G.E. FULLER. A WORLD WITHOUT ISLAM. New York-Boston-London: Little Brown and Company, 2010. 328 p.*

The book by Graham E. Fuller, a professor at Simon Fraser University (USA), who previously served as Deputy chairman of the National Intelligence Council, attracts attention by its title. His earlier books, including The Future of Political Islam, were more academic in nature. His new work is frankly provocative: the author suggests imagining the development of the world without Islam, stating in advance that the results of world development will be exactly the same as with the presence of this world religion. And even if we assume the disappearance of Islam in the future, there will still be the possibility of civilizational conflicts and terrorist threats, which should not be thrown into "one basket with the inscription "Islam "" (p. 7).

Indeed, the approach proposed by the author allows us to more correctly perceive the development of Muslim countries and assess the phenomenon of Islam in modern world development, as well as to protect ourselves from thoughtless and sweeping labeling of many negative or potentially dangerous phenomena, which may be based on a variety of reasons. G. Fuller continues the tradition laid down by E. Said in the famous work "Orientalism": consider the East as an integral part of European civilization and culture, ignoring the fact that the East is only a material part of European civilization. At the same time, it should be noted that the author openly polemics with the ideas of S. Huntington expressed in his sensational article and book "Clash of Civilizations", although he directly objects only to the statement "Islam has bloody borders".

Fuller turns to the history of Islam, the emergence of various states in the Middle East region and the interaction of various cultures and peoples, starting with the Prophet

E. G. Fuller. A world without Islam. New York-Boston-London: Little Brown & Co., 2010. 328 p.

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Muhammad and ending with the Ottoman Empire. He rejects the familiar as well as simplistic view of the development of the Middle East exclusively through the prism of the confrontation between Islam and the West, East and West, arguing that Islam is not the source of problems in the region. The author pays considerable attention to the situation of Muslims in old and new Russia, mentioning the events in Chechnya (Chapters 7 and 8); draws attention to the phenomenon of colonialism and imperialism of the West in the Middle East, especially considering the Palestinian problem (chapters 12-13); analyzes the modern phenomenon of Muslim communities in different countries of Western Europe, the USA, and India and China (Chapters 9-11). Extensive factual material is used by him to build a certain system of evidence for his main idea about the" secondary " Islamic factor as a religion in the processes of social development in comparison with more significant - national, political and economic factors.

I note that the author apparently does not attach much importance to the religious faith itself, which goes beyond the limits of everyday, purely pragmatic life in the modern world: "Religion is an exceptionally powerful humanitarian force" (p. 38). He pays some attention to Muslim theology in search of an answer to the question of whether there is really something unique in Islam that generates violence and conflict, but generally focuses on the study of the political aspects of Islam. He considers Islam not as a world religion, but as an "organized religion" and analyzes the perception of Islam in the West and the West's relations with the Islamic world. You can be more precise: This is an appeal to the current creators of US Middle East policy with an invitation to consider possible changes in the goals and approaches of American policy.

The book consists of an introduction and 14 chapters divided into three unequal parts: "Heresies and Power", "Interaction of civilizations on the borders of Islam" and "The place of Islam in the modern world".

The introduction is large in scope and actually plays the role of the theoretical basis of G. Fuller's work, which sets out his main approaches and provisions. From the first pages, the author attacks American neoconservatives with their ideas about "islamofascism", the outbreak of the Fourth World War, and their persistent disregard for" countless other factors that influenced the formation of the East-West confrontation", such as nationalism and patriotism inherent not only in Americans (p. 3, 7). Another example: a prominent Bush administration official, asked about the ambiguities of reality in the wars in the Middle East, said without delay:: "We create our own reality" (p. 6). It is worth noting that this kind of substitution of the essence of imaginary things is characteristic not only of the departed American administration.

Islam has had a huge impact on the world, creating one of the most influential and powerful civilizations in history. Today, the Islamic world is not one, Islam is multi-layered, the author says: "there are several Islamic worlds or Islamic countries, and Muslims are just as different" (p. 8, 15). Europeans habitually view Islam as something "exotic and strange", notes G. Fuller, and suggests looking at this world religion in the context of the development of Abrahamic (monotheistic) religions - Judaism and Christianity, as a continuation of the "tradition of Middle Eastern religious thought" (p. 11). Islam is blamed for merging with the state, but "the close connection between religion and the state can be seen throughout the entire history of the West" (p. 12).

Meanwhile, for any expert, the fundamental difference in world religions is obvious. For Muslims, Islam is more than just a worship of God and a belief system that is different from the other, secular side of their lives. Islam for them is life in all its fullness of spiritual, social, political, cultural and everyday content. Unlike Christianity, the institution of Islam combines the functions of both the church and the state.Belonging to Islam can exceed loyalty to the state and attachment to social aspects of life.

The author does not share the view expressed by S. Huntington about the inevitability of a "clash of civilizations", believing that in the future "Islam meets and joins other major civilizations" - Byzantine, Russian, Western Christian, Indian and Chinese (p. 14, 15). The current crisis in East-West relations, Islam-West in reality has little to do with religion, says Fuller. In general, in the purely secularized twentieth century, the religious factor, in his opinion, did not play a significant role in world history, although it was used in different countries by the authorities in a critical situation (Islam - by Sultan Mehmed V during the First World War).

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World War II, Orthodoxy - and. Stalin in repelling the attack of Nazi Germany, Shintoism in Japan during World War II) (p. 269).

In chapter 1 - "Islam and the Abrahamic faiths" - and Chapter 2 - "Power, heresies and the evolution of Christianity" - the main task of the author was to equalize the three world monotheistic religions as equivalent and equal, which, in fact, does not particularly need proof. But Fuller strives for more, namely, to recognize the truth of Islam along with the truth of Judaism and Christianity, which is possible only from the point of view of complete relativism. To substantiate his position, he compares various Christian heresies that emerged in the first centuries of Christianity as a form of developing an accurate creed, and Islam, which took in its own way the Old Testament and part of the dogmatic teaching of the New Testament. In fact, Fuller writes, heresies are " closely related to the creative process in the history and evolution of ideas... And who can say that this particular opinion is "true" and "correct"?.. This is almost always the prerogative of the authorities" (p. 38). In doing so, he substitutes the process of searching for truth and renounces the very possibility of defining it. Meanwhile, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, "heresy is a deliberate sin against the faith", and in the list of heresies compiled in the VIII century by St. John of Damascus, Islam also appeared. It is worth noting that, according to experts, before the prophetic activity of Muhammad, the Arabs were aware of monotheistic religions, but Christianity reached them just in the distorted form of heresies (Arianism, Nestorianism and Monophysitism), under the influence of which the prophet's preaching began.

The book under review reflects in many ways a typical Western worldview, an essential part of which is the concept of "tolerance". From this perspective, the author notes with approval that the concepts of " orthodoxy "and" heresy " are almost completely absent in Hinduism (p. 42). However, the author attaches great importance to these concepts, noting that any orthodoxy "gives the right to protect and control ideas that affect the authorities", so the authorities, especially the state, were not indifferent to theological issues, putting orthodox doctrine at the service of their interests. For G. Fuller, this is an additional argument in favor of the similarity of Islam with other world monotheistic religions, in which fundamentalist trends have also recently become more active.

The author considers the final argument to be the decisions of the Second Vatican Council, which recognized the possibility of salvation after death for Muslims. Thus, the author concludes, in social terms, religion is nothing more or less than an "important element of identity", along with such elements as nationality, community, and state (p. 37).

As for the reason for the Middle East's divergence from the West, as discussed in chapter 3, "Byzantinism versus Rome: The War of the Poles of Christianity," Orthodox Byzantium is to blame, the author claims. It was the policy of Constantinople that laid the foundation for the trend of hostility to the West, which Islam was forced to accept. This tradition is present today in the East, especially in Russia, so you should not give Muslims a monopoly on"anti-westernism". "Taking into account the thousand years of distrust of Orthodoxy towards Rome and the West, on the one hand, and the new imperative of co-existence of Orthodoxy with Islam , on the other, the final achievement of Islam's power in the region (Middle East. - A. Ya.It seems to have caused minor problems " (p. 148). The author ignores a huge amount of material about the active interaction of two branches of Christianity-Western Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy-which inherited, although to varying degrees, the legacy of the ancient world. In his opinion, "for most Western Christians, Constantinople and its legacy have become nothing more than a corrupt Orthodox (Orthodox) swamp and a historical anomaly that deserves little attention" (p. 74). A more serious reason for deepening the division of the Islamic East and West was the Crusades, which the author sees as an early "imperialist motive" (p. 115).

In an attempt to equalize Islam and Christianity, the author compares the principles of religious life and attitudes to the Holy Scriptures among Muslims and Protestants, who are considered as a fundamentalist movement, and the Reformation as an analogue of the "Muslim Renaissance" in the XX century. In this context, Islam is not a unique phenomenon in the Middle East, but part of "a global process of religious change with political content, or, in other words, a process of political change with religious content" (p. 120). One can only note that the Reformation was limited to Northern Europe, and the Islamic Renaissance claims to transform the entire world.

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Analyzing the phenomenon of "anti-Westernism", the author directly identifies it with anti - Americanism, which, in his opinion, is shared by most of the world's population-in the Islamic world, Russia, China and Latin America. Especially much attention is paid to Russia, which "inherited the irritated envy of Byzantium towards the West and strengthened it..." and to this day is "schizophrenic" towards the West, which is "part of its struggle for its own identity" (p. 146, 153). A rather superficial account of the history of relations between Byzantium and Russia would not deserve much attention if it were not used by the author for another bold comparison: Constantinople became the "second Rome", Tsar Ivan III called Moscow the "third Rome", but Sultan Mehmed II after the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 saw it as the "third Rome", "Islamic Rome" in Istanbul (p. 152). And so the defeat of the Turkish army at Vienna in 1683 is not a clash of civilizations, but of two empires - the Habsburgs and the Ottomans.

The expansion of the Russian Empire, the author notes, turned it into an important Muslim state, but at the same time "a Messianic view of the civilizational and spiritual role of Russia in protecting the true Christian faith from heresies and enemies - Roman Catholicism and Islam" emerged in Russia (p. 153). G. Fuller recalls the Slavophils-as well in order to point out their hostility to the West, surpassing the hostility of Muslims. The reason for this hostility is the Orthodox faith, which is distinguished by "the importance of the individual's religious mystical experiences. The Church developed a deep sense of the dichotomy between Eastern and Western Christianity: from the Orthodox (Orthodox) point of view, Latin Catholicism and the West were imbued with the spirit of materialism, rationalism (reason is higher than faith and spirit), individualism and corruption due to the close ties of the papacy and the church with power, which led to spiritual emptiness " (p. 150). K. N. Leontiev was also named to mark the propaganda of "Byzantinism" and the idea of "cultural and territorial expansion to the east - to India, Tibet and China" in Russia in the 19th century (p. 155). And in the new, post-communist Russia, "the state quickly turned the Orthodox Church into a symbol and integral part of Russian nationalism", using this phenomenon not from a religious point of view, but as a sign of traditional identification (p. 158, 159). In general, many pages are devoted to substantiating the author's opinion about the high degree of hostility of Orthodoxy to both the West and Islam. However, the author further notes that "many of the manifestations of anti-Western anger originated outside the Islamic world, for example, in the 19th century in China..." (p. 156).

Russia's" encounter with Islam", the author states, turned out to be longer, deeper, more intense and more complex than in Europe. "The coexistence of Islam and Orthodoxy in the Russian Empire is a significant experience in the history of Islamic peoples. The Muslims remained loyal to the Empire because they were not forced to assimilate... Russian forms of co-existence with Islam are always voluntary, simply because they have always lived in a common space" (p. 171, 173). To date, Russia remains the only Western state that has included significant Muslim communities among its citizens.

In chapter 9, " Muslims in the West: Loyal Citizens or the fifth Column?", Fuller tries to draw the idea that Islam itself is not involved in conflicts between native European residents and migrants from Islamic countries. Muslims make up about 5% of the population of the united Europe. The problems that arise in their host countries - social, economic, and actually urban-have nothing to do with religion, " the author sympathetically states the opinion of the famous Islamic figure Tariq Ramadan (p. 188). A new identity has emerged-Muslim Europeans, the author claims, and further outlines the prospects for the ongoing process of interaction: "European culture was formed over two millennia by the efforts of various cultures, invasions, barbarians, wars and external influences. Islam made a significant contribution to the development of medieval European culture and the development of Greek philosophy. Thus, Europeans should also expect and find their traditional cultural evolution as an unexpected encounter of globalizing entities" (p. 199). "Europeans should accept Muslim culture as part of the new Europe - just as Jewish, Indian, or Chinese cultures are now accepted as part of Western multicultural wealth" (p. 209).

You can agree with this statement, but with a significant reservation about the inequality of the parties. The demographic growth of the Muslim population itself (along with the decline in the number of indigenous Europeans) sets the parameters for the development of both Eastern and, in the future, Western European societies. Economic migrants in the West form an ethno-confessional-

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the core part of their worldview becomes, as a rule, much more active than in the environment and even in their own country, faith is the main basis for their self-identification in a foreign society. A significant proportion of Muslim youth, brought up in the traditions of Arab-Muslim culture, are alien to modern Western secular culture and reject it.

It is worth recalling again S. Huntington, who pointed out at the end of the XX century. on the rise of civilizational self-consciousness in the modern world, on the predominant importance of"cultural identities - ethnic, national, religious, civilizational". For the West, in his opinion, the tasks of strengthening self-identity, preserving and protecting Western civilization are increasing "not because it is universal, but because it is unique" (p. 508). But in recent years, a different process has been actively taking place in Western European countries: a compromise deviation from European Christian values and recognition of the legitimacy of other values for the sake of "political correctness" and "multiculturalism". Thus, G. Fuller's reference to the main trend of cultural development in Western Europe is correct. But not because the "Islamization of Europe" is excessively active, but because the de-Christianization of Europe is in full swing.

Considering the situation of Muslims in India becomes yet another proof of the possibility of peaceful coexistence of Islam with another denomination, in this case with Hinduism: "These two cultures are now so closely connected that they cannot be separated along civilizational 'borders' ... " (p. 227). Similarly, "Beijing's problems are not really related to Islam at all, but to national minorities, especially when their unique ethnic status is reinforced by religion" (p. 238). Chinese Muslim Han, on the other hand, have become "an integrating and creative force linking Muslim and Chinese cultures" (p. 239).

In Part 3, "The place of Islam in the modern world," Fuller explains the hostility of Eastern peoples, including Muslims, to the West by one circumstance: the prolonged and brutal imperialist domination of the West, colonial oppression, and the exploitation of the natural resources of the East. And the struggle for national independence, the author explains, was directed not against Western civilization, but against a certain, colonial and neocolonial policy of Western powers and Western capital. The author lists cases of direct American interference in the affairs of Arab and Islamic countries of the East (Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq) over the past half-century. US support for corrupt regimes, along with military supplies, maintaining military bases, providing loans through the World Bank they control, intervening in regional problems, military threats, and disregard for civil liberties and human rights issues, creates the basis for resistance to neo-imperialism in the Middle East region. This policy is based not on Islam, but on Arab nationalism, although Islam is used in this struggle.

On the contrary, it was the Americans who began to use the "Islamic factor", attracting supporters of fundamentalist views to solve their tasks in Afghanistan in the 1990s, as the Israelis did earlier, in the 1960s, in the struggle against the growing influence of the Arab nationalist Ya'akov Arafat in the PLO. Islam has nothing to do with the emergence of the Palestinian problem and the Arab-Israeli crisis.

All this allows the author to question the justification of the "Global War against Terror" as a war against Islam. He does not see the connection between " war and religion "in" all major world traditions", the use of terror as a tool has a long history in various countries. He is convinced that "a new policy is needed in relations with the world of Islam" (p. 287). Part of it must be the recognition by the West of the full legitimacy of the overthrow of despotic regimes, the struggle for national liberation and armed resistance to foreign occupation.

G. Fuller suggests using RAND Corporation developments as measures to combat terrorist manifestations themselves. It analyzed the experience of various terrorist groups and organizations in 1968-2008. The largest part of them - 43% - abandoned terror and transformed into legal political organizations; in 40% of cases, they were eliminated by the police and special services; in 10% of cases, the terrorists themselves considered that their goals were achieved; and only in 7% of cases, they were eliminated by the use of military force (p .294-295). Terrorism in the Middle East will be reduced if conditions are created for this. However, it is worth noting another scenario: retreat before the strength and persistence of terrorists.

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As a strategic solution to the problem, G. Fuller suggests: "Washington should act as if Islam were not involved in the political process in the Middle East" (p. 300). No one can "punish Islam", just as no one can "punish the West", and therefore "it is necessary to reduce the existing confrontation between the Islamic world and the United States", which should include the withdrawal of all US and Western military forces from the Islamic space, refusing to help pro-American dictatorial regimes and supporting the process of democratization in the Islamic world, and Islamic parties should be granted the right to operate legally in the course of a democratic process. The Palestinian problem requires a quick solution, so Israel's colonization policy in the Palestinian territories should be put to rest.

In general, Fuller's book deserves attention both for its pointed statement of the problem of Islam in the modern globalizing world, and for its stated opposition of Orthodox Russia to the West and the world of Islam.

It is impossible to imagine a world without Islam, and there is no need to: Islam has been and will continue to be an integral part of world civilization, but what kind of Islam is it? There is no answer to this question in the book.

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