Graham E. Fuller - A World Without Islam

Little, Brown and Company

N EW Y ORK B OSTON L ONDON

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 Jewishwho have touched my life in so many ways in the course of working, and living, in this field

I magine, 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 Sharia 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 todays 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 Wara 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, wouldnt 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 itselfall of which provide ample ground for East-West rivalries and 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 todays conflict, which we often conveniently simply ascribe to Islam. It doesnt require special knowledge of the Middle East to grasp that ties between the Westespecially the United Statesand 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, wouldnt we be spared many of the current challenges before us? Wouldnt 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.

T HE W EST , 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 centuriesor 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 problemwhich, 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 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 strongsuch as elephantsneed 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 easeor 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. Washingtonperhaps as many global powers have done in the pastuses 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 worlds sole global superpower, with over seven hundred military bases abroad and the Pentagons huge global footprint, and yet, on the other hand, be oblivious to and unacknowledging of the magnitude of its own rolefor better or for worseas 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