Understanding the Islam-West divide

In many previous articles we criticised some Western writers and academics for attempting to portray Islam as the next "ism" for the West. Fairness and objectivity oblige us however to shed light on the other side of Western academia, one that has been trying hard to defuse the crisis between Islam and the West.

Last week, Graham Fuller, a former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA and an adjunct professor of history at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, wrote an interesting article in the current issue of Foreign Policy Magazine.

In his "World without Islam" essay, Fuller wondered if the world would have been a safer place had Islam never existed. He did not give a straight answer to this question, but tried intelligently to portray a picture of how the world would look like had Islam not emerged.

As a point of departure, Fuller tried to analyse the internal dynamics of the region independently from religion. He quickly discovered, however, that a Middle East without Islam would still remain complex and conflicted.

The dominant ethnic groups - Arabs, Persians, Turks, Kurds, Jews, even Berbers and Pashtuns - would still dominate politics. The struggle between and among these groups - over power, territory, influence and trade - existed long before Islam and is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

Taking the external factors into account, Fuller argues that 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.

After all, it wasn't Islam that made Middle Eastern states powerfully resist the colonial project, with its drastic redrawing of borders in accordance with European geopolitical 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.

Indeed, the resistance of Christian Latin America, Hindu India, Confucian China and Buddhist Vietnam to Western domination of their oil, economics and politics was not milder than the resistance of Muslim Middle Easterners.

And then would the Middle East have been more democratic without Islam? Not necessarily, Fuller answers. 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 US blessing and in partnership with the Catholic Church. Most Christian African nations have not fared much better. Why would then a Christian Middle East have looked any different?

Most urgent issue

But what of terrorism - the most urgent issue the West most immediately associates with Islam today, Fuller asks? For the US academic, September 11, 2001, was not the beginning of history.

"In the West's focus on terrorism in the name of Islam, memories are short. Jewish guerrillas used terrorism against the British in Palestine.

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 in many places around the world terrorism - the list goes on. It doesn't take a Muslim to commit terrorism".

For Fuller, 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.

In such cases, religion ceases to be primarily the source of clash and confrontation, but rather its vehicle. And even here, terrorism is often the chosen instrument of the weak, Fuller argued. It already stymies the unprecedented might of US armies in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

And thus Osama 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, Fuller concluded.

Fuller's argument is brilliant, indeed. One may need perhaps to read the entire article in order to appreciate its significance. After all, this is not the argument of an apologetic Muslim scholar, trying to defend his beliefs, values and the actions of his own people.

Rather, it is an excellent attempt by a Western scholar to provide a fair account of the relationship between Islam and the West.

Dr Marwan Kabalan is a lecturer in media and international relations, Faculty of Political Science and Media, Damascus University, Syria.