would not have made
any difference
for the players
By Kulamarva Balakishna
Vienna,Saturday,January 26,2008: Thanks to
Muslim Bridges MPBI (May Peace Be Upon It),
The foreign Policy Magazines full article on a world
without Islam is avaiable for all.Written by Graham
E.Fuller,former vice chairman of the U.S.National
Intelligence Council at the CIA in charge of long
range strategic forecasting and the Current Professor
of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver,
Canada.
Do not be misled by the listing of all sorts of events
by exposing softly the issues of cash,power,and
human wellbeing carefully suppressed to reach the
goal.Do note the statements Vietnamese taught
terrorism,Hitler was a secularist,of course with
a mixed basket of Pol Pot, Stalin,etc.But do the
supermarkets have identities to name them?
Singular global superpower´s foot print left by
the alleged democratic leader,who could, in less
than six months,dish out to the world media 933
lies so Iraq could be invaded.Islam is exposed
as uniform mass without accounting for the
divergences.
Bin Laden, if he was not there, would have been
created!Before him there was Che Guevera.
There lives still Fidel Castro.There live underworld
drug trade and slave trades.There is of course
obscene the white elephant family of
United Nations. Interests survive.
After all we can dump everything to
human nature. If there was no human
nature how could there be a mother in
law even as The Queen? Husband as
a debauchee ? That is the question.These are
only pointers.I would suggest readers read
the text keeping in mind it is not what is said
in the text that determine the policies under
formulation.Besides, this contribution comes
from a single source. There are going to be
other imputs into the kitchen. I let you now
read the articulate text:
The Text: The world without Islam |
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What if Islam had never existed? To some,
it is a comforting 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.
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 is 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? ( what about the rest of the
world?)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?
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
(moon came after Islam) 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
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 up liftingly 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 (imperial is
meant). And so it is 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 European 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 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.
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 anticolonial movements to wrest
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.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 homeland 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.
(they just happened without external
planned charges of influence)
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.
Putattive world without...
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.
(of course under lacer sharp
western influence)
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 prophets misleading
single color green banner king
Abdullah or Qadafi look alike
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, jurisprudence, and good
governance--all in a deeply rooted high
culture.( a victim being meted with
punishment,live slavery, non existence
of art,banned creativity,music sense of
humor,womens rights, human rights
make indeed the dominant Islamic
sect a great culture of tribals) 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.In a world without Islam,
Western imperialism would have found the
task of dividing, conquering, and dominating
the Middle East and Asia much easier.
There would not have remained a shared
cultural memory of humiliation and defeat
across a vast area. That is a key reason why
the United States now finds itself breaking its
teeth (artificial teeth after Vietnam)
upon the Muslim world. Today, global
intercommunications and shared satellite
images have created a strong self-consciousness
among Muslims and a sense of a broader
Western imperial siege against a common
Islamic culture.This siege is not about
modernity; it is about the unceasing Western
quest for domination of the strategic space,
resources, and even culture of the Muslim
world--the drive to create a pro-American
Middle East.
Unfortunately, the United States naively
assumes that Islam is all that stands between
it and the prize. But what of terrorism--the
most urgent issue the West most immediately
associates with Islam today? In the bluntest
of terms, would there have been a 9/11
without Islam? If the grievances of the
Middle East, rooted in years of political and
emotional anger at U.S. policies and actions,
had been wrapped up in a different banner,
would things have been vastly different?
Again, it's important to remember how
easily religion can be invoked even when
other long-standing grievances are to
blame. Sept. 11, 2001, was not the
beginning of history. To the al Qaeda
hijackers, Islam functioned as a magnifying
glass in the sun, collecting these
widespread shared common grievances
and focusing them into an intense ray,
a moment of clarity of action against the
foreign invader.
In the West's focus on terrorism in the
name of Islam, memories are short.
Jewish guerrillas used terrorism against
the British in Palestine. Sri Lankan Hindu
Tamil Tigers invented the art of the suicide
vest and for more than a decade led the
world in the use of suicide bombings--
including the assassination of Indian Prime
Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Greek terrorists
carried out assassination operations against
U.S. officials in Athens. Organized Sikh
terrorism killed Indira Gandhi, spread
havoc in India, established an overseas
base in Canada, and brought down an
Air India flight over the Atlantic.
Macedonian terrorists were widely
feared all across the Balkans on the eve
of World War I.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
and terrorists in Vietnam against
Americans, communist Malayans against
British soldiers in the 1950s, Mau-Mau
terrorists against British officers in
Kenya--the list goes on. It doesn't take
a Muslim to commit terrorism.
Even the recent history of terrorist
activity doesn't look much different.
According to Europol, 498 terrorist attacks
took place in the European Union in 2006.
Of these, 424 were perpetrated by
separatist groups, 55 by left-wing
extremists, and 18 by various other
terrorists. Only 1 was carried out by
Islamists.To be sure, there were a
number of foiled attempts in a highly
surveilled Muslim community.But these
figures reveal the broad ideological range
of potential terrorists in the world.Is it
so hard to imagine then, Arabs--Christian
or Muslim--angered at Israel or
imperialism's constant invasions,
overthrows, and interventions employing
similar acts of terrorism and guerrilla
warfare? The question might be instead,
why didn't it happen sooner?
As radical groups articulate grievances in
our globalized age, why should we not
expect them to carry their struggle into
the heart of the West?If Islam hates
modernity, why did it wait until 9/11 to
launch its assault? And why did key
Islamic thinkers in the early 20th
century speak of the need to embrace
modernity even while protecting Islamic
culture? Osama bin Laden's cause in his
early days was not modernity at all--he
talked of Palestine, American boots on
the ground in Saudi Arabia, Saudi rulers
under U.S. control, and modern Crusaders.
It is striking that it was not until as late
as 2001 that we saw the first major boiling
over of Muslim anger onto U.S. soil itself,
in reaction to historical as well as
accumulated recent events and U.S.
policies.If not 9/11, some similar event like
it was destined to come.And even if Islam
as a vehicle of resistance had never existed,
Marxism did. It is an ideology that has
spawned countless terrorist, guerrilla,
and national liberation movements.
It has informed the Basque ETA, the
FARC in Colombia, the Shining Path in
Peru, and the Red Army Faction in
Europe, to name only a few in the West.
George Habash, the founder of the deadly
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine,
was a Greek Orthodox Christian and Marxist
who studied at the American University of
Beirut.In an era when angry Arab nationalism
flirted with violent Marxism, many Christian
Palestinians lent Habash their support.
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.
And religion everywhere can still serve
to bolster ethnicity and nationalism even
as it transcends it especially when the
enemy is of a different religion. In such
cases, religion ceases to be primarily the
source of clash and confrontation, but
rather its vehicle. The banner of the
moment may go away, but the
grievances remain.
We live in an era when terrorism
is often the chosen instrument of the
weak.It already stymies the unprecedented
might of U.S. armies in Iraq, Afghanistan,
and elsewhere. And thus 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.MORE OF THE SAME But the
question remains, if Islam didn't exist,
would the world be more peaceful?
In the face of these tensions between
East and West, Islam unquestionably adds
yet one more emotive element, one more
layer of complications to finding solutions.
Islam is not the cause of such problems.
It may seem sophisticated to seek out
passages in the Koran that seem to explain
why they hate us. But that blindly misses
the nature of the phenomenon.How
comfortable to identify Islam as the source
of the problem; it is certainly much easier
than exploring the impact of the
massive global footprint of the
world's sole superpower.(without a
trace of human well being part of
the policy projections)
A world without Islam would still see most
of the enduring bloody rivalries whose
wars and tribulations dominate the
geopolitical landscape. If it were not religion,
all of these groups would have found some
other banner under which to express
nationalism and a quest for independence.
Sure, history would not have followed the
exact same path as it has. But, at rock bottom,
conflict between East and West remains all
about the grand historical and geopolitical
issues of human history: ethnicity, nationalism,
ambition, greed, resources, local leaders, turf,
financial gain, power, interventions, and
hatred of outsiders, invaders, and imperialists.
Faced with timeless issues like these, how
could the power of religion not be invoked?
Remember too, that virtually every one of
the principle horrors of the 20th century
came almost exclusively from strictly secular
regimes: Leopold II of Belgium in the
Congo,Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin and
Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot.
It was Europeans who visited their world
wars twice upon the rest of the world two
devastating global conflicts with no remote
parallels in Islamic history. Some today might
wish for a world without Islam in which these
problems presumably had never come to be.
But, in truth, the conflicts, rivalries, and crises
of such a world might not look so vastly
different than the ones we know today.(end)
Comments:
Why not a world without religion?Parvin
I do not mind.But if some need to have
fun on the basis of religion as sense of
humor,color it hurts no one.But not at the
cost of normal people, with sanity ruthlessly
destroyed.-Kulamarva Balakrishna
27-01-2008
)
