The mantra that Islam and violence are inextricably linked ignores one crucial fact: Take away Islam, and the world would still be left with the main forces that drive today’s conflicts, including colonialism, cross-national ideologies, ethnic conflicts and terrorism, says Graham Fuller, a professor of history at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, and a former Vice-Chairman of the National Intelligence at the CIA.
In his article entitled A World Without Islam, published in Foreign Policy (subscription required), Fuller challenges us “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?”
Fuller maintains that a religious/ideological fissure between the West and the Middle East would probably still exist, and the world order would still have experienced clash of civilizations, 9/11, and holy wars under the pretext of alternative religion or ideology, such as Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Marxim, or ethnic nationalism.
