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affected Islam and the Islamic world. The theme of heresy becomes very
important here. I look at how heresies—religious views not accepted by
authority—are often major vehicles for political opposition to the state at the
mass level. Thus, when we look at issues of religious dispute, how much are we
really talking about power relationships?
I also try to point out how the evolution of Islam moved along tracks often
similar or parallel to the evolution of Christianity—although hardly in all
respects; this observation suggests that most religions follow certain inevitable
trajectories when it comes to authenticating scripture, maintaining theological
orthodoxy, dealing with accretions or corruptions of the faith, and the like. Here
again, Islam is not special but fits into the general course of religious
developments in theological terms; this in turn suggests that it is not religion per
se that creates distinctions so much as state use of religion, and that furthermore,
the foundation of distinct religious communities may hinge little upon theology
and a great deal on secular rivalry.
The book devotes major attention to the tensions and differences between
Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Western or Roman Catholic Christianity. If
Islam had not dislodged Christian rule across most of the Middle East, the entire
region today would most likely still be under Eastern Orthodox Christianity. And

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relations between Orthodoxy and Catholicism have ranged between suspicious
and toxic for nearly two millennia despite many shared classical traditions. So
there are excellent grounds for imagining that Orthodox Christianity today could
have served as a religious and ideological springboard for crystallizing the
grievances of the Middle East against the West—witness the evolving history of
Eastern Orthodoxy in its current center of gravity, Moscow.
This theme continues on into an examination of the Crusades: was it a
religious or a geopolitical event? Furthermore, while popularly conceived as a
struggle between Christianity and Islam, it was in reality an important three-way
political struggle among Eastern Christianity, Western Christianity, and Islam.
I devote a chapter to the Christian Reformation that finds striking parallels
between the logic of events in Christian Europe and in the emergence of Islamic
“fundamentalism” under differing conditions later. The role of politics in both
cases seems to dominate theological issues; theology again primarily serves as a
vehicle to mobilize action. And we note how loss of state or church control over
theology has led to major radicalism in both Christian and Muslim traditions.
We find some striking resemblances among issues in conflict between
Orthodoxy and Catholicism on the one hand and between Christianity and Islam
on the other. These issues include historical grievances, differing views on the
role of the church and religion in society, on the forging of public and private
values, the relationship between the state and the church/mosque, and the debate
over the meaning and implications of “secularism” in the contemporary world.
Power and bad blood again seem to supersede theological issues that often
appear relatively trivial in themselves.
The book then launches into an examination of the theme of the political
scientist Samuel Huntington in his reference to the “bloody borders of Islam,”
expounded in his well-known article and book, The Clash of Civilizations. What
are we really talking about here? I look into what are fascinating relationships
between Islam and four other major civilizations with which it has been in long-
term close contact: Western Europe, Orthodox Russia, Hindu India, and
Confucian China. In each of these cases, complex and shifting accommodations
were reached between them; cross-pollination resulted. These relationships
present a far subtler picture of how Muslims actually manage their relationships
with other cultures and religions than is commonly portrayed in more lurid and
simplistic confrontation scenarios.
Some readers may take issue with the fact that the book focuses more on the
grievances of Muslims against the West than on the many grievances others
might have against Muslims. That is indeed the case. In the first instance,
Muslim perspectives and historical grievances against the West are not so well

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known in the West. I could write at length—indeed many thousands of others
have already written—about outrages that Muslims have perpetrated against
Christians, Hindus, or Jews at one time or another in history: everyone has
heartrending stories to tell. Muslims have equally terrible tales to tell as well
about what others have done to them. This book makes no attempt to provide a
balance in a tally of blood-libels on one side or the other; it is rather an attempt
to put these events in perspective—especially along the civilizational “fault
lines” where Islam meets and joins with other major civilizations. Once again,
we see how the role of Islam is usually less important than ethnic confrontations,
which may or may not be augmented by religious differences on either side.
The last part of the book examines some modern aspirations of the Muslim
world, beginning with a look at the history of the Muslim struggle against
colonial power. We see how relatively recently, in fact, the Middle East’s
struggle against Western imperialism developed and how anti-imperial thinking
remains a deep theme in the Middle East’s view of the world today. I note
similarities with the anti-imperial rhetoric and experience of several other
cultures today, including China, to demonstrate how much of a piece with other
Asian cultures Muslim thinking is on imperialist interventionism from the West.
I also look at the most urgent of contemporary topics—jihad, resistance, war,
and terrorism. These are the issues that seize the media and confront the general
public most vividly; they are the source of immense legitimate concern, as well
as the subject of fear-mongering, exaggeration, and misinformation. Are these at
bottom religious or geopolitical issues? And finally, in the concluding chapter, I
return to specific policy concerns and offer some brief, unvarnished points on
how policies and perspectives must change sharply if we are ever going to get
out of the present morass that has been so costly to everyone.
In some ways, then, this book is at least as much about other civilizations
neighboring Islam—Byzantine, Russian, Western Christian, Indian, Chinese—as
it is about Islam. Central to my argument is how comfortably Islam fits in so
many ways into the broader cultural assumptions, aspirations, and world outlook
of these other major cultures. There are certain near-universal suspicions and
fears of Muslim societies toward the West today that are actually shared widely
by many other cultures of the developing world, even if they don’t always agree
on the cultural details. In other words, many of the values and political views
attributed to the Muslim world today that so worry the West also exist in a
“world without Islam.”
This book is an argument, not a narrative. I seek to illuminate certain specific
trends and forces that are often ignored or buried in more traditional historical

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accounts. Through the vehicle of this hypothetical argument, I hope to present a
new perspective on how and why things have developed in the Middle East,
beyond Islamic factors. In the end, I hope the reader will think about Islam as a
much more complex and integral part of a common human, political, and
religious experience in the world. If there is a “problem with Islam,” it is a
problem with us as well.
I refer to “Islam” repeatedly in the book, including in this introduction; but of
course in one sense there is no “Islam”—there are many Islams. Or, put another
way, there is one Islam, but many different ways Muslims live and interpret it
that differ greatly from country to country, age to age, issue to issue, person to
person. In fact, Islam is what Muslims think Islam is, as well as what they want
it to be. And they differ, as do adherents of other faiths.
To generalize about such a huge and dynamic phenomenon as Islam is to pin
it as a butterfly in a collection box to preserve it, to be consulted and examined
as a specimen for all time. There are really thousands of butterflies out there, and
the species is evolving and changing even as we seek to grasp it. Ironically, it is
the most fanatic and rigid of Muslims, on the one hand, and their most zealous
enemies in the West, on the other, who both seek to freeze Islam into one single
immutable phenomenon, the better to promote it or denigrate it.
In the end, I hope to persuade the reader that the present crisis of East-West
relations, or between the West and “Islam,” has really very little to do with
religion and everything to do with political and cultural frictions, interests,
rivalries, and clashes. This conclusion matters a lot: it has everything to do with
how we end up treating the problem of Western-Muslim confrontations today.
Are we in fact headed toward a titanic and implacable clash of civilizations, a
new Hundred Years’ War or World War IV, as some have suggested? A small
group of Muslims, Christians, and Jews actually like such a stark narrative of
existential struggle. But if we conclude that religion is not the central issue at
work in present tensions, then we have a much better chance at dealing with and
even resolving those issues, however more complex they may be. In that sense,
we are hopefully working toward building a solid foundation for the three great
Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—that share more than they
dispute. It is the states that dispute.
SADLY, WHEN RELIGION BECOMES linked with political forces, it tends to
lose its soul—its spiritual dimension. Yet in so many places, religion is regularly
invoked in numerous bloody struggles for territory, sovereignty, political control,

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political agenda, and existential preservation of the community. This applies to
most religions: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Shintoism,
and many others, including traditional aboriginal faiths.
We are living at a point of time in the West when rational, secular thinking
seems to largely dismiss the phenomenon of religion as an archaic force that
inhibits the social order at best, or as the source of hatreds, violent conflict, and
war at worst. Many in the West have been dismayed by the “return of religion,”
when it appears to be more powerful and sometimes more dangerous than ever.
There is some truth to this observation. Yet the real issue is not the danger of
religion per se, but of dogmatic thinking. The true horrors of the twentieth
century have almost nothing to do with religions: two world wars, Franco,
Mussolini, Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Rwanda—the deaths of hundreds
of millions of people, all involving secular, even atheist regimes that seized upon
dogmatic ideas and brutally implemented them at all cost.
Finally, I’m not really writing about religion as faith at all, but about
“organized religion” as a supreme vehicle for many other facets of human
aspirations, including politics, fears, drives, prejudices, dreams, and bitterness. I
would not for a second claim that these concerns are all that religion is about.
But as we watch the agonies of the twenty-first century unfold, we should be
quite realistic about the complex burden of issues that contemporary religion
carries; most of what passes for “religious issues” are not truly about religion at
all, however much it is publicly invoked. And that goes as much for America as
it does for Cairo, Tel Aviv, Mumbai, or Colombo. Religion speaks with many
voices; it serves many ends, fully as noble and ignoble as humans themselves
can be. In that spirit, then, let’s take a look at a world without Islam. How
different will it be in terms of our relations with the Middle East? What other
forces do we find at work?

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