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 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 European
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
estalish 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 civilization 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, translational
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 easier.
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 ideological 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’s certainly
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
