An Islamist Apologetic Without Islam

In 2010, one of the CIA's "old Arab hands" put out A World Without Islam. I tried to leaf through it in 2010 and failed. I bought it used in 2013 and again, failed.

This book presents itself as a what-if and (more self-consciously) as an argument (p. 15). Its underlying assumption is that theology doesn't matter, but is only a coverup for national aspirations (p. 13). Fuller believes that theology ruined Christian unity. Church-and-state debates affected Christendom far more than they affected Islam (p. 12).

I kept getting put off by Fuller's tone - and by his many historical mistakes. bullshit, errors, and snide remarks, I said at the time.

To the first, I note that those debates which Islam did entertain internally, especially involving the "createdness" of the Quran which went to the relation of the judiciary with the state and the mosque, which brought about the Mihna inquisition under the 'Abbasids... those don't count, for Fuller. The contemporary Awza'i / Hanafi debate, over to what extent the "imam" controls the Jihad: that also doesn't count. Because, Fuller assumes, these debates concerned the role of the mosque in a part of the state. I respond: humbug!

In part, Fuller is just lazy and his editors, worse. Some howlers include that the Queen of Sheba was contemporary with Christian Axum (p. 24); or the wholesale adoption of Islam's claims about its own origins, including Mecca, questions about which even Fuller must acknowledge (p. 24) before he blithely accepts it as The Great Hijazi Trade Hub.

As for the tone, the Passive Aggressive First-Person Case is employed over the introduction, on how "we" are blinkered and mindlessly patriotic and pro-Israel... implying not himself, of course. I rate the humbug level five "bahs" out of five.

Fuller's book is An Islamist Apologetic Without Islam.

Also, whatever you think of Emmet Scott or Robert Spencer or Darío Fernández-Morera or any other of the many anti-Islam ideologues, at least they've put up serious arguments. Fuller writing in 2010 wasn't privy to all these arguments; I think that, nowadays, Fuller would have to spend some time on them.

Some flashes of light burst through the bafflegab. I do appreciate Fuller's eventual admission that, yes, some aspects of "theology" did have serious political and social implications (p. 30, his italic!). He is right that "heresy" - disagreement - becomes criminal wherever a state applies an "orthodoxy" (p. 53f). I also appreciate his Wansbroughian observation that Islam came out of a Christian Late Antiquity in the Near East (p. 11) although, he doesn't cite Wansbrough, any more than he cites the innumerable translations of Ernst Renan (full light...) in p. 27.