VANCOUVER - A terrorist attack on the U.S. like that launched on Sept. 11, 2001 would likely have occurred even if the Muslim religion had never existed, says a former top official of the Central Intelligence Agency who now makes his home in Squamish. "If not 9/11, some similar event like it was destined to come," writes Graham Fuller, an expert on political Islam who was in charge of long-term strategic forecasting for the CIA, in the cover story of this month's issue of the magazine Foreign Policy. Fuller, an adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University, argues in his opinion piece, titled A World Without Islam, that though Islam provides a convenient scapegoat for those trying to explain the origins of terrorism, violent reformers would have likely arisen out of the Middle East even if the region had remained largely Christian.

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