IF Graham E Fuller is to be believed, then, Islam and Muslims are the victims of larger non-religious conflicts being waged against them, rather than the perpetrators of religious terrorism across the globe. In his book A World Without Islam, Fuller, a former CIA official, has gone into much trouble to ‘prove’ that in all the worldwide trouble zones, in which Muslims are at least on one side, ethnic, economic and political reasons are at the centre. Reads like an Islamist propaganda material. Is the writer part of the now familiar Arab lobby?
In one sweep he categorises the trouble in the Middle East as anti-West sentiments. He has chronicled how the West went on an aggressive campaign to dominate the ‘East’ and hence set off the reactions. Fuller argues that there is no essential religious difference between the ‘Abrahamic faiths’ of Christianity, Islam and Judaism. And hence the fight between them has to lie outside the ‘religion.’ This is too simplistic an assessment, a shallow argument and thoroughly lacking in supportive facts.
The “focus of interest in this book is specifically how the relations between the West and the Middle East would be if there is no Islam. – I argue that Islam is not the primal or even secondary causal factor – for that we have to look elsewhere” Fuller says in the introduction. With that the tone of the book is set.
“The directness of the message of Islam seems to have spoken to the populations that came to accept it” he says, “completely glossing over historic evidence that Islam’s spread has largely been through the sword and it has erased and broken down the other religious and cultural images it came across in its path.” He adds “The religious appeal of Islam and its rapid spread may have been why many Christian powers feared Islam and demonised it early on.” To buttress his point Fuller says if Islam was not acceptable then why did not the countries go back to their original religion, when the conquering forces left. Again, a pedestrian poser that reveals the author’s shallow understanding of history lessons.
The author blames the arrogance of the West, the ‘insensitivity of the Hindus’ and the inimical ethnic differences for the terror activities by Islamic terrorists in America and Europe, India and Chechen (Russia). He has also taken strong exception to the expression “bloody borders of Islam” in Samuel Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilizations and plays it again and again throughout the book.
Fuller has used three non-West comparisons Russia, China and India to say that Islam has largely been non-confrontational and if there has been any trouble it is owing to ethnicity and discriminations. Obviously he is not familiar with the history of these countries. On India his biggest source of information is Teesta Setelvad and his strongest arguments are Ayodhya and Gujarat. He has even quoted some report to make an atrocious claim that 85 per cent of riot victims in independent India have been Muslims. It would come as news to even the secularists here. He brushes aside the fact that Muslims fought with Hindus to take away a part of the land as a machination of the British.
Reading the book, one cannot help but remember another book, The Arab Lobby: The Invisible Alliance That Undermines America’s Interests in the Middle East by Mitchell Bard, in which the author describes how the Islamic lobby sponsors academic work and books to whitewash the image of Islam, Muslims and jehadis. This line of thinking and argument is all the more surprising coming from a former CIA official, a set up one would think has the inside input and insight to see a spade as a spade. If the title was provocative, the content is disappointing.
(Hachette India, 612/614 (6th Floor), Time Tower, MG Road, Sector 28, Gurgaon-122 001.)
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