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contemporary 
rivalry with Rome (framed, 
incidentally, in terms of 
Roman 
mythology) than any real feelings of cultural animosity. Secondly, 
for what it is worth, Carthage (a completely new city, built on the site of Rome’s one time rival, 
which had been razed to the ground), had at this time been a loyal Roman city and capital of the 
imperial province of Africa for four hundred years. It is perhaps this casual attitude to the 
telescoping of history and the reifying of retrospectively invented tradition which leads Fuller to 
subtitle a chapter on Russia’s present day relations with its Muslim minorities ‘Byzantium lives!’! 
Whether substituting cultural determinism for theological determinism is really much of a step 
forward is, of course, moot. After all, Western popular culture seems perfectly capable of dreaming 
up the same negative orientalist stereotypes for pre-Islamic periods as for post-Islamic ones. But 
having set off down this road, one might at least expect some interesting scenery on the way. 
Unfortunately, Fuller goes on to miss many of the more interesting points that this line of argument 
might suggest. He is eager to point out that Islam shares many similarities with Christianity and 
Judaism. No one denies it. But such is his reverence for orthodox Muslim accounts of Islamic 
history that he largely bypasses a whole school of important, if controversial, revisionism which 
might, at the least have added some zest to his case. According to this, Islam did not spring fully 
formed from the revelations and deeds of its prophet, but rather in a process of accretion, taking 
place over roughly two centuries, in which an elite of Arab conquerors gradually combined 
elements of Christianity and Judaism, together with a miscellany of their own oracular heritage, to 
produce a partially retrofitted tradition which, expediently, helped guard against cultural 
assimilation into the conquered. If so, the very origins of Islam might be said to have their roots in 
the underlying political culture of the Middle East, rather than vice versa. Fuller is happy to note 
similarities between some strands of late antique Christian thought and Islam. But he prefers to use 
this as a jumping off point for lambasting the small mindedness of those who would fight over mere 
details in religion. This might be useful rhetoric, but it seems like poor argumentation. After all, 
even the most dyed in the wool essentialist would hardly deny the 
similarities
between monotheistic 
religions. The question is where the 
differences
come from, and whether they actually matter.
Indeed, for a book with such an imaginative premise, the fundamental flaw in this work is lack of 
imagination. Ironically, given his liberal vision, Fuller seems so wrapped up in his own world view 
that he cannot even countenance the possibility that there could be any truth to the position against 
which he is arguing. As a result, he seems not to see the need to actually make his case. For 
instance, he flatly asserts on numerous occasions that where religion seems to be a source of 
unpleasantness, it is inevitably the result of political interference. ‘It is really the 
cultural glue of 
theology - 
any theology - that sustains a community on an ethnic and religious basis’, he tells us. 
‘The religion can be Judaism, Christianity or Islam; it doesn’t really matter’ (p. 37). True religion is 
all about ‘personal life, philosophy and conduct’ (p.38). If it gets nasty, then it must be ‘the 
exploitation of religion for secular ends’. (p.12). Without the state, theological decisions would 
merely be about ‘obscure proceedings of theologians sitting solemnly in council’ (p.48) and, in any 
case, these wouldn’t matter very much as ‘heresy gets a bad rap’, but is actually ‘in the eye of the 
beholder’ (p.38). Fair enough. But Fuller offers no explanation for why things must be this way 
round (though much later he nods to the issue as a ‘chicken and egg problem’- p. 62). Nor does he 
recognise any possible objection. After all, if the specificities of religion matter so little, if politics 
always trumps it, then why did the Roman emperor Diocletian’s attempt to impose an official 
version of paganism fail, while his successor, Constantine, was able to establish an already 
unstoppable looking tide of Christianity as the state religion of the empire? For scholars like 

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Rodney Stark monotheistic religions like Christianity have built-in sociological characteristics 
which help to ensure their viral success.
2
Fuller barely even recognises that such views exist.
By parts two and three of the book, Fuller has – it seems – more or less abandoned the entire 
project. In presenting sweeping chapters on the status of Muslims in rival Huntingtonian 
‘civilisations’ of Russia, India, China and the West and on Islam’s troubled encounter with 
modernity, Fuller offers a decent synthesis, but very little that is original. The bold imaginary of a 
‘world without Islam’ has decayed to yet another well-meaning refutation of essentialist claims 
about Islam. What would the world be like without this book? Not much different, one has to 
assume.
2
R. Stark, 
The Rise of Christianity
, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1997