Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes Read Online Free PDF Page A

The word magician also derives from magi. These priests were thought by others (and sometimes themselves claimed) to possess miraculous powers.
    In the late days of the empire, the Persians broke into the Mediterranean world and made a brief, big splash in Western world history. Persian emperor Darius sallied west to punish the Greeks. I say “punish,” not “invade” or “conquer,” because from the Persian point of view the so-called Persian Wars were not some seminal clash between two civilizations. The Persians saw the Greeks as the primitive inhabitants of some small cities on the far western edges of the civilized world, cities that implicitly belonged to the Persians, even though they were too far away to rule directly. Emperor Darius wanted the Greeks merely to confirm that they were his subjects by sending him a jar of water and a box of soil in symbolic tribute. The Greeks refused. Darius collected an army to go teach the Greeks a lesson they would never forget, but the very size of his army was as much a liability as an asset: How do you direct so many men at such a distance? How do you keep them supplied? Darius had ignored the first principle of military strategy: never fight a land war in Europe. In the end, it was the Greeks who taught the Persians an unforgettable lesson—a lesson that they quickly forgot, however,for less than one generation later, Darius’s dimwitted son Xerxes decided to avenge his father by repeating and compounding his mistakes. Xerxes, too, came limping home, and that was the end of Persia’s European adventure.
    It didn’t end there, however. About 150 years later, Alexander the Great took the battle the other way. We often hear of Alexander the Great conquering the world, but what he really conquered was Persia, which had already conquered “the world.”
    With Alexander, the Mediterranean narrative broke forcefully in upon the Middle World one. Alexander dreamed of blending the two into one: of uniting Europe and Asia. He was planning to locate his capital at Babylon. Alexander cut deep and made a mark. He appears in many Persian myths and stories, which give him an outsize heroic quality, though not an altogether positive one (but not entirely villainous, either). A number of cities in the Muslim world are named after him. Alexandria is the obvious example, but a less obvious one is Kandahar—famous now because the Taliban consider it their capital. Kandahar was originally called “Iskandar,” which is how “Alexander” was pronounced in the east, but the “Is” dropped away, and “Kandar” softened into “Kandahar.”
    But the cut Alexander inflicted closed up, the skin grew over, and the impact of his eleven years in Asia faded. One night in Babylon he suddenly died, whether from the flu, malaria, too much drink, or poison, no one knows. He had stationed generals in various parts of the territory he had conquered, and the moment he died, the toughest ones claimed whatever terrain they happened to hold, fashioning Hellenic kingdoms that endured for a few hundred years. For example, in the kingdom of Bactria (now northern Afghanistan) artists made Greek-looking sculptures; later, when Buddhist influences seeped north from India, the two art styles mixed, resulting in what is now known as Greco-Buddhist art.
    Eventually, however, those kingdoms weakened, Greek influence faded away, the Greek language fell out of use here, and the Persian substratum welled back to the surface. Another empire came to occupy much the same territory as that of the ancient Persians (though not as much of it). The new rulers called themselves Parthians, and they were formidable warriors. The Parthians battled Rome to a standstill, preventing their expansion east. Their armies were the first to include cataphracts—knights in full metal armor riding huge armored horses, much like the ones we associate with Europe’s feudal ages. These Parthian knights were like mobile castles. But