A WORLD WITHOUT ISLAM

Without the establishment of Islam, writes former CIA official Fuller (New Turkish Republic: Turkey As a Pivotal State in the Muslim World, 2007, etc.), the religion of the East would predominately still be Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and probably as hostile to the West as it was before the fall of Constantinople.

In focusing all its rage against Islam in the pursuit of the eradication of terrorism, the West has lost sight of the key role of “geopolitical considerations of power” over theological differences. Islamism, rather than Islam, has become just one of many ideological vehicles employed against Western interventionism, imperialism and colonialism, and the rise of its new forms of resistance—fundamentalism and terrorism—is as predictable as, say, the Reformation grievances against the Catholic Church. The author provides a broad, far-flung survey of historical currents that have fed the West-East divide, namely how the early centuries of peaceful Christian conversion in the Middle East gave way to orthodoxy and the organization of a state structure in the form of the Byzantine Empire, which broke with Rome and vigorously suppressed “a smorgasbord of heresies.” The relatively recent religion on the scene, Islam, united dissonant tribal entities of the region and opened Islam to non-Arabs, an organic development that Fuller views as “an important process of fusion.” The author considers the Crusades as an expansionist move by the West, in response to external marauding forces, and demonstrates how the breakaway elements in the Protestant Reformation “opened the door” to more liberal (or literal) interpretations of orthodoxy, in much the same way that modern Islamist movements have broken away from (or adhered more strictly to) the Islamic party line. Fuller offers a useful survey of Muslim communities in Russia, India and China, and looks at how Islam—rather than Arab nationalism, for example—has become today’s tool in resistance to the West.

A cogent argument demonstrating that a knowledgeable awareness of the rich dynamics that drive societies will better help diffuse tensions.