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Graham Fuller. 
A World Without Islam. 
London:
 
Little, Brown and Company, 2010. Paperback 
£13.99; pp. 336. ISBN-13: 978-0316041195 
Reviewed by Gilbert Ramsay 
University of St Andrews 
St Andrews, UK 
Is Islam inherently in conflict with democracy, with liberalism, with ‘the West’? Or is Islam just a 
façade for the real issues that are at stake? This question has been asked and answered so many 
times in the past twenty years or so (usually in favour of the latter view) that authors now have to 
work ever harder for new angles on the subject. In 
A World Without Islam
, Graham Fuller takes the 
big question to its logical conclusion. What if Islam had never existed at all?
The idea is, if nothing else, provocative. Interesting counterfactuals abound in Middle Eastern 
history. Islam took over a Late Roman Levant which was already theologically at odds with 
Constantinople. Does that mean that government agencies might today be warning of the prospect 
of suicide attacks by radical ‘home grown’ Syriac Orthodox? Had Genghis Khan converted to 
Nestorian Christianity (as it was rumoured he might), and thus evaded assimiliation by conversion, 
would we now be told that the Mongol inheritance of Middle Eastern countries predisposed them to 
tribalism and violence?
Fuller acknowledges such possibilities. But – perhaps a bit deceptively – this isn’t really a book of 
alternative history. This may be for the best. Such thought experiments make for fun essays, but it 
seems questionable that the exercise could offer the basis for a whole book. The problem, however, 
is that Fuller also fails really to seize on the important questions that his speculation might raise. 
Instead what we get is wishy-washy history and bland apologetic.
Fuller’s intentions are interesting. He perceives the chance to creatively reappraise the history of the 
region by starting with everything left once Islam itself is subtracted. Is the contemporary 
relationship of Western countries with the Middle East really the legacy of ancient, pre-Islamic 
history? Or is this invented tradition which merely clothes geopolitical interest? Or are the enduring 
geo-strategic situations of the Middle East and Europe products of some fundamental engine of 
history which has, in turn, become written into culture? These are questions which have provoked 
some of the greatest minds on both sides of the putative divide right back to Ibn Khaldun and even 
(perhaps in itself evidence for Fuller’s case), Herodotus. Moreover, simply asking them challenges 
us to think about what it really means to be anti-essentialist. Is it actually determinism by ‘Islam’ 
which we are concerned about, or is it ‘Islamic culture’ (an argument whose circularity Roy has 
usefully drawn attention to).
1
Unfortunately, Fuller seems almost afraid of exploring the big ideas his premise invokes. Instead of 
the bold argument we are promised, what we mostly get is narrative history - of a rather sweeping, 
opinionated kind. For example, we learn on page 80 that Sixth century Syrian resentment of 
Byzantium had everything, apparently, to do with long-term cultural hatreds, and nothing to do with 
more immediate factors (such as brutal, draining wars with the neighbouring Sassanian Persian 
1
O. Roy, (trans. C Volk) 
The Failure of Political Islam
, Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 1994 

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Empire). Indeed, a few lines later (p. 81), we are told about the third century warrior queen 
Zenobia’s hostility to Rome that ‘tellingly, she was descended from nobility in Carthage - another 
city that famously nurtured historical hatred of its chief Mediterranean rival, Rome’. Firstly, there is 
no evidence that Zenobia was really of Carthaginian ancestry. She liked to claim descent from the 
mythical queen Dido, but this says more about her