'A world without Islam' by Graham E. Fuller

[Keenir]

anyone encountered this book?


I was a little afraid to read this book much at my local Borders bookstore...

The dust jacket says that the author uses this book to examine the history of the world from the 600s to the present day, looking at how history would be different, sans Islam. such as (and these are on the dust jacket too),

• the Crusades would still happen, but they would be more nakedly imperialistic.
• Byzantium would become a superpower.
• there would still be suicide bombers, because it was the Tamil Tigers who invented the suicide vest.

The table of contents includes chapters such as "China and Islam" and "India and Islam".

 

[Midas]

I skimmed over a 4-page long preview of it.

Despite his immense experience in field of Islam he seems to make some pretty woefully inaccurate assumptions about how history would develop without Islam. Admittedly, it seems more like a course in Islamic history for those who aren't really familiar with it then it does a counterfactual or alternate history.

For instance, he seems to completely disregard the butterfly effect in anyway. He supposes that "Turks still would have conquered Anatolia, the Balkans up to Vienna, and most of the Middle East", that "Mongols would still have overrun and destroyed the civilizations of Central Asia and much of the Middle East in the 13th century". The preview also says that "a world without Islam might not look vastly different from what we know today."

So yeah, it seems more like he's trying to convince islamophobes or regular joes who think Islam is all carbombs and AK-47s that those kinds of things aren't exclusive to Islam and that the world would still have war, strife, etc. without it. He's not very sensitive on alternate history though. A PoD in 600 A.D. would send rippling changes even in the more liberal interpretations of butterfly theory. I don't really see how you can justify an expanding Ottoman Empire "to Vienna" 800 years before the fact and removing Islam hahaha. I'm not supposing it couldn't happen, but in the book it seems like he makes it out to be a historical inevitability.

So I'd say, seems like a good political read, perhaps with some good insight, but I wouldn't rely on it to retell an alternate history in a form that'd be accepted on here.

 

[tormsen]

I think incorporating the butterfly effect well would have been a mistake for his thesis. It seems intuitive enough for us, but not for the audience he intended. The whole "without Islam, history would have continued along a certain course" is something I can understand and agree with in a general sense, though not in the details as seem to be presented.

That said, an argument could be made that the Turk and Mongol expansions were due to factors that are unrelated to the spread of Islam, and though the circumstances would differ analogous Central Asian steppe warrior expansions probably would happen. So for the sake of the thesis, hewing to the OTL way of things might be acceptable.