A World Without Islam Quotes

“❝Washington — perhaps as many global powers have done in the past — uses what I might call the “immaculate conception” theory of crises abroad. That is, we believe we are essentially out there, just minding our own business, trying to help make the world right, only to be endlessly faced with a series of spontaneous, nasty challenges from abroad to which we must react. There is not the slightest consideration that perhaps US policies themselves may have at least contributed to a series of unfolding events. This presents a huge paradox: how can America on the one hand pride itself on being the world’s sole global superpower, with over seven hundred military bases abroad and the Pentagon’s huge global footprint, and yet, on the other hand, be oblivious to and unacknowledging of the magnitude of its own role — for better or for worse — as the dominant force charting the course of world events? This Alice-in-Wonderland delusion affects not just policy makers, but even the glut of think tanks that abound in Washington. In what may otherwise often be intelligent analysis of a foreign situation, the focus of each study is invariably the other country, the other culture, the negative intentions of other players; the impact of US actions and perceptions are quite absent from the equation. It is hard to point to serious analysis from mainstream publications or think tanks that address the role of the United States itself in helping create current problems or crises, through policies of omission or commission. We’re not even talking about blame here; we’re addressing the logical and self-evident fact that the actions of the world’s sole global superpower have huge consequences in the unfolding of international politics. They require examination.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“The west, and especially the United States, has shown no serious or sustained interest in the Middle East until the last half century. We tend to be comfortably ignorant of the history of Western interventionism in the region over centuries — or even over a millennium. We are only superficially aware of Middle Eastern critiques of Western policies that touch on oil, finances, political intervention, Western-sponsored coups, Western support for pro-Western dictators, and carte blanche American support for Israel in the complex Palestinian problem — which, after all, had its roots not in Islam, but in Western persecution and butchery of European Jews. European powers have also exported their local quarrels and parleyed them into two world wars that were fought out partly on Middle Eastern soil, as was much of the Cold War as well. All this suggests that many other causative factors are at work that have at least as much explanatory power for the current turmoil as does “Islam.”

It is not simply a matter of “blaming the West” as some readers might rush to suggest here. I argue that deeper geopolitical factors have created numerous confrontational factors between the East and the West that predate Islam, continued with Islam and around Islam, and may be inherent in the territorial imperatives and geopolitical outlook of any states that occupy those areas, regardless of religion.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“International politics is not unlike the jungle: smaller and weaker animals require acute intelligence, sensitive antennae, and nimbleness of footing to assure their own self-preservation; the strong—such as elephants—need pay less attention to ambient conditions and can often do as they wish, and others will get out of the way.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“One less desirable aspect of democracy is that it seems to require serious demonization of the enemy if the nation and public opinion are to be galvanized sufficiently to pay a serious price in blood or treasure at war.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“Indeed, no sultan or Muslim ruler in Islamic history ever kneeled to ask forgiveness before a grand mufti in the way that Henry IV was forced to do before the pope in 1077 in Canossa for challenging papal authority on some key secular matters. Henry VIII of England had to break with Rome entirely simply to secure the divorce he sought from his wife. Thus, intimate linkage between religious and state power marked most of Christian history in a way that has had no parallel in Islam.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“Religion may in most of its forms be defined as the belief that the gods are on the side of the Government. —Bertrand Russell”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“Where Tsarist Russia had promoted religion as the basis of political and social organization of the empire, the Bolshevik communists now dramatically changed direction and sought to encourage narrowly defined ethnic groups as the basis for organization of the Soviet Empire in a divide-and-conquer process. Hence, instead of working with a broad Turkic ethnicity, for example, the Soviets developed separate political republics for each separate Turkic language—Uzbek, Tatar, Kazak, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, Azeri, and so on. Ethnicity had now become the tool by which to destroy the Islamic identity and possible pan-Turkic nationalist ideas.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“But the Russian engagement with Islam is older, deeper, more extensive, and more complex than Europe’s. One key reason is that the Russian Empire encountered Muslims as a result of contiguous overland expansion east and south, unlike the European imperialists who encountered Muslims only through distant voyages of conquest overseas. Russian forms of coexistence with Islam persist and always will, simply because they inhabit common space. Russia remains the sole state in the West that embraces a significant indigenous Muslim community among its citizenry.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“However functional at the time, the idea of administering the state through religiously based communities strikes the contemporary observer as outmoded, the product of a different, more religious age. Yet, what then should the basis of identity be within the state? Ethnicity (language) or religion?”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“Muslims represent the largest religious minority in the new Russian Federation, and Islam remains the second-biggest religion in Russia after Orthodoxy. The city of Moscow now has the biggest Muslim population of any city in the entire West. By dint of its large Muslim population, Russia now seeks to be an observer within the Mecca-based pan-Islamic Islamic Conference Organization. Perhaps the most significant reality is that in Russia virtually all Muslims are ethnically non-Russian, that is, they belong to other ethnic—primarily Turkic—groups. Some of these same Turko-Tatar-Mongol peoples had invaded Russia in the thirteenth century and are remembered for their harsh rule when they controlled Muscovy for several hundred years.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“Grigory Yavlinski, the head of the political movement Yabloko, commented that “lack of faith is the prologue to corruption and bureaucracy, which produce terrorism…. Economic reforms in a nation that does not believe in God are totally impossible.” The writer Valery Ganichev, chairman of the Russian Union of Writers, proclaimed his fears that “Russia is cloning the cells of immorality that it grasped from Western culture” and called for popular demand that the government “help save the nation from depravity.” These tensions were further reinforced by the bitter so-called Uniate controversy, still ongoing, between Catholicism and Orthodoxy over who should control the Nestorian and Monophysite churches in Ukraine and Belorussia—an issue now inevitably entangled in the geopolitical struggles between Russia and the West.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“This is not about religion, but about identity, tradition: Proudly, [the Orthodox Church] points to a 1,005-year-old tradition of faith, liturgy, music, saints and iconology. While that does not necessarily make it a state church, many within Orthodoxy see themselves as the state religion. They argue that Russia can only be Orthodox and that historically it has been a state church.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“Leontiev’s writings also happened to contain several remarkably prescient insights made before the beginning of the twentieth century into the future evolution of the West, including the belief that Germany would soon cause “one or two wars” in Europe, that there would be a “bloody revolution in Russia led by an ‘anti-Christ’ that would be socialist and tyrannical in nature, and whose rulers would wield more power than their tsarist predecessors.” He also made the fascinating prophesy that “socialism is the feudalism of the future.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“For all the pious sloganeering that accompanied it, the struggle was only incidentally one between Islam and Christianity. Territory was the aim, along with something less tangible but equally compelling: the right to claim the legacy of the Roman Empire…. Had not… Mehmed the Conqueror toppled the Byzantines and seized Constantinople two centuries before? Far from wishing to obliterate the Byzantine past, the Ottomans meant to assume it as their own…”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“In a fascinating extension of the same theme, the Turkish historian I˙lber Ortayı suggests that Mehmet now saw Ottoman Constantinople itself as the “Third Rome”—successor to pagan Rome in Italy and to Eastern Orthodox “Rome” in Constantinople—now an “Islamic Rome” in Istanbul. In this view, Islam did not represent a rejection of Eastern Christianity; rather, in powerful continuity, it picked up and smoothly adopted much of the Eastern imperial tradition from Christianity and integrated it into what would be the world’s biggest and longest-lasting Muslim empire. Empire looms larger than faith in this great transition.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“Sultan Mehmet quickly sought to reestablish Constantinople as an international and multicultural capital. He invited all those Christians who had fled to return and restore the city to its former character. The patriarch of Constantinople was granted authority to oversee all Orthodox communities within the empire. In fact, the new power of the patriarch and his administrators under the Ottoman Turks came to be resented by some outlying Orthodox communities as an infringement upon their former autonomous authority”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“The conversion of Russia was a huge geopolitical prize for Orthodoxy: to this day, Russia remains the single largest Orthodox communion in the world. Russia is also the only religious link the Orthodox Church possesses to a major world power.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“Of the Muslim Bulgarians of the Volga the envoys reported there is no gladness among them; only sorrow and a great stench, and that their religion was undesirable due to its taboo against alcoholic beverages and pork; supposedly, Vladimir observed on that occasion: “Drinking is the joy of the Rus.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“For reconstructionists, tolerance is not a neutral concept that acknowledges equal validity of all religious belief before the law; instead, they speak of a “Christian tolerance” that permits equal treatment but not equal acceptance of all doctrine. Reconstructionists would not seek to regulate personal beliefs, but would regulate public actions and behavior.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“Just as many Muslims believe that one day—simply due to its innate doctrinal superiority—Islam may ultimately become the religion of all mankind, so do reconstructionists believe that one day Christianity will be acknowledged by all and will thus come to dominate the world. Imposition by force is undesirable, unnecessary, and counterproductive to the longer goal; it will simply come.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“Some reconstructionists argue that Christian clerics should be in charge of government, similar to Iran’s theocracy, or rule by clerics.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“The common theme through all of this is the relationship of the state and state power: what happens when the state loses control over doctrine. We see it almost invariably releases popular participation in political and social events, often unleashing radical activism, especially when conditions are bad.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“For the majority of Islamists, da’wa, or missionary work, is aimed at changing other Muslims whose understanding of Islam is seen as flawed or incorrect; they seek to call them back to the true faith. In the eyes of many of these fundamentalists, contemporary Muslim society is deeply corrupted, has lost its moral path, and is even referred to as jahili, or “ignorant”—a term originally applied to pre-Islamic Arabian society, a state of ignorance before Islam.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“This sect preaches that there is little true Islam in this world and that the only option open to the individual is to denounce contemporary Muslim society as “ignorant” or nonbelieving and to take refuge, either in a special righteous community (like Calvin’s City of God) or, more commonly, within oneself, to find purity of belief and action against the corrupting influences of society.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“And in Islam, the Sunni branch in particular is characterized by a lack of centralized theological control or even of a single authoritative voice like a pope. So, in one sense, it shares the same dilemma as Protestantism. There is no one figure in Sunni Islam who can speak with absolute or binding authority on questions of interpretation of Islam. The”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“Ideas have consequences.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“In fact, the Protestant Reformation exemplifies, in a number of fascinating ways, many of the same concepts we raised earlier: the intensely political nature of events usually understood as being primarily religious in character. But again, religion is the vehicle of political confrontation and turmoil, not the cause. Political leaders attempt to maintain tight control over religion as a means to their own ends.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“Note throughout all of this that it was the pope who called for all of these wars and campaigns over a nearly two-hundred-year period. The pope in effect inspired, directed, and commanded the political and military actions of European princes. We are hard put to find any parallel of purely religious authorities in Islam directing the actions of Muslim armies.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“Furthermore, there is a striking contrast of religious and legal aspects between the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in 637 and the Christian conquest of Jerusalem in 1099. Muslims were required by the tenets of Islam to respect the place of Christians and Jews in Muslim society and largely did so (although there were, of course, other cases where they did not observe Islamic strictures); yet Christians were in no way required by Christian doctrine to protect the place of Jews and Muslims in Christian society and largely did not.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“At the time of the conquest, Islam was meant to be a religion of the Arabs, a mark of caste unity and superiority. The Arabs had little missionary zeal. When conversions did occur, they were an embarrassment because they created status problems and led to claims for financial privileges.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam