Graham E. Fuller > Quotes

“❝Washington — perhaps as many global powers have done in the past — uses what I might call the “immaculate conception” theory of crises abroad. That is, we believe we are essentially out there, just minding our own business, trying to help make the world right, only to be endlessly faced with a series of spontaneous, nasty challenges from abroad to which we must react. There is not the slightest consideration that perhaps US policies themselves may have at least contributed to a series of unfolding events. This presents a huge paradox: how can America on the one hand pride itself on being the world’s sole global superpower, with over seven hundred military bases abroad and the Pentagon’s huge global footprint, and yet, on the other hand, be oblivious to and unacknowledging of the magnitude of its own role — for better or for worse — as the dominant force charting the course of world events? This Alice-in-Wonderland delusion affects not just policy makers, but even the glut of think tanks that abound in Washington. In what may otherwise often be intelligent analysis of a foreign situation, the focus of each study is invariably the other country, the other culture, the negative intentions of other players; the impact of US actions and perceptions are quite absent from the equation. It is hard to point to serious analysis from mainstream publications or think tanks that address the role of the United States itself in helping create current problems or crises, through policies of omission or commission. We’re not even talking about blame here; we’re addressing the logical and self-evident fact that the actions of the world’s sole global superpower have huge consequences in the unfolding of international politics. They require examination.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“The west, and especially the United States, has shown no serious or sustained interest in the Middle East until the last half century. We tend to be comfortably ignorant of the history of Western interventionism in the region over centuries — or even over a millennium. We are only superficially aware of Middle Eastern critiques of Western policies that touch on oil, finances, political intervention, Western-sponsored coups, Western support for pro-Western dictators, and carte blanche American support for Israel in the complex Palestinian problem — which, after all, had its roots not in Islam, but in Western persecution and butchery of European Jews. European powers have also exported their local quarrels and parleyed them into two world wars that were fought out partly on Middle Eastern soil, as was much of the Cold War as well. All this suggests that many other causative factors are at work that have at least as much explanatory power for the current turmoil as does “Islam.”

It is not simply a matter of “blaming the West” as some readers might rush to suggest here. I argue that deeper geopolitical factors have created numerous confrontational factors between the East and the West that predate Islam, continued with Islam and around Islam, and may be inherent in the territorial imperatives and geopolitical outlook of any states that occupy those areas, regardless of religion.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“Governments often keep their populace in permanent states of vigilance or anxiety against foreign enemies as a control mechanism—the politics of fear.”
― Graham E. Fuller, Turkey and the Arab Spring: Leadership in the Middle East

“One of the outstanding sources of resistance to imperial power in the Muslim world came from Sufi groups. While Sufi brotherhoods are generally known for a more quietist and mystic approach to Islam, they traditionally rank among the best organized and most coherent groupings in society. They constitute ready-made organizations - social-based NGOs, if you will - for maintaining Islamic culture and practices under periods of extreme oppression and for fomenting resistance and guerrilla warfare against foreign occupation. The history of Sufi participation in dozens of liberation struggles is long and widespread across Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Sufi groups were prominent in the anti-Soviet resistance, and later against the American in Afghanistan and against US occupation forces in Iraq.”
― Graham Fuller

“International politics is not unlike the jungle: smaller and weaker animals require acute intelligence, sensitive antennae, and nimbleness of footing to assure their own self-preservation; the strong—such as elephants—need pay less attention to ambient conditions and can often do as they wish, and others will get out of the way.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“One less desirable aspect of democracy is that it seems to require serious demonization of the enemy if the nation and public opinion are to be galvanized sufficiently to pay a serious price in blood or treasure at war.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“Indeed, no sultan or Muslim ruler in Islamic history ever kneeled to ask forgiveness before a grand mufti in the way that Henry IV was forced to do before the pope in 1077 in Canossa for challenging papal authority on some key secular matters. Henry VIII of England had to break with Rome entirely simply to secure the divorce he sought from his wife. Thus, intimate linkage between religious and state power marked most of Christian history in a way that has had no parallel in Islam.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“Religion may in most of its forms be defined as the belief that the gods are on the side of the Government. —Bertrand Russell”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“As liberal columnist Şahin Alpay points out, however, the fundamental division in Turkish society is not between Islamists and secularists but between those who oppose a military-bureaucratic “tutelary” regime and those who support it.”
― Graham E. Fuller, Turkey and the Arab Spring: Leadership in the Middle East

“Moracete da se pomirite sa gubitkom jednog dela svog samopostovanja i svoje brige o ponosu ukoliko stvarno zelite da napredujete.”
― Graham Fuller, How to Learn a Foreign Language

“Grigory Yavlinski, the head of the political movement Yabloko, commented that “lack of faith is the prologue to corruption and bureaucracy, which produce terrorism…. Economic reforms in a nation that does not believe in God are totally impossible.” The writer Valery Ganichev, chairman of the Russian Union of Writers, proclaimed his fears that “Russia is cloning the cells of immorality that it grasped from Western culture” and called for popular demand that the government “help save the nation from depravity.” These tensions were further reinforced by the bitter so-called Uniate controversy, still ongoing, between Catholicism and Orthodoxy over who should control the Nestorian and Monophysite churches in Ukraine and Belorussia—an issue now inevitably entangled in the geopolitical struggles between Russia and the West.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“The pope, furthermore, insisted on arrogating to himself immense secular powers in ways that the Byzantine patriarch did not. The history of the European Middle Ages is replete with just such massive power struggles between the pope and worldly princes. This reminds us that there is, in fact, a much deeper tradition of religious interference into Western secular politics by the Roman Catholic Church than has ever been the case in Islam and its consistently secular (nonclerical) rulers (until modern Iran).”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“ACTUALLY, in many senses there is no “Muslim world” at all, but rather many Muslim worlds, or many Muslim countries and different kinds of Muslims.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“Yet Islam and Judaism share a common critique of Christianity; both see the idea of any “son” of God as blasphemous to the concept of the One God, who does not beget and cannot be subdivided. The concept of a Trinity smacks of polytheism, which is equally anathema to both Jews and Muslims. According to Islam, Jesus did not die on the cross but was taken up to heaven by God. And it will be Jesus, not Muhammad, who will return at the day of judgment to quell the anti-Christ, punish the enemies of Islam, and bring justice.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“And in Islam, the Sunni branch in particular is characterized by a lack of centralized theological control or even of a single authoritative voice like a pope. So, in one sense, it shares the same dilemma as Protestantism. There is no one figure in Sunni Islam who can speak with absolute or binding authority on questions of interpretation of Islam. The”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“For all the pious sloganeering that accompanied it, the struggle was only incidentally one between Islam and Christianity. Territory was the aim, along with something less tangible but equally compelling: the right to claim the legacy of the Roman Empire…. Had not… Mehmed the Conqueror toppled the Byzantines and seized Constantinople two centuries before? Far from wishing to obliterate the Byzantine past, the Ottomans meant to assume it as their own…”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“While Islam indeed established a new political order, we are not talking about a brand-new religion, new gods, or new perceptions of morality. If there had been no Islam, the world would have been less rich culturally and intellectually, but the cultural and theological groundwork of thinking in the Middle East might not have been vastly different.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“Furthermore, there is a striking contrast of religious and legal aspects between the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in 637 and the Christian conquest of Jerusalem in 1099. Muslims were required by the tenets of Islam to respect the place of Christians and Jews in Muslim society and largely did so (although there were, of course, other cases where they did not observe Islamic strictures); yet Christians were in no way required by Christian doctrine to protect the place of Jews and Muslims in Christian society and largely did not.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“Sayyid Ali Amin said that the Lebanese Shi’ite Hizballah movement was attempting to stop discussion of the thesis of clerical rule in Iran, because challenging this ideology would undermine Hizballah’s own power in Lebanon. “This is the biggest proof that [clerical rule] is not part of religious beliefs, but it is a power and political ideology,” he said.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“Thus, in a world without Islam, the much harsher Jewish critique of Jesus, as expressed in Judaism, still stands.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“In the first place we can discount the tendency—which has been popular in Christendom—to over-estimate the extent of the use of force in the propagation of Islam. The show of adherence to the religion exacted by the Prophet’s successors was limited to the performance of a small number of not very onerous external observances….”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“The common theme through all of this is the relationship of the state and state power: what happens when the state loses control over doctrine. We see it almost invariably releases popular participation in political and social events, often unleashing radical activism, especially when conditions are bad.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“For the state, theology is too important to be left to the theologians.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“In fact, the Protestant Reformation exemplifies, in a number of fascinating ways, many of the same concepts we raised earlier: the intensely political nature of events usually understood as being primarily religious in character. But again, religion is the vehicle of political confrontation and turmoil, not the cause. Political leaders attempt to maintain tight control over religion as a means to their own ends.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“Take Islam out of the equation, and there’s a very good chance you’d still find the Middle East at loggerheads with the West.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“Preservation of orthodoxy seems to emerge as a supreme and contentious problem for all three monotheistic faiths, far more so than for other major world religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, or Confucianism. This may be partly due to the fact that the monotheistic religions are “revealed,” that is, they are believed to have existed eternally and preexist the exact moment of revelation to their prophets. There is less room for flexibility on doctrine.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“This sect preaches that there is little true Islam in this world and that the only option open to the individual is to denounce contemporary Muslim society as “ignorant” or nonbelieving and to take refuge, either in a special righteous community (like Calvin’s City of God) or, more commonly, within oneself, to find purity of belief and action against the corrupting influences of society.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“The conversion of Russia was a huge geopolitical prize for Orthodoxy: to this day, Russia remains the single largest Orthodox communion in the world. Russia is also the only religious link the Orthodox Church possesses to a major world power.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam

“If there was never any Islam, if there was never a prophet Muhammad, that the relationship between the west and the middle east today would probably not be all that different.”
― Graham Fuller

“Many Orthodox are still fully convinced of their real superiority toward other peoples and of their salvific [redemptive] mission in the world.” The same could be said of many Muslims’ belief that Islam, too, can one day serve to rescue a morally rudderless and foundering West.”
― Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam