A world Without Islam pdfdrive com

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A
WORLD
WITHOUT
ISLAM

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GRAHAM E. FULLER
Little, Brown and Company
NEW YORK BOSTON LONDON

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Begin Reading
Table of Contents
Copyright Page

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To my wife, Prue; to our remaining children, Samantha and Melissa, and
their families; and to my siblings, David, Meredith, and Faith, and their
families: they have watched me struggle and be shaped by the
fascinations, joys, complications, and frustrations of working with and in
the Muslim world, and have provided consistent encouragement
And to those many good friends—
Muslim, Christian, and Jewish—who have touched my life in so many
ways in the course of working, and living, in this field

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Introduction
Imagine, if you will, a world without Islam. Nearly impossible, it would seem,
when images and references to Islam dominate our headlines, airwaves,
computer screens, and political debates. We are inundated with terms such as
jihad, fatwa, madrasa, Taliban, Wahhabi, mullah, martyr, mujahideen, Islamic
radicals, and Shari’a law. Islam would seem to lie at the very center of the
American struggle against terrorism and the long commitment to several
overseas wars launched with the “Global War on Terror.”
Indeed, Islam seems to offer an instant and uncomplicated analytical
touchstone for most affairs in the Middle East, by which to make sense of
today’s convulsive world. By referring to Islam, we can reduce things to a
polarized struggle between “Western values” and the “Muslim world.” For some
neoconservatives, “Islamofascism” is now, in fact, our chief sworn foe in a
looming World War IV or “Long War”—a titanic ideological struggle that
conveniently focuses on religion and seems to ignore myriad other factors that
have contributed to a long-building East-West confrontation.
This book will argue the case from the opposite direction. If there had never
been an Islam, if a Prophet Muhammad had never emerged from the deserts of
Arabia, if there had been no saga of the spread of Islam across vast parts of the
Middle East, Asia, and Africa, wouldn’t the relationship between the West and
the Middle East today be entirely different? No, I argue, it might actually be
quite similar to what we see today.
As counterintuitive as this argument might seem at first glance, a powerful
case can be made for the existence of deeply rooted geopolitical tensions
between the Middle East and the West that go very far back into history indeed,
predating Islam, even predating Christianity. A multitude of other factors have
powerfully influenced the evolution of East-West relations over a very long time:
economic interests, geopolitical interests, power struggles between regional
empires, ethnic struggles, nationalisms, even severe clashes within Christianity
itself—all of which provide ample ground for East-West rivalries and

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confrontations that really have little if anything to do with Islam.
Indulge me a bit, then, as we look at the course of events between the West
and the Middle East over time that provide powerful alternative explanations for
the roots of today’s conflict, which we often conveniently simply ascribe to
“Islam.” It doesn’t require special knowledge of the Middle East to grasp that
ties between the West—especially the United States—and the Middle East are
presently dangerously skewed. What is going on? Why is the Middle East the
way it is? Or the West the way it is? Without Islam, wouldn’t we be spared many
of the current challenges before us? Wouldn’t the Middle East be more peaceful?
How different might the character of East-West relations be? Without Islam,
surely the international order would present a very different picture than it does
today, or would it? The balance of this book aims to suggest some alternative
answers to these questions.
THE WEST, and especially the United States, has shown no serious or sustained
interest in the Middle East until the last half century. We tend to be comfortably
ignorant of the history of Western interventionism in the region over centuries—
or even over a millennium. We are only superficially aware of Middle Eastern
critiques of Western policies that touch on oil, finances, political intervention,
Western-sponsored coups, Western support for pro-Western dictators, and carte
blanche American support for Israel in the complex Palestinian problem—
which, after all, had its roots not in Islam, but in Western persecution and
butchery of European Jews. European powers have also exported their local
quarrels and parleyed them into two world wars that were fought out partly on
Middle Eastern soil, as was much of the Cold War as well. All this suggests that
many other causative factors are at work that have at least as much explanatory
power for the current turmoil as does “Islam.”
It is not simply a matter of “blaming the West,” as some readers might rush to
suggest here. I argue that deeper geopolitical factors have created numerous
confrontational factors between the East and the West that predate Islam,
continued with Islam and around Islam, and may be inherent in the territorial
imperatives and geopolitical outlook of any states that occupy those areas,
regardless of religion.
It would, of course, be silly to suggest that Islam has had no role whatsoever
in coloring elements of this East-West confrontation. Islam represents a powerful
and deep culture that has exercised huge impact upon the whole Middle East and
beyond. But in terms of East-West relations, I argue that it has primarily served

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as flag or banner for other, deeper kinds of rivalries and confrontations taking
place.
If nothing else, I hope this examination will cause readers to rethink the
nature of East-West conflict and how Americans, in particular, regard their own
foreign policies. Such a process of self-examination comes hard to superpowers;
they suffer from their own particular kind of isolation and myopia: possession of
great power suggests a security and certitude, an ability to ignore situations that
smaller states find threatening or dangerous and that they cannot afford to get
wrong. International politics is not unlike the jungle: smaller and weaker animals
require acute intelligence, sensitive antennae, and nimbleness of footing to
assure their own self-preservation; the strong—such as elephants—need pay less
attention to ambient conditions and can often do as they wish, and others will get
out of the way.
Power also brings a certain arrogance: the belief that we can control the
situation, we are in charge, we can persuade or intimidate with ease—or so we
think. Indeed, one senior official in the Bush administration, when asked about
looming realities of the wars in the Middle East, stated without a pause, “We
create our own realities.” The course of events of the past decade reveals how
sadly true that has been.
The problem lies in the optic we employ. Washington—perhaps as many
global powers have done in the past—uses what I might call the “immaculate
conception” theory of crises abroad. That is, we believe we are essentially out
there, just minding our own business, trying to help make the world right, only
to be endlessly faced with a series of spontaneous, nasty challenges from abroad
to which we must react. There is not the slightest consideration that perhaps US
policies themselves may have at least contributed to a series of unfolding events.
This presents a huge paradox: how can America on the one hand pride itself on
being the world’s sole global superpower, with over seven hundred military
bases abroad and the Pentagon’s huge global footprint, and yet, on the other
hand, be oblivious to and unacknowledging of the magnitude of its own role—
for better or for worse—as the dominant force charting the course of world
events? This Alice-in-Wonderland delusion affects not just policy makers, but
even the glut of think tanks that abound in Washington. In what may otherwise
often be intelligent analysis of a foreign situation, the focus of each study is
invariably the other country, the other culture, the negative intentions of other
players; the impact of US actions and perceptions are quite absent from the
equation. It is hard to point to serious analysis from mainstream publications or
think tanks that address the role of the United States itself in helping create
current problems or crises, through policies of omission or commission. We’re

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not even talking about blame here; we’re addressing the logical and self-evident
fact that the actions of the world’s sole global superpower have huge
consequences in the unfolding of international politics. They require
examination.
There is a further irony here: How can a nation like the US, which expresses
such powerful outpourings of patriotism and ubiquitous unfurling of the flag on
all occasions, seem quite obtuse to the existence of nationalism and patriotism in
other countries? Washington never fared very well in the Cold War in
understanding the motives and emotions of the nonaligned world; it dismissed or
even suppressed inconvenient local nationalist aspirations, thereby ending up
pushing a large grouping of countries toward greater sympathy with the Soviet
Union. This was a kind of strategic blindness that viewed other nations’ interests
and preferences as something that needed to be hemmed in, or isolated. We have
been obtuse toward nationalism and identity issues in the Middle East and have
lumped it all into the basket of “Islam.”
When we do not like a foreign adversary, we tend to denigrate them in strong,
sometimes nearly apocalyptic terms. One less desirable aspect of democracy is
that it seems to require serious demonization of the enemy if the nation and
public opinion are to be galvanized sufficiently to pay a serious price in blood or
treasure at war. And the message as to why we are in confrontation or at war
must be simplified enough to fit on a bumper sticker.
In today’s world, “Islam” has become that bumper sticker for America, the
default cause of many of our problems in the Muslim world. In the past we have
gone in to do battle with anarchists, Nazis, Fascists, communists—today it is
“radical Islam.” I put this term in quotation marks not because it does not exist,
but because it is a broad and complex phenomenon that comes in various shapes
and sizes and requires a wide array of differing responses. The term does not
begin to present an accurate or useful description of the kinds of problems we
face in dealing with the Muslim world. In even more simpleminded analyses, we
sometimes hear that the problem is not “radical Islam” but really perhaps even
Islam itself. Why do “they” hate us, why are they violent, why do they “hate
democracy,” why do they not accept America’s nostrums and values, why do
they engage in guerrilla war or terrorism, why do they resist American policies,
why will they not accept America’s best-laid plans for their futures—Islam
seems to supply a ready answer.
ACTUALLY, in many senses there is no “Muslim world” at all, but rather many

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Muslim worlds, or many Muslim countries and different kinds of Muslims.
Nonetheless it is important to acknowledge that under assault and siege from the
West in both real and imagined ways, the Muslim world has come together to an
unusual degree over past decades. Indeed, US policies over this time have
probably done more to forge a common-minded umma—the collective
international community of Muslims—than any other factor since the time of the
Prophet Muhammad.
History did not begin with 9/11. Our dealings with the Middle East go back a
long way. The attack on 9/11 was a violent, extremist, and outrageous act, but it
was also almost a culmination of a preceding chain of events over many years. If
we choose to see history beginning at 9/11—whereby we suddenly become the
sole justifiably aggrieved party, now authorized to bring vigilante justice to the
world—then we will continue to do what we have been doing all along, with
disastrous consequences evident to all.
IT IS, OF COURSE, ABSURD, in a sense, to speak of a “world without Islam.”
We cannot rewrite history, nor can we truly guess what would have happened in
history if certain other things had not happened. In other words, once you get
into theoretical, “what if” types of arguments, they open the floodgates to
endless speculation. Indeed, a great many interesting books have been written on
precisely these “what if” speculations: What if 9/11 had not taken place? What if
the Archduke Ferdinand had not been assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914? What if
Lenin had never been sent back to Russia by the Germans in a sealed railroad car
on the eve of the Russian Revolution, and if the Bolshevik Revolution had never
taken place? Or what if the Confederacy had won the Civil War? Would our
world be dramatically different than today, or would it have ended up reasonably
similar in the long run?
Such questions are inherently unanswerable. But the point of the exercise is
to employ imagination to illuminate history from an alternative angle, to permit
new contours and features to suddenly appear before our eyes that had
previously remained unnoticed. Maybe the odds were only 51 percent that an
event would turn out the way that it did. That suggests that there are 49 percent
of other factors at work that did not, in the end, happen to dominate. But they
were there all along and possibly still remain below the surface, exerting
considerable, even if not decisive, influence on later events and may again in the
future. I remember my stint as Vice Chair of the National Intelligence Council at
the CIA in the 1980s in charge of long-range strategic forecasting; we

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occasionally employed one type of brief intellectual exercise among many that
could often be analytically illuminating: to posit an important future event—
however unlikely we felt it might be—and then briefly write the scenario in
some detail as to how it came to pass. Assume that Saudi Arabia undergoes a
radical Islamist revolution—how might it have come about, in quite specific
scenarios? Assume that the Communist Party in China collapses—how might it
happen and what would the process look like on a daily basis? What hidden
forces, little tracked today, might rise to the fore? The purpose of such exercises
is to lend flesh and substance to otherwise unthinkable or unlikely series of
events; they serve to sharpen the analytical antennae to indicators of such
possible events in the off chance that the “unthinkable” might come about. They
represent exercises in political and social imagination, just one tool among many.
In the same spirit, this book looks at key events in the history of the Middle
East and attempts to identify what forces were at work that might have had little
to do with Islam, events that could have occurred in roughly similar ways
without Islam. This book, in effect, shines a spotlight upon events from a
completely different angle, illuminating features we perhaps did not note before.
Even if you disagree with some of the assumptions and explanations, the
chances are that you will not look at events in the Muslim world in quite the
same way again. Other factors at work suddenly become sharper and cause us to
consider them anew in our own analyses.
Inevitably many readers will offer alternative paths to the ones I have chosen
—that’s fine. I’m aware of having to make choices myself. Indeed, I could write
a rebuttal to some of the arguments presented here, but that is not the point. The
point is to reconsider our facile assumptions that Islam is what the Middle East is
all about—the source of the problem and the solution—and instead attend to
other deeper and systemic types of problems and issues that exist, making the
Middle East what it is in the face of the West.
One point I wish to make very clear: the purpose of this book is not at all to
denigrate or dismiss the role of Islam in world history. Islam has had great
impact upon the world, as one of the greatest and most powerful continuous
civilizations in history. No other civilization has lasted as long over such a broad
expanse of the world as Islam. I have immense regard for Islamic culture, arts,
sciences, philosophy, and civilization, and for Muslims as people. The world
would be a much more impoverished place in the absence of Islamic civilization.
Nor do I ignore the fact that Islam has created a powerful and distinct edifice
—the “Muslim world”—linking large numbers of diverse peoples, states,
cultures, and climes in ways that might not otherwise be the case. This is hugely
important for the peoples of that region. But the focus of interest in this book is

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specifically how the relations between the West and the Middle East would be if
there were no Islam. I do not examine how the whole of the Muslim world might
be different if there had been no Islam. Or what the West would have lost in the
absence of Islamic culture. We look at the continuing trajectory of East-West
relations. And to the extent that those relations have severely deteriorated, I
argue that Islam is not the primal or even secondary causal factor—for that we
have to look elsewhere. The minute we do look elsewhere, we are struck by the
huge variety of alternative forces affecting the nature of East-West relations.
I want to make some additional points as well. First, the West has a tendency
to view Islam as somewhat exotic and strange, distinct and alien from our
Western perspectives. Here I try to place Islam in the context of other world
religions, especially Judaism and Christianity. To an astonishing degree, Islam
comes directly out of a long tradition of Middle East religious thought, including
multiple heresies, fitting in as an integral piece of the whole religious picture.
Indeed, Islam came to fit in comfortably with large numbers of preexisting
forces.
Another key theme is the relationship among religion, power, and the state. I
argue that the close affiliation of religion and the state over most of Western
history has affected Christianity and Christian history vastly more than it has