Quotes from Graham E. Fuller

Governments often keep their populace in permanent states of vigilance or anxiety against foreign enemies as a control mechanism—the politics of fear.

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.

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.

Religion may in most of its forms be defined as the belief that the gods are on the side of the Government. —Bertrand Russell

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.

The 20th century is the probably most hideous ugly century of the history of the human race. More people were killed by war in the 20th century than ever in history.

Old and cherished ideas die hard.

Of the Muslim Bulgarians of the Volga the envoys reported there is no gladness among them; only sorrow and a great stench, and that their religion was undesirable due to its taboo against alcoholic beverages and pork; supposedly, Vladimir observed on that occasion: "Drinking is the joy of the Rus.

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.

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….

The second principle of 'Umar's settlement was that the conquered populations should be as little disturbed as possible. This meant that the Arab-Muslims did not, contrary to reputation, attempt to convert people to 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.

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…

We have been obtuse toward nationalism and identity issues in the Middle East and have lumped it all into the basket of "Islam.

At the time of the conquest, Islam was meant to be a religion of the Arabs, a mark of caste unity and superiority. The Arabs had little missionary zeal. When conversions did occur, they were an embarrassment because they created status problems and led to claims for financial privileges.

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.

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.

Ideas have consequences.

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

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.

For the majority of Islamists, da'wa, or missionary work, is aimed at changing other Muslims whose understanding of Islam is seen as flawed or incorrect; they seek to call them back to the true faith. In the eyes of many of these fundamentalists, contemporary Muslim society is deeply corrupted, has lost its moral path, and is even referred to as jahili, or "ignorant"—a term originally applied to pre-Islamic Arabian society, a state of ignorance before Islam.

This is not about religion, but about identity, tradition: Proudly, [the Orthodox Church] points to a 1,005-year-old tradition of faith, liturgy, music, saints and iconology. While that does not necessarily make it a state church, many within Orthodoxy see themselves as the state religion. They argue that Russia can only be Orthodox and that historically it has been a state church.

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.

Yet the real issue is not the danger of religion per se, but of dogmatic thinking.