On 11 September 2001, 19 Islamic jihadists, mostly from Saudi Arabia and all members of Al Qaeda, a Sunni Muslim terrorist group, hijacked and crashed four passenger jets in the USA, with a total loss of almost 3000 lives. Osama bin Laden, the Al Qaeda founder, justified their action on religious grounds, declaring Americans were disbelievers in the Koran and Sharia and fought against Allah in the cause of Satan. 1 Beginning in the summer of 2014 another Sunni Muslim extremist called Daesh in Arabic or ISIS or ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria/Levant) and led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi committed and continues to commit atrocities in Syria and Iraq, particularly against Christians, Shiite and pro-Western Muslims, and other sects. It also vowed to conquer Rome, the historical capital of Western Civilization, and build an Islamic caliphate to rule the world. On 13 November 2015, Daesh committed mass murder in the streets of Paris and took credit for blowing up two weeks earlier a Russian civilian jetliner over Egypt.
In March 2014, Vladimir Putin attacked Ukraine, annexed Ukraineâs Crimea into Russia, and mobilized troops on Ukraineâs eastern border in support of Russian-backed separatists because, he charged, Western Europe and the USA âhave come to believe in their exclusivity and exceptionalismâ and push a Western agenda around the world that was âaimed against Ukraine and Russia,â lands that have a common Orthodox culture and âcannot live without each other.â 2 The Moscow Orthodox Patriarchate endorsed the Russian aggression and claimed, âthe Russian people are a divided nation on their historic territory that have the right to reunite in one state body.â 3 On 30 September 2015, Putin intervened in the Syrian Civil War by bombing both Daesh and pro-Western Sunni Muslims who are opposed to his and Iranâs ally, the Alawite, Shia-affiliated Assad regime in Damascus. The USA and the Sunni Muslim governments of Turkey and Saudi Arabia objected to Putinâs action, and Turkey on 24 November 2015 shot down a Russian bomber that crossed into Turkish air space.
In 2014, Pope Francis I beckoned Muslim and other world leaders to halt the butchers of Daesh and condemn and stop those who use religion to commit murder, terrorism, and atrocities. In June 2015, he pointedly urged Putin âto engage in a sincere and great effort to achieve peaceâ in Ukraine. In September 2015, at the United Nations (UN), he pleaded with the international community to reject ânationalistic or falsely universalist ideologiesâ; stop and prevent âsystematic violence against ethnic and religious minoritiesâ; and âprotect innocent peopleâ caught in the throes of sectarian wars. 4 In November 2015, in Africa, he implored Muslims and Christians to work together and to âsay no to hatred, to revenge and to violence.â 5
Why did Osama bin Laden, Daesh or ISIS, and other Muslim extremists commit murder and acts of terrorism in the name of religion and vow to conquer Rome? Why did Putin attack Ukraine and the West, and look to Orthodoxy for justification? Why did Pope Francis step up and condemn violence by Muslim extremists and push Putin to relent in his aggression against Ukraine? Why was and is the West at the center of this turmoil and the common enemy of Osama bin Laden, Vladimir Putin, and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi? Why has and is religion playing such a momentous role in world affairs?
This book tries to answer these questions and many more related to the strained relationship between the West, Russia, and the world of Islam. It argues that the tension between the West and Russia and Islamic groups and nations is not new. It is part of a struggle that started almost two millennia ago when Christianity first appeared and spawned two divergent, world religions, Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, which, in turn, helped generate and profoundly influence two distinct value systems, which were embedded in and reflective of two large cultural orders called the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire, which appeared in the fourth century, and Christendom or Western Civilization or, more simply, the West, which was a new culture that had to be built from scratch because of German destruction of the western part of the Roman Empire and, accordingly, evolved slowly from the fourth to the eleventh and twelfth centuries. A third world religion, Islam, appeared in the seventh century. Because it was both a religion and a military-political order and used its military to conquer settled civilizations in Persia, India, and the Byzantine Empire, it was able to use existing infrastructure to produce an Islamic state and yet a third value system in the seventh and eighth centuries.
There were more ancient religions, traditions, and civilizations in the world, including Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, and others, and they all performed critical roles in setting up and maintaining social order, morality, and political identity for their followers. They also expanded, particularly Buddhism, by virtue of trade, military conquest, borderland proximity, voluntary conversions, or diasporas. However, these ancient orders were not as a rule purposely expansive, aggressive, and promotive of a core value system for all of mankind. For the most part, they championed self-contained, quiescent, and harmonious ordersâislands of civilization in a turbulent seaâbut none of them, except Buddhism, was a world religion, and none, including Buddhism, sought to unite the human family on the basis of its values.
The Orthodox, Islamic, and Western orders, on the other hand, were quite expansionist. They were determined to tame the sea and connect the islands of civilization in a broad archipelago anchored by their value systems, which were based partly on beliefs that they claimed derived from divine revelation and partly on other sources that included Judaism, the customs of founding tribes and nations, and the multifaceted traditions of Greek and Roman Civilizations, which the religions approved of and blessed as having truth and merit. These three orders, and these alone, were and are the reason that the world today talks of globalization, global interdependency, and global civilization.
As they developed and organized their global missions, these three dynamic value systems built impressive, high cultures. They also interacted with and cross-fertilized one another and shared, directly or indirectly, some ideas, institutions, and technology. Orthodox, Islamic, and Western Civilizations were interdependent. They also borrowed from the other non-expansionist orders of the civilized world, particularly India and China, and consistently showed an uncanny ability to adapt to and absorb local cultures and environments. In fact, over the long span of history, they intermingled so much that one could argue that they allâboth the expansionist and non-expansionist ordersâaided the rise of global civilization and provided insight into human nature and truth.
Nonetheless, even though the worldâs civilizations interacted and were interdependent, the Orthodox, Islamic, and Western value systems and political identities were different and evolved into rival approaches on how best to organize a global order. They stood for and effected ideas and institutions within society that led to alternative, often adversarial, blueprints of development. The historical struggle among these value systems ebbed and flowed but constituted an overarching trajectory that pitted them against one another on multiple fronts following the collapse of the Roman Empire and often led to the destruction of the customs and sometimes the inhabitants of other civilizations. The word âcivilizationâ is an unwieldy and vague term because it implies that there were clear-cut, cultural orders that were independent of one another. That was not the case. It is also deficient because we are already in an age of a single global civilization that has superseded Orthodox, Islamic, and Western Civilizations. It is used in this book only as a shorthand way to refer to shared values and political identity, which were different and distinct and tended to subsume but not negate nation, race, ethnicity, and language differences.
In the struggle to set up a global value system, Orthodox Civilization appeared as if it would be the dominant order once the western part of the Roman Empire disintegrated. Then in the seventh and eighth centuries, Islamic Civilization seemed to be positioned to be the values hegemon. However, starting in the late eleventh century Western Civilization moved toward a leadership role. Both Orthodox and Islamic cultures slowly but surely started to adjust and attenuate parts of their value system in favor of Western values. The transformation was taxing, drawn out, and destabilizing because it entailed tampering with foundational principles and political identity. Nonetheless, by the advent of the twentieth century the West saw its values, if not its beliefs, approaching global dominance.
In the first three decades of the twentieth century Orthodox Russia experienced four revolutions, which amounted to a fateful fight over Western values. In the Revolution of 1905 the tsar committed to constitutional government, freedom of religion, basic human rights, and private property. However, he involved Russia in foreign entanglements in the Balkans and Central Europe that led to what became World War I, backtracked on his Westernizing policies, and abdicated in a Second Revolution in February 1917. The new government that replaced him, called the Provisional Government, put Russia back on the road to Westernization, but it failed to match its rhetoric with policies and ultimately failed to withdraw Russia from World War I, which opened the door to a Third Revolution in October 1917 that brought to power a Radical Left extremist group called the Bolshevik or Communist Party. This fanatical element was determined to abort the growth of Western values in Russia and around the world. It created a new empire called the Soviet Union or Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
The Communists were particularly interested in ending private ownership of land and, ironically, wiping out religiously based values. However, they quickly discovered that they did not have the power to reverse the peasantsâ determination to become landowners, so they acquiesced in peasant control of the land from 1921 to 1928 while they assembled their coercive instruments, the secret police (variously named the Cheka, the Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del (NKVD), and the Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti (KGB), the gulag prison system, and the Red Army. In October 1928 they launched the Fourth Revolution called Collectivization, which was a full-scale attack upon the peasants and bourgeois values in Russia and ended up in a sanguinary totalitarian regime that stymied the growth of Western values in Soviet Russia for most of the remainder of the twentieth century.
The new Soviet state also fomented international revolution in an attempt to overturn the existing global order and replace it with Communist societies governed by the Soviet Union. Its support of revolution helped spark anti-Communist Radical Right parties in Italy, Germany, and Japan, which were also energized by disenchantment over the outcome of World War I and the effects of the Great Depression. It also led to fears of Communism in Eastern Europe, Great Britain, France, and the USA, and played no small role in Western governmentsâ appeasement of the Radical Right, which championed anti-Communism.
However, the aggression of Germany, Italy, and Japan soon threatened peace across Europe and Asia and forced other nations to put their aversion to Communism and its values on hold until they stopped the Radical Right. A Western-dominated alliance that ironically included the Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, and their allies in East Europe in World War II. With that victory, Westernization expanded anew. In an amazing advance, epitomized by the formation of the UN and the European Union (EU), Western core values revived across Europe and spread around the globe.
The challenge of the Radical Left and Soviet totalitarianism, though, remained. Here the West, led by the USA and its allies, especially the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Greece, and, significantly, a Westernizing Turkey, opposed the Communist camp for over half a century in the so-called Cold War. In 1989, the Soviet Empire in East Europe fell and in 1991 the Soviet Union imploded. The Communist model was soon discarded or modified everywhere with the sole exception of North Korea.
With the waning of Communism, Western values grew in the Orthodox countries of Bulgaria and Romania. They also found significant support in Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Macedonia. Of course, traditional Western states that had been held by force in the Soviet UnionâLithuania, Latvia, and Estoniaâand in the Soviet EmpireâPoland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungaryâquickly reasserted Western values. By 2014, the EU membership counted 28 countries and the UN had 193 members.
Even in the land o...