Graham E. Fuller is Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and a 20-year veteran of the CIA where he worked in a number of predominantly Islamic countries. He thinks common western stereotypes about Islam obscure the fact that there are powerful modernizing forces at work within political Islam.
Graham E. Fuller has a BA and MA from Harvard in Russian and Middle East studies. He worked 20 years as a CIA operations officer, seventeen of them overseas in Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Afghanistan and China. He later became Vice-Chair of the National Intelligence Council at CIA, with overall responsibility for national level strategic forecasting.
After leaving government service Mr. Fuller was a Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation for 12 years where, among many publications, he wrote on political Islam in various countries, and on the geopolitics of the Muslim world. He speaks several Middle Eastern languages as well as Russian and Chinese. He has written many books and articles on Middle Eastern and South Asian geopolitics, including The Center of the Universe: the Geopolitics of Iran; The Geopolitics of Islam and the West; Turkey Faces East: Turkey’s New Geopolitics from the Balkans to Central Asia; The Arab Shi’a; and The Future of Political Islam, 2003. His 2008 book is The New Turkish Republic: Turkey’s Pivotal Role in the Middle East. His newest work, A World Without Islam, was published by Little Brown in August 2010.
This talk was recorded on October 18, 2010 at the Bay Point Ballroom located on the grounds of the Samoset Resort in Rockport.