Graham Fuller, a much respected student of Turkey, Iran, and the broader region of the Middle East, has contributed the lead article to the latest issue of "Foreign Policy" exploring which elements of the current unpleasantness are due to Islam and which to other factors. Here is an advance text:
A WORLD WITHOUT ISLAM
FOREIGN POLICY
Jan-Feb 2008
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/users/login.php?story_id=4094&URL=http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4094
What if Islam had never existed? To some, it's a comforting thought: No clash of civilizations, no holy wars, no terrorists. Would Christianity have taken over the world? Would the Middle East be a peaceful beacon of democracy? Would 9/11 have happened? In fact, remove Islam from the path of history, and the world ends up pretty much where it is today.
By Graham E. Fuller
Graham E. Fuller is a former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA in charge of long-range strategic forecasting. He is currently adjunct professor of history at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. He is the author of numerous books about the Middle East, including The Future of Political Islam (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
Imagine, if you will, a world without Islam. admittedly an almost inconceivable state of affairs given its charged centrality in our daily news headlines. Islam seems to lie behind a broad range of international disorders: suicide attacks, car bombings, military occupations, resistance struggles, riots, fatwas, jihads, guerrilla warfare, threatening videos, and 9/11 itself. "Islam" seems to offer an instant and uncomplicated analytical touchstone, enabling us to make sense of today's convulsive world. Indeed, for some neoconservatives, "Islamofascism" is now our sworn foe in a looming "World War III".
But indulge me for a moment. What if there were no such thing as Islam? What if there had never been a Prophet Mohammed, no saga of the spread of Islam across vast parts of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa?
Given our intense current focus on terrorism, war, and rampant anti-Americanism—some of the most emotional international issues of the day—it's vital to understand the true sources of these crises. Is Islam, in fact, the source of the problem, or does it tend to lie with other less obvious and deeper factors?
For the sake of argument, in an act of historical imagination, picture a Middle East in which Islam had never appeared. Would we then be spared many of the current challenges before us? Would 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?
IF NOT ISLAM, THEN WHAT?
>From the earliest days of a broader Middle East, Islam has seemingly shaped the cultural norms and even political preferences of its followers. How can we then separate Islam from the Middle East? As it turns out, it's not so hard to imagine.
Let's start with ethnicity. Without Islam, the face of the region still remains complex and conflicted. The dominant ethnic groups of the Middle East-- Arabs, Persians, Turks, Kurds, Jews, even Berbers and Pashtuns--would still dominate politics. Take the Persians: Long before Islam, successive great Persian empires pushed to the doors of Athens and were the perpetual rivals of whoever inhabited Anatolia. Contesting Semitic peoples, too, fought the Persians across the Fertile Crescent and into Iraq. And then there are the powerful forces of diverse Arab tribes and traders expanding and migrating into other Semitic areas of the Middle East before Islam. Mongols would still have overrun and destroyed the civilizations of Central Asia and much of the Middle East in the 13th century. Turks still would have conquered Anatolia, the Balkans up to Vienna, and most of the Middle East. These struggles--over power, territory, influence, and trade--existed long before Islam arrived.
Still, it's too arbitrary to exclude religion entirely from the equation. If in fact Islam had never emerged, most of the Middle East would have remained predominantly Christian in its various sects, just as it had been at the dawn of Islam. Apart from some Zoroastrians and small numbers of Jews, no other major religions were present.
But would harmony with the West really have reigned if the whole Middle East had remained Christian? That is a far reach. We would have to assume that a restless and expansive medieval European world would not have projected its power and hegemony into the neighboring East in search of economic and geopolitical footholds. After all, what were the Crusades if not a Western adventure driven primarily by political, social, and economic needs? The banner of Christianity was little more than a potent symbol, a rallying cry to bless the more secular urges of powerful Europeans. In fact, the particular religion of the natives never figured highly in the West's imperial push across the globe. Europe may have spoken upliftingly about bringing "Christian values to the natives," but the patent goal was to establish colonial outposts as sources of wealth for the metropole and bases for Western power projection.
And so it's unlikely that Christian inhabitants of the Middle East would have welcomed the stream of European fleets and their merchants backed by Western guns. Imperialism would have prospered in the region's complex ethnic mosaic--the raw materials for the old game of divide and rule. And Europeans still would have installed the same pliable local rulers to accommodate their needs.
Move the clock forward to the age of oil in the Middle East. Would Middle Eastern states, even if Christian, have welcomed the establishment of Euro-pean protectorates over their region? Hardly. The West still would have built and controlled the same choke points, such as the Suez Canal. It wasn't Islam that made Middle Eastern states powerfully resist the colonial project, with its drastic redrawing of borders in accordance with European geopolitical preferences. Nor would Middle Eastern Christians have welcomed imperial Western oil companies, backed by their European viceregents, diplomats, intelligence agents, and armies, any more than Muslims did. Look at the long history of Latin American reactions to American domination of their oil, economics, and politics. The Middle East would have been equally keen to create nationalist anticolonial movements to wrest control of their own soil, markets, sovereignty, and destiny from foreign grip--just like anticolonial struggles in Hindu India, Confucian China, Buddhist Vietnam, and a Christian and animist Africa.
And surely the French would have just as readily expanded into a Christian Algeria to seize its rich farmlands and establish a colony. The Italians, too, never let Ethiopia's Christianity stop them from turning that country into a harshly administered colony. In short, there is no reason to believe that a Middle Eastern reaction to the European colonial ordeal would have differed significantly from the way it actually reacted under Islam.
But maybe the Middle East would have been more democratic without Islam? The history of dictatorship in Europe itself is not reassuring here. Spain and Portugal ended harsh dictatorships only in the mid-1970s. Greece only emerged from church-linked dictatorship a few decades ago. Christian Russia is still not out of the woods. Until quite recently, Latin America was riddled with dictators, who often reigned with U.S. blessing and in partnership with the Catholic Church. Most Christian African nations have not fared much better. Why would a Christian Middle East have looked any different?
And then there is Palestine. It was, of course, Christians who shamelessly persecuted Jews for more than a millennium, culminating in the Holocaust. These horrific examples of anti-Semitism were firmly rooted in Western Christian lands and culture. Jews would therefore have still sought a homeland outside Europe; the Zionist movement would still have emerged and sought a base in Palestine. And the new Jewish state would still have dislodged the same 750,000 Arab natives of Palestine from their lands even if they had been Christian--and indeed some of them were. Would not these Arab Palestinians have fought to protect or regain their own land? The Israeli-Palestinian problem remains at heart a national, ethnic, and territorial conflict, only recently bolstered by religious slogans. And let's not forget that Arab Christians played a major role in the early emergence of the whole Arab nationalist movement in the Middle East; indeed, the ideological founder of the first pan-Arab Ba.th party, Michel Aflaq, was a Sorbonne-educated Syrian Christian.
But surely Christians in the Middle East would have at least been religiously predisposed toward the West? Couldn't we have avoided all that religious strife? In fact, the Christian world itself was torn by heresies from the early centuries of Christian power, heresies that became the very vehicle of political opposition to Roman or Byzantine power. Far from uniting under religion, the West's religious wars invariably veiled deeper ethnic, strategic, political, economic, and cultural struggles for dominance.
Even the very references to a "Christian Middle East" conceal an ugly animosity. Without Islam, the peoples of the Middle East would have remained as they were at the birth of Islam--mostly adherents of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. But it's easy to forget that one of history's most enduring, virulent, and bitter religious controversies was that between the Catholic Church in Rome and Eastern Orthodox Christianity in Constantinople--a rancor that still persists today. Eastern Orthodox Christians never forgot or forgave the sacking of Christian Constantinople by Western Crusaders in 1204. Nearly 800 years later, in 1999, Pope John Paul II sought to take a few small steps to heal the breach in the first visit of a Catholic pope to the Orthodox world in a thousand years. It was a start, but friction between East and West in a Christian Middle East would have remained much as it is today. Take Greece, for example: The Orthodox cause has been a powerful driver behind nationalism and anti-Western feeling there, and anti-Western passions in Greek politics, as little as a decade ago, echoed the same suspicions and virulent views of the West that we hear from many Islamist leaders today.
The culture of the Orthodox Church differs sharply from the Western post-Enlightenment ethos, which emphasizes secularism, capitalism, and the primacy of the individual. It still maintains residual fears about the West that parallel in many ways current Muslim insecurities: fears of Western missionary proselytism, the perception of religion as a key vehicle for the protection and preservation of their own communities and culture, and a suspicion of the "corrupted" and imperial character of the West. Indeed, in an Orthodox Christian Middle East, Moscow would enjoy special influence, even today, as the last major center of Eastern Orthodoxy. The Orthodox world would have remained a key geopolitical arena of East-West rivalry in the Cold War. Samuel Huntington, after all, included the Orthodox Christian world among several civilizations embroiled in a cultural clash with the West.
Today, the U.S. occupation of Iraq would be no more welcome to Iraqis if they were Christian. The United States did not overthrow Saddam Hussein, an intensely nationalist and secular leader, because he was Muslim. Other Arab peoples would still have supported the Iraqi Arabs in their trauma of occupation. Nowhere do people welcome foreign occupation and the killing of their citizens at the hands of foreign troops. Indeed, groups threatened by such outside forces invariably cast about for appropriate ideologies to justify and glorify their resistance struggle. Religion is one such ideology.
This, then, is the portrait of a putative "world without Islam". It is a Middle East dominated by Eastern Orthodox Christianity--a church historically and psychologically suspicious of, even hostile to, the West. Still riven by major ethnic and even sectarian differences, this Middle East possesses a fierce sense of historical consciousness and grievance against the West. It has been invaded repeatedly by Western imperialist armies; its resources commandeered; its borders redrawn by Western fiat in conformity with the West's various interests; and regimes established that are compliant with Western dictates. Palestine would still burn. Iran would still be intensely nationalistic. We would still see Palestinians resist Jews, Chechens resist Russians, Iranians resist the British and Americans, Kashmiris resist Indians, Tamils resist the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, and Uighurs and Tibetans resist the Chinese. The Middle East would still have a glorious historical model--the great Byzantine Empire of more than 2,000 years standing—with which to identify as a cultural and religious symbol. It would, in many respects, perpetuate an East-West divide.
It does not present an entirely peaceful and comforting picture.
UNDER THE PROPHET'S BANNER
It is, of course, absurd to argue that the existence of Islam has had no independent impact on the Middle East or East-West relations. Islam has provided a unifying force of a high order across a wide region. As a global universal faith, it has created a broad civilization that shares many common principles of philosophy, the arts, and society; a vision of the moral life; a sense of justice, jurisprudence, and good governance--all in a deeply rooted high culture. As a cultural and moral force, Islam has helped bridge ethnic differences among diverse Muslim peoples, encouraging them to feel part of a broader Muslim civilizational project. That alone furnishes it with great weight. Islam affected political geography as well: If there had been no Islam, the Muslim countries of South Asia and Southeast Asia today--particularly Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Indonesia--would be rooted instead in the Hindu world.
Islamic civilization provided a common ideal to which all Muslims could appeal in the name of resistance against Western encroachment. Even if that appeal failed to stem the Western imperial tide, it created a cultural memory of a commonly shared fate that did not go away. Europeans were able to divide and conquer numerous African, Asian, and Latin American peoples who then fell singly before Western power. A united, transnational resistance among those peoples was hard to achieve in the absence of any common ethnic or cultural symbol of resistance.
In a world without Islam, Western imperialism would have found the task of dividing, conquering, and dominating the Middle East and Asia much eas-ier. There would not have remained a shared cultural memory of humiliation and defeat across a vast area. That is a key reason why the United States now finds itself breaking its teeth upon the Muslim world. Today, global intercommunications and shared satellite images have created a strong self-consciousness among Muslims and a sense of a broader Western imperial siege against a common Islamic culture. This siege is not about modernity; it is about the unceasing Western quest for domination of the strategic space, resources, and even culture of the Muslim world--the drive to create a "pro-American" Middle East. Unfortunately, the United States naïvely assumes that Islam is all that stands between it and the prize.
But what of terrorism--the most urgent issue the West most immediately associates with Islam today? In the bluntest of terms, would there have been a 9/11 without Islam? If the grievances of the Middle East, rooted in years of political and emotional anger at U.S. policies and actions, had been wrapped up in a different banner, would things have been vastly different? Again, it's important to remember how easily religion can be invoked even when other long-standing grievances are to blame. Sept. 11, 2001, was not the beginning of history. To the al Qaeda hijackers, Islam functioned as a magnifying glass in the sun, collecting these widespread shared common grievances and focusing them into an intense ray, a moment of clarity of action against the foreign invader.
In the West's focus on terrorism in the name of Islam, memories are short. Jewish guerrillas used terrorism against the British in Palestine. Sri Lankan Hindu Tamil "Tigers" invented the art of the suicide vest and for more than a decade led the world in the use of suicide bombings--including the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Greek terrorists carried out assassination operations against U.S. officials in Athens. Organized Sikh terrorism killed Indira Gandhi, spread havoc in India, established an overseas base in Canada, and brought down an Air India flight over the Atlantic. Macedonian terrorists were widely feared all across the Balkans on the eve of World War I. Dozens of major assassinations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were carried out by European and American "anarchists," sowing collective fear. The Irish Republican Army employed brutally effective terrorism against the British for decades, as did communist guerrillas and terrorists in Vietnam against Americans, communist Malayans against British soldiers in the 1950s, Mau-Mau terrorists against British officers in Kenya--the list goes on. It doesn't take a Muslim to commit terrorism.
Even the recent history of terrorist activity doesn't look much different. According to Europol, 498 terrorist attacks took place in the European Union in 2006. Of these, 424 were perpetrated by separatist groups, 55 by left-wing extremists, and 18 by various other terrorists. Only 1 was carried out by Islamists. To be sure, there were a number of foiled attempts in a highly surveilled Muslim community. But these figures reveal the broad ide-ological range of potential terrorists in the world.
Is it so hard to imagine then, Arabs--Christian or Muslim--angered at Israel or imperialism's constant invasions, overthrows, and interventions employing similar acts of terrorism and guerrilla warfare? The question might be instead, why didn't it happen sooner? As radical groups articulate grievances in our globalized age, why should we not expect them to carry their struggle into the heart of the West?
If Islam hates modernity, why did it wait until 9/11 to launch its assault? And why did key Islamic thinkers in the early 20th century speak of the need to embrace modernity even while protecting Islamic culture? Osama bin Laden's cause in his early days was not modernity at all--he talked of Palestine, American boots on the ground in Saudi Arabia, Saudi rulers under U.S. control, and modern "Crusaders." It is striking that it was not until as late as 2001 that we saw the first major boiling over of Muslim anger onto U.S. soil itself, in reaction to historical as well as accumulated recent events and U.S. policies. If not 9/11, some similar event like it was destined to come.
And even if Islam as a vehicle of resistance had never existed, Marxism did. It is an ideology that has spawned countless terrorist, guerrilla, and national liberation movements. It has informed the Basque ETA, the FARC in Colombia, the Shining Path in Peru, and the Red Army Faction in Europe, to name only a few in the West. George Habash, the founder of the deadly Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was a Greek Orthodox Christian and Marxist who studied at the American University of Beirut. In an era when angry Arab nationalism flirted with violent Marxism, many Christian Palestinians lent Habash their support.
Peoples who resist foreign oppressors seek banners to propagate and glorify the cause of their struggle. The international class struggle for justice provides a good rallying point. Nationalism is even better. But religion provides the best one of all, appealing to the highest powers in prosecuting its cause. And religion everywhere can still serve to bolster ethnicity and nationalism even as it transcends it—especially when the enemy is of a different religion. In such cases, religion ceases to be primarily the source of clash and confrontation, but rather its vehicle. The banner of the moment may go away, but the grievances remain.
We live in an era when terrorism is often the chosen instrument of the weak. It already stymies the unprecedented might of U.S. armies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. And thus bin Laden in many non-Muslim societies has been called the "next Che Guevara." It's nothing less than the appeal of successful resistance against dominant American power, the weak striking back.an appeal that transcends Islam or Middle Eastern culture.
MORE OF THE SAME
But the question remains, if Islam didn't exist, would the world be more peaceful? In the face of these tensions between East and West, Islam unquestionably adds yet one more emotive element, one more layer of complications to finding solutions. Islam is not the cause of such problems. It may seem sophisticated to seek out passages in the Koran that seem to explain "why they hate us." But that blindly misses the nature of the phenomenon. How comfortable to identify Islam as the source of "the problem"; it'scertainly much easier than exploring the impact of the massive global footprint of the world's sole superpower.
A world without Islam would still see most of the enduring bloody rivalries whose wars and tribulations dominate the geopolitical landscape. If it were not religion, all of these groups would have found some other banner under which to express nationalism and a quest for independence. Sure, history would not have followed the exact same path as it has. But, at rock bottom, conflict between East and West remains all about the grand historical and geopolitical issues of human history: ethnicity, nationalism, ambition, greed, resources, local leaders, turf, financial gain, power, interventions, and hatred of outsiders, invaders, and imperialists. Faced with timeless issues like these, how could the power of religion not be invoked?
Remember too, that virtually every one of the principle horrors of the 20th century came almost exclusively from strictly secular regimes: Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo, Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin and Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. It was Europeans who visited their "world wars" twice upon the rest of the world—two devastating global conflicts with no remote parallels in Islamic history.
Some today might wish for a "world without Islam" in which these problems presumably had never come to be. But, in truth, the conflicts, rivalries, and crises of such a world might not look so vastly different than the ones we know today.
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18 comments:
I appreciat your vast concept of the conflict,& I quite agree with you that if not Islam there would have been other enemies.
It is the nature of human race ( as well as animal race) to make enemies ,the reason is always one...competition & clash of interests.
Yet we have to addmit now that Islam does impose a real threate to civilization.
USA should stop supporting Saudi Arabia as it is the majore base for terrorism in the world.
France should stop supporting Iran ...the other side of equation...then we might have a more safe 6 peaceful world.
Samir Farid
Remove Islam in history the world would have remained backward and unorganised. Do you remember that the West owes its social and technological development to the scientific efforts of the middle aged Muslim scholars and scientists.
Despite the efforts of the western political leaders to demonise Islam, a close study of the religion will reveal to you that it is not all evil as being portrayed. Can we say because of the senseless crusade, the inhuman holocaust, the two world wars, the slave trade and colonialism that Christianity is all evil? Does the illegal creation of the state of Israel and the cruel occupation of Palestine make Judaism an evil religion?
ISLAM REMAINS TO BE THE RELIGION OF PEACE. CHRISTIANITY CONTINUES TO PROMOTE LOVE. Let the blood thirsty politicians stop their war mongering campaign of 'we against them'. If Snuffy Smith's wish is for Islam and Muslims to be exterminated, he should remember that his wish will never come true. Despite all the false propaganda against it, Islam continues to be the fastest growing religion in the world today. How do you explain that?
"Islam continues to be the fastest growing religion in the world today. How do you explain that?"
Islam and Christianity are both growing! This is explained by the fact that there are more and more IGNORANT people being born in the world today !! religions are the root of politics and evil !
Interesting article, a colorful thread: personal passions flaring, people talking past each other, each adament about asserting his/ her "opinion" or "belief" as the best alternative, as the enlightened choice.
Somewhat symptomatic of the issues that underly the question under consideration :) ... would the absence of one religion or all religions change the course of history? Both the subset and superset propositions are interesting intellectual exercises, why not? Sometime intellectual exercises are purely done for personal edification, and not necassarily to reach some grand conclusions. The process of going through the exercise, however, does allow for critical thinking that can shed new light in either the area under consideration or in other areas. Case in point: Fermat's last theorem. Prooving it took over 300 years, but prooving it really "achieved" nothing of real substance. It was purely intellectual. However, the process of getting there was long and arduous and spawned off entirely new fields of mathematics that are the cornerstone of a lot of modern thinking. I digress, of course.
Back to the discussion at hand. Religion is a tool (call it Christianity or Communism, both are ideas that consolidate a population under the banner of something bigger than the self, bigger than the collective, something abstract and intangible ...), and regardless of whether it has a divine or a human inspiration component at its foundation, I would hypothesize that in the absence of the religions/ ideologies that populate our culture and imagination today, if history were to unfold without these specific shisms, it would be different sure, but not significantly different, not structurally different. We would invent "religions" all over again. Relgion fuels many components of our humanity including, but not limited to: fear of the future and of the unknown (alpha and omega included), hope and optimism, power and control, structure and organization, economic and social scale and scope, and my personal favorite, our propensity towards "herd" psychology etc. Unless we, humans, had evolved with an entirely different set of characteristics, we humans, as we know ourselves, would always develop systems and structures akin to religion (divine or otherwise). In trying to think through some of this mess recently, I wrote:
"Nations and their legal codes, as religions and their moral codes are needed in a society comprised of more than one person. They allow the terrible, beautiful diversity of the human collective to function together by establishing rules that enable efficient functioning through cooperation, and by minimizing conflict. They are meant to be tools that promote civilized collective action, and punish bad behavior, where bad behavior may be defined as the actions of an individual or individuals that infringe upon and hurt the rights or the capacity of another or of the collective. They help mitigate the overall risk for the collective, while allowing for trustful interaction between strangers, and providing some sense of certainty for the future. The paradox of nations as of religions, is their exclusion, when the best purpose they would serve is inclusion. The initial ideology that is founded to promote collective action, build scale, and share in combined prosperity is soon infected by the self-interested rationalism of the new, stronger, more powerful individual that has risen from a once burgeoning collective, which now competes with and possibly diametrically opposes other individuals, groups, or collectives on claims of superiority, resource scarcity, unabashed greed or what-have-you. This insularity, driven by a need to maximize personal gain, has plagued humanity from the beginning of time. When in fact the historic record would clearly advise that cooperation between humans and societies has allowed for unprecedented prosperity, the like of which would be unknown to smaller collections of humans on their own. The 21st century is a case in point, with 6.5 billion people sharing quantities of wealth and prosperity previously unknown to the planet (let's leave aside the wealth distribution argument for now), based on a social and economic system that is highly interdependent, and requires tremendous cooperation. Yet our instinct towards protectionism and individualism continues to overwhelm us."
http://promiscuous-dialectic.blogspot.com/2007/10/prisoners-dilemma.html
In the end, what I am saying is that my answer is the best answer. I am starting a new religion, and I promise that it will change the course of history. Right.
;-P
AssalamAlaikum,
Its an interesting article and has given us several different aspects to think about. Foreign policy hmmm... I think everyone will agree to the fact that once you write some article the best approach is to keep the reader involved till the last word. The catch would be to write depending on the interest of target audience the article Title catches every other eye... so a reader starts reading it, then article starts describing the ways wars and conflicts around the world started again keeping religion on focus. Then the last comment that I read about this article was creating a new religion again a certain objective of a certain group of people...
I would Just like to say Allah is one and Mohammad PBUH is his last messenger. Last book revealed on mankind is Holy Quran and Allah is the one and only almighty who will last forever. No one can challenge the words of Allah and Allah has revealed that "Today I have completed my religion on you" and I am just a man obedient to Allah, for once if we start thinking and stop acting like a God all our conflicts and issues will be resolved.
Conflicts are never because of religion it always happens when we start taking matters into our own hands. The first ever person who got killed on this face of earth was not killed based on religious matters he was killed because of following his own consience...
Just remember for once Satin is our true enemy and he has openly declared his enimosity to all. So always keep that in our mind that Allah is our best of the friends and Satin is our enemy always trying to deviate us from the righteous path.
May Allah guide us and help us understand each other.
Regards and keep me in your prayers,
Atif Mukhtar
Just to comment on the idea that many have about Islam being ideologically a religion of violence based on passages from the Qu'ran...I would have to warn any Christian who would do so that they are treading on shaky ground since much of the Qu'ran is based on the Bible. So by quoting Qu'ranic scripture to prove the violent nature of Islam you may be unwittingly doing the same to Christianity. The truth is that both the Christian Bible and Muslim Qu'ran have many violent passages as well as many peaceful passages (mostly parallel) ...it's all about context! Even leaving scripture out of it and judging each by their actions alone, both historically and in the modern era will show more similarities than disparities in the atrocities commited by each as well as great acts of charity and goodwill.
One Book religion, One god religion (with millions of interpretations) Sunday religion, Friday religion, miracle reliogion, The religion whose prayer..oh God give me my daily bread' gosh..that could be the prayer of my pet.. It was always for power Christ and Allah earned followers. See how Vatican proclaims saints on the heresay of 'miracles' performed by them...Let's ask this question to these blind followers. Is there God? What is his relationship with humanity and the rest ofthe world ? How do we realise God? See how hollow the philosophy of 'sunday religion' and 'friday religion' is.
People often say religion is one of the most prevalent causes of war. But when one really analyzes world history, one sees that nationalism, ethnocentrism, and plain greed are much more common engines of war. If you don't believe me, explain to me how Palestinians and Israelis can get along in Chicago while they practice the same religions as Palestinians and Israelis in Jerusalem.
I am dismayed to see that Graham Fuller has completely missed the cultural and scientific advances made by Islamic civilization. Algebra, chemistry, surgery, and so many other fields were greatly improved by Muslims whose minds were trained by Islam. The Hajj was once the world's greatest scientific conference where Muslims from around the known globe could share ideas. Disappointing Mr. Fuller.
Apologetic hogwash! I cannot speculate about the world prior to WWII, but most definetly the world after would have evolved into something more peaceful without Islam. Islam like Nazism, is a filthy ideology of war and oppression set on world domination. According to the Quran, Allah sent Mohammed with the "true" religion not for peaceful coexistence with other faiths, but so it should rule over all other religions and it calls for war against those people who won´t accept its superior reign. There is no real peace, only periods of cease fire until Moslems gain more power to resume the fighting. This is a war that will not end untill Islam rules the whole world. HUMANITY HAS SOME TOUGH TIMES AHEAD!
This article is completely ridiculous. The importance of Islam in the West is monumental and any attempt to conceive of the world without it is bound to be futile. Islam is symbolically Christianity's doppelganger - it is fundamental in how Christians define themselves as "Western." I stumble at trying to find all of the things you left out but I will try to give a complete list. With out Islam, you have no Spanish inquisition, no expulsion of the Jews from Spain and its eventual decline, possibly no Spanish adventures in the New World. You really don't have the crusades - possibly an earlier form of colonialism? - so you lose one of the forces destroying feudalism, you lose the idea of Christendom really. The Islamic empire was the dominant force in the medieval world and the power of the Catholic Church was based around the fear of these invader. Then, of course, the whole idea of the Reformation comes into question - which is an essential event in the creation of modernity. Does the absence of an Islamic threat make the Reformation more palatable? Or less extreme? Probably both. Where comes modern capitalism without Calvinism? Where comes American democracy without that? Perhaps if Austria and southern Germany weren't so afraid of the invading Muslims they would have consented to Luther's Reformation and we would have had a Germany united by religion three hundred years before 1871. Then you lose the French Revolution, Napoleon. France itself declines as a major European state. Perhaps German Nationalism and Lutheranism become so intertwined that it functions as a national religion. The entire modern western history is fucked. In fact, I'll just say this. Without the threat of Islam to unite Europe, the West would never have become the dominant force in the world. It would be torn apart by rivalries. No Islam, no modernity. Jesus, this article is fucking stupid. Why don't you pick up a History book, Asshole!
I will agree that humans are perfectly capable of killing each other without any one religion. I do not wish to indict the founding of one religion with the ills of the world.
However, I believe you miss some points.
The crusades, though evil and opportunistic, would not have been as resounding a feat had they not been provoked first. There was jihad before there was a crusade, ask the inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula and Charles Martel.
Doubtless the European imperialist did expand far and wide, but I do not believe that at the era France took Algiers, that Islamism (not necessarily Islam itself) can be overlooked as to cause. The French actually took it, in large part, due to the threat of Piracy. Corssairs all along the Barbary Coast had been tormenting European (and American) ships for centuries. These Corsairs enjoyed great patronage by the Ottoman Caliph and used the excuse that it was their duty and right to enslave the unbelievers, or to receive tribute therefrom. Thus the seizing of the North African Arablands was also provoked.
By that I don't wish to apologize for the Europeans. For years they indulged the monsters with tribute and probably didn't see fit to invade until doing a cold and wicked cost=benefit analysis.
If the Near and Middle East remained Orthodox Christian, Orthodoxy and not Catholicism would have become the dominant form of Christianity and the Roman papacy would have likely fallen, as there is nothing about Orthodoxy that would have been unpalatable to Western Christians. (Can you imagine getting illiterate soldiers to fight to the death over 'filioque'?)
The divide in Christianity would have been between the Judaic and Gnostic varieties, leading to some very interesting theology. Possibly the most profound consequence- no Rome, no Protestant Reformation and all the great ideas that sprung from it. I dare say that Islam not existing would have had a stronger effect on the West than the East.
a religon is not a race.
This is all a thought experiment. Just go with it and stop dissecting it as if it's an inaccurate retelling of history.
Islam, as mentioned in the article was a unifying force in the sense that it effectively smothered the cultures that pre-dated it, either by outright killings or conversions (forced and voluntary). The concept of viewing the pre-Islamic period as a benighted period ("jayhiliyah") was extended to the conquered peoples, whether they be Persians, Berbers or Egyptians. Its unity was based on the erasure of the past. As for the Jews, they constituted a sizable minority in the Christian East, not the 'blip' the article's author implies. Some of the more shrill and ahistorical commenters on this blog continue to refer to Jews and Israel as some interlopers against the poor, woebegotten "Palestinians". Had Islam not materialized, what is referred to as Palestine was heavily Christian AND Jewish in the 7th century and would likely have been peopled by these separate communities. Large Jewish communities on North Africa and Mesopotamia (eventually depleted by the depredations of Arabs and Islam) would have continued their attachment to historic Israel. Who knows where this might have led; perhaps an earlier reconstitution of Israel before the 20th century.
A "world without Islam" would be a world free of jihad, taqiyya, honor killings not to mention the lies of Graham Fuller's buddy Fethulah Gulen and his control of media, schools, politicans, politics, police and military. Gulen was kicked out of Turkey for a reason but Graham Fuller wrote a letter to Homeland Security in favor of Visa granting to Fetosh who only has a 5th grad education.
You Americans are getting a major snow job to the tune of $1 billion in Educational funds.
http://www.charterschoolwatchdog.com
http://www.harmonyparenttruth.blogspot.com
Free of Jihad?? Ask yourself what causes this "Jihad"...Arab nations are not upset with America because of Our freedom or anything like that, they are upset with the constant intruding from the U.S. upon their land...Im sure America, a christianity based nation, would react the same way if, lets say, North Korea or China were in our streets with military kicking down the doors of our homes, or "accidently" killing our women and children. After awhile of constant harassment on people you have no right to pick on, those people are going to start to obviously be bred to think that you are the enemy and begin to seek revenge...im just saying!...Us Americans would react the same way...THINK BEFORE YOU SPEAK!
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