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A WORLD WITHOUT ISLAM Pt. 1 | |
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Editor's Note:
What if Islam had never existed? To some, it's a comfort-
ing 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.
Part 2 will be mailed tomorrow.
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A WORLD WITHOUT ISLAM Pt. 1 - By Graham E. Fuller
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 geo-
political 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 anti-
colonial 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.
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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 home-
land 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, juris-
prudence, 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.
[Part Two will be emailed tomorrow]
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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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