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A World Without Islam Pt. 2 | |
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"Exploring The Powerful Issues & Emotions of The Middle East"
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Editor's Note:
This is the second part of a two part Viewpoint entitled,
A World Without Islam. We are getting unprecedented
feedback.
Part 1 can be seen by visiting: A World Without Islam Pt. 1
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A WORLD WITHOUT ISLAM Pt. 2 - By Graham E. Fuller
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
naively 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-stand-
ing 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.
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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 unprecedent-
ed might of U.S. armies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and else-
where. 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 certain-
ly 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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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).
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