Tamim Ansary

Tamim Ansary is an Afghan-American author, historian, and public intellectual whose work bridges the cultural divide between the Islamic and Western worlds with rare insight, clarity, and humanity. His book Destiny Disrupted is a brilliant, accessible history of the world told from the Islamic perspective, offering Western readers a fundamentally different framework for understanding global history from the one they learned in school. Ansary traces the story of civilisation from the emergence of Islam in the seventh century through the great Islamic empires, the Crusades, the colonial period, and the modern era, showing how the world looks profoundly different when viewed from the perspective of the societies and cultures that developed within the Islamic sphere. The book was born from Ansary's viral email sent to friends in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, in which he tried to explain Afghanistan and the Muslim world to Americans who suddenly needed to understand a part of the world they had largely ignored. His writing is characterised by warmth, wit, and an extraordinary ability to make complex historical processes clear and engaging. Ansary's other works include West of Kabul, East of New York, a memoir of growing up between two cultures. Destiny Disrupted is available as an audiobook, offering listeners an essential, eye-opening alternative history of the world.