is very important to use one of the best hookah bowls available in the hookah market or your town smoke shop.”
― Tamim Ansary

“Literary scholar Hamid Dabashi notes the curious case of the English language novel The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, written by a traveler named James Morier, who pretended he had merely translated a Persian original. Morier used a ridiculous diction in his novel to lampoon Persian speech and depicted Iranians as dishonest scoundrels and buffoons. Then, in the 1880s, an astounding thing happened. Iranian grammarian Mirza Habib translated Hajji Baba into Persian. Remarkably, what in English was offensive racist trash became, in translation, a literary masterpiece that laid the groundwork for a modernist Persian literary voice and “a seminal text in the course of the constitutional movement.” The ridicule that Morier directed against Iranians in an Orientalist manner, the translator redirected against clerical and courtly corruption in Iranian society, thereby transforming Hajji Baba into an incendiary political critique.2”
― Tamim Ansary, Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes