BOOKS: A World Without Islam. By E. Fuller (Jim Miles)

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A World Without Islam. Graham E. Fuller. Little, Brown, and Company, N.Y. 2010

Feb. 1, 2011 (Palestine Chronicle) -- A title for a book is frequently the set of few words that creates a significant first impression and attracts the purchasers’/readers’ eye in to give more consideration to the work.

Fuller’s “A World Without Islam” is an intriguingly successful work, relying in part on an initial attraction to the word Islam, and then to the connotation of a world without Islam. My first thought was that it might be an ill-considered argument by some right wing media pundit looking for their position in the spotlight by denouncing Islam and how good the world would be without it. It was that reaction prompting my extraction of the work from among the dozens on the bookshelf, hoping to find something that I could delve into and find out what kind of arrogant arguments could be made to support that supposition.

As it soon became apparent, the intent of the title was not to see how the world would be if Islam had never existed, rather the intent was more subtle, to examine east-west antagonisms and consider if they would still exist without the Islamic influence. The simple answer is, yes, “we would expect violent reaction from most cultures under similarly stressful or violent conditions.” Even more simply stated on the final page, “a world without Islam does not markedly change the nature of things.”

Another way to put it is that antagonisms between east and west developed over millennia of interactions as different peoples passed over and conquered the lands between Europe and Asia. These interactions occurred well before the advent of Islam, with Islam only being a latecomer as the vehicle for the reactions and not the cause of the reactions -- at least until recent times and the advent of “with us or against us” crusade rhetoric from the Bush government.

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