Karen Armstrong on the 9/11 Attacks: A “Flagrant and Wicked Abuse of Religion”

To mark the ninth anniversary of 9/11, I share today an excerpt from the revised and updated edition of Karen Armstrong’s book Islam: A Short History.

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On September 11, 2001, nineteen Muslim extremists hijacked four passenger jets, flying two of them into the World Trade Center in New York City and one into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., killing more than three thousand people. The fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania. The hijackers were disciples of Osama bin Laden, whose militant brand of Islam was deeply influenced by Sayyid Qutb.

The ferocity of this attack against the United States took the fundamentalist war against modernity into a new phase. When [Islam: A Short History] was first published in 2000, I had predicted that if Muslims continued to feel that their religion was under attack, fundamentalist violence was likely to become more extreme and to take new forms.

. . . The vast majority of Muslims recoiled in horror from this September apocalypse and pointed out that such an atrocity contravened the most sacred tenets of Islam. The Quran condemns all aggressive warfare and teaches that the only just war is a war of self-defense. But Osama bin Laden and his disciples claimed that Muslims were under attack. He pointed to the presence of American troops on the sacred soil of Arabia; to the continued bombing of Iraq by American and British fighter planes; to the American-led sanctions against Iraq, as a result of which thousands of civilians and children had died; to the deaths of hundreds of Palestinians at the hands of Israel, America’s chief ally in the Middle East; and to the support that the United States gives to governments that bin Laden regards as corrupt and oppressive, such as the royal family of Saudi Arabia. However we view American foreign policy, none of this can justify such a murderous attack, which has no sanction in either the Quran or the Shariah. Islamic law forbids Muslims to declare war against a country in which Muslims are allowed to practice their faith freely, and it strongly prohibits the killing of innocent civilians. The fear and rage that lie at the heart of all fundamentalist vision nearly always tend to distort the tradition that fundamentalists are trying to defend, and this has never been more evident than on September 11. There has seldom been a more flagrant and wicked abuse of religion.



Immediately after the attack, there was a backlash against Muslims in Western countries. . . . It was widely assumed that there was something in the religion of Islam that impelled Muslims to cruelty and violence, and the media all too frequently encouraged this assumption.

. . . It has never been more important for Western people to acquire a just appreciation and understanding of Islam. The world changed on September 11. We now realize that we in the privileged Western countries can no longer assume that events in the rest of the world do not concern us. What happens in Gaza, Iraq, or Afghanistan today is likely to have repercussions in New York, Washington, or London tomorrow, and small groups will soon have the capacity to commit acts of mass destruction that were previously only possible for powerful nation states. In the campaign against terror on which the United States has now embarked, accurate intelligence and information are vital. To cultivate a distorted image of Islam, to view it as inherently the enemy of democracy and decent values, and to revert to the bigoted views of the medieval Crusaders would be a catastrophe. Not only will such an approach antagonize the 1.2 billion Muslims with whom we share the world, but it will also violate the disinterested love of truth and the respect for the sacred rights of others that characterize both Islam and Western society at their best.


Recommended Off-site Links:
Islam Not the Enemy, Obama Tells America – Sydney Morning Herald (September 12 2010).
Tensions High on 9/11 Anniversary – David Batty (The Guardian, September 11, 2010).
The Healers of 9/11 – Nicholas D. Kristof (New York Times, September 8, 2010).
9/11 Father: “I Don’t Understand All of This Hate – Deborah Hastings (AOLNews.com, September 10, 2010).
This 9/11, Let’s All Take Responsibility for Ending a Summer of Hate – Rinku Sen and Fekkak Mamdouh (ColorLines Magazine, September 9, 2010).
Eight Ways to Confront Extremism on 9/11 – Sarah van Gelder (Yes! Magazine, September 9, 2010).
9/11: The Rest Should Be Silence – Michael Winship (CommonDreams.org, September 9, 2010).
Gay Saints of 9/11: Mychal Judge and Mark Bingham – Kittredge Cherry (Jesus In Love Blog, September 11, 2010).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
Rebecca Solnit on How 9/11 Should Be Remembered
9/11: Seven Years On
Remembering September 11 and Its Aftermath
Let’s Also Honor the “Expendables”
A Way to Show Your Support for American Muslims
Informed and Helpful Perspectives on the "Ground Zero Mosque" Controversy
What Catholics and Muslims Share in Common
What Muslims Want
Their Faith, Their Voice
The Anti-Muslim Sentiment of Some Americans: The Onion Nails It
Irene Khan: Shaking Things Up Down Under
In the Garden of Spirituality - Karen Armstrong
A Dangerous Medieval Conviction

In the Garden of Spirituality – Karen Armstrong

“We are not on earth to guard a museum,
but to cultivate a flowering garden of life.”

– Pope John XXIII

The Wild Reed’s series of reflections on religion and spirituality continues with an excerpt from the preface of Karen Armstrong’s book, Islam: A Short History.

In this particular excerpt, Armstrong explores the “central paradox of the religious life” and how it is expressed in the religion of Islam.

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The central paradox of the religious life is that it seeks transcendence, a dimension of existence that goes beyond our mundane lives, but that human beings can only experience this transcendent reality in earthly, physical phenomena. People have sensed the divine in rocks, mountains, temple buildings, law codes, written texts, or in other men and women. We never experience transcendence directly: our ecstasy is always “earthed,” enshrined in something or someone here below. Religious people are trained to look beneath the unpromising surface to find the sacred within it. They have to use their creative imaginations. Jean-Paul Sartre defined the imagination as the ability to think of what is not present. Human beings are religious creatures because they are imaginative; they are so constituted that they are compelled to search for hidden meaning and to achieve an ecstasy that makes them feel fully alive. Each tradition encourages the faithful to focus their attention on an earthly symbol that is peculiarly its own, and to teach themselves to see the divine in it.

In Islam, Muslims have looked for God in history. Their sacred scripture the Quran, gave them a historical mission. Their chief duty was to create a just community in which all members, even the most weak and vulnerable, were treated with absolute respect. The experience of building such a society and living in it would give them intimations of the divine, because they would be living in accordance with God's will.


For further thoughts on transcendence, see the previous Wild Reed post:
Intimate Soliloquies

For more of Karen Armstrong at The Wild Reed, see:
Boorganna (Part 2)
A Return to the Spirit
A Dangerous Medieval Conviction

See also:
What Muslims Want
Informed and Helpful Perspectives on the "Ground Zero Mosque" Controversy
Irene Khan: Shaking Things Up Down Under
The Sufi Way

Image: Michael J. Bayly.

A Return to the Spirit

Two renowned authors remind us
what religion is really all about.

Theologian and author Harvey Cox (pictured at right) was recently in the Twin Cities speaking about his new book, The Future of Faith, in the lecture series known as the Westminster Town Hall Forum. Although I was unable to attend, my friends Paula, Bernie, and Eileen heard Cox speak, and spoke highly of the ideas and insights he shared.

In the October 20 issue of the Christian Century, Episcopal priest, religious history professor, and author Randall Balmer reviewed Cox’sThe Future of Faith. Here’s what Balmer says about the book’s overall thesis.

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Cox ushers the reader on an excursion through church history, which he divides into three eras: the Age of Faith, the Age of Belief, and the Age of Spirit.

. . . Cox admires the early years of Christianity, which, he says, had “no standardized theology, no single pattern of governance, no uniform liturgy, and no commonly accepted scripture.” More important, the early church had no “clerical caste” during this Age of Faith, which lasted until early in the fourth century, when Constantine converted to Christianity.

The identification of religion with empire triggered the transition from faith to belief, as a clerical elite with dubious claims (Cox says) to apostolic authority sought to enforce uniformity of belief.

“This tendency to replicate the structure of empire,” writes Cox, “helps explain why so much of the Christian movement, which began as the persecuted victim of the Roman empire and provided an alternative to it, then became a sycophantic mimic of that empire and finally its obsequious acolyte.”

During the Age of Belief, which has prevailed (with some exceptions) to the present, Christianity “curdled into a top-heavy edifice defined by obligatory beliefs enforced by a hierarchy.” Cox understands belief as the adherence to propositional truth that forms the basis for fundamentalism: “Faith had been coarsened into belief, and Christianity has been hobbled by this distortion ever since.”

Whereas early Christians allowed for multiple understandings and expressions of the faith, Christianity in this Age of Belief demanded conformity. Christianity, “a loose network of local congregations, with varied forms of leadership, congealed into a rigid class structure with a privileged clerical caste at the top ruling over an increasingly disenfranchised laity on the bottom.” Women, “who played such a vital leadership role in the earliest days, were pushed to the underside and the edges.”

But even amid the theological sludge of the Age of Belief, various adventurers pushed their way to the surface. Cox cites the mystics and the Pentecostals (though he neglects the Camisards). “Mystics always make prelates nervous, “Cox writes, “but they are always with us.”

Due in part to the vision and courage of these dissenters, Cox believes, Christianity now stands on the cusp of the Age of Spirit, which is characterized by a return to faith over belief, a renewed concern for the poor, and an openness to the Spirit.

Cox insists that the real catalyst is the shifting of the center of Christianity from the West to Africa, Latin America, and the Asia-Pacific region. “In those countries where the clerical leadership clings to the older model, the churches are empty,” he writes. “But in those areas of the world where creeds and hierarchies have been set aside to make way for the Spirit, like the stone rolled away from Christ’s grave in the Easter story, one senses life and energy.”

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Two points: First, Cox’s framework reminds me somewhat of Karl Rahner’s three-epoch theory of Christian history, a theory succinctly summarized by theologian Terry Dosh in the April 2008 issue of The Progressive Catholic Voice.

Second, one doesn’t only have to look abroad for evidence of what Cox describes as an emerging “life and energy” within Catholicism. I’m fortunate to be part of the Spirit of St. Stephen’s Catholic Community – a vibrant intentional Catholic community that was formed after a large number of parishioners were compelled to move out of the South Minneapolis parish of St. Stephen’s after the chancery ordered that the parish conform its various liturgies to the rubrics of the General Instruction of the Roman Missal (GIRM). These liturgies had, over the past 40 years, evolved in ways that made the chancery uncomfortable. They had, for example, evolved to in ways that saw the introduction of women altar servers, inclusive language, lay homilists, an understanding of the priesthood of the people, and the welcoming of LGBT people.

The Spirit of St. Stephen’s continues to thrive (a second weekend liturgy will soon be offered), which is more than can be said about the parish of St. Stephen’s. What I believe we’re witnessing in cases like the Spirit of St. Stephen’s and St. Mary’s in Brisbane, Australia, is a clear example of the “return to faith over belief” that Cox writes about.

I think much of the current tension within Roman Catholicism – and indeed wider Christianity – comes from the fact that we’re living through this transition from (to use Cox’s terminology) the Age of Belief to the Age of Spirit. My concern is that because Roman Catholicism still operates as a feudal caste system, those within the tradition open to being active participants in this transition will be simply shown the door, and Roman Catholicism will be reduced to, in the words of David Carlin, the status of a “minor and relatively insignificant sect.”

In reviewing Carlin’s book, The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America, Russell Shaw summarizes the grim scenario put forth by Carlin as follows: “[So-called] traditionalists will have won the internal Catholic power struggle, says Carlin, mainly because the progressives will have drifted away. But in the end, the small band of traditionalists will find themselves isolated in ‘a new Catholic quasi-ghetto,’ with about as much influence on the culture as the Amish and Hasidic Jews have now.”

Yet, as I’ve noted previously, I’m not in the least bit interested in circling the wagons and living in any type of ghetto. Neither are the Catholics I know. Yet a ghetto is exactly what the current clerical leadership seems intent on creating for us. I’m drawn instead to a Church open to the Spirit, a Church that recognizes and celebrates itself as the Risen Body of Christ, alive and afoot in the world; a Church unafraid of journeying and engagement, of growth and change.

Interestingly, though not really surprisingly given that we are indeed in the midst of a transition or paradigm shift in religious consciousness, Harvey Cox isn’t the only person speaking about moving beyond an understanding and expression of religion that’s all about the need to define, defend, and divide.

In her latest book, The Case for God, Karen Armstrong (pictured at left) contends that religion is more about practice than belief; more about orthopraxy than orthodoxy.

Writes Armstrong:

Religion as defined by the great sages of India, China, and the Middle East was not a notional activity but a practical one; it did not require belief in a set of doctrines but rather hard, disciplined work, without which any religious teaching remained opaque and incredible.

True. But is it always that easy to separate belief from practice? Don’t our beliefs in large part shape what we do? Yes, but then perhaps Armstrong would argue that our beliefs should likewise be always open to being shaped by our ongoing practices within the context of an ever-changing world.

Elsewhere in her book, Armstrong observes:

A deliberate and principled reticence about God . . . was a constant theme not only in Christianity but in the other major faith traditions until the rise of modernity in the West. People believed that God exceeded our thoughts and concepts and could be known only by dedicated practice. We have lost sight of this important insight, and this, I believe, is one of the reasons why so many Western people find the concept of God so difficult today.

In discussing Armstrong’s latest work, Brian McGrath Davis notes:

For most of Western history “belief” has meant nothing like what it means today. Today, when someone asks me if I believe in God, for example, they are asking if I assent to the proposed verity or the factual existence of God — and usually it is in reference to a very specific understanding of that God. Similarly, if I'm asked if I have “faith in Christ”, the question is whether I agree with the proposition that Jesus of Nazareth was divine, died on a cross, and was raised from the dead, or some form of that story. In both cases, questions of “belief” and questions of “faith” require answers of thought. Yet, as surprising as it may seem, these understandings are relatively recent. “Faith” has its etymological roots in the Greek pistis, “trust; commitment; loyalty; engagement.” Jerome translated pistis into the Latin fides (“loyalty”) and credo (which was from cor do, “I give my heart”). The translators of the first King James Bible translated credo into the English “belief,” which came from the Middle English bileven (“to prize; to value; to hold dear”). Faith in God, therefore, was a trust in and loyal commitment to God. Belief in Christ was an engaged commitment to the call and ministry of Jesus; it was a commitment to do the gospel, to be a follower of Christ. In neither case were “belief” or “faith” a matter of intellectual assent.

This, of course, correlates with Harvey Cox’s contention that during much of Christian history, “faith had been coarsened into belief, and Christianity has been hobbled by this distortion ever since.”

In conclusion, I share the following excerpt from Christopher Hart’s July 5, 2009, London Times review of Armstrong’s The Case for God. Enjoy!

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Both Bible-bashing fundamentalists and dogmatic atheists have a similar idea of what “God” means, [Armstrong] points out, and it is an absurdly crude one. They seem to think the word denotes a large, powerful man we can’t see. Such a theology is, she says, “somewhat infantile.” The only difference between the fundamentalists and the atheists is that the former affirm this God’s existence, the latter deny it and try to demolish it.

The new atheists, Armstrong says with impeccable restraint, “are not theologically literate”, and “their polemic…lacks intellectual depth”. In contrast, she usefully reminds us, both Galileo and Darwin, supposed icons of modern atheism, were adamant that their discoveries had no impact on religious faith. Equally humble in a different way, Socrates pushed rationality and intellect to the point where they fail: you reach his famous aporia, and realise you really know nothing at all. The new atheists do the opposite. Their rationality and intellect bring them to a place of absolute knowledge, a height from where they survey all history, and pronounce with finality on pretty much everything. Never trust anyone who knows this much.

Yet for centuries, ideas of God and the Bible were far more subtle and profound than today’s atheism or fundamentalism can conceive. “We have lost the ‘knack’ for religion,” says Armstrong. It is as if the success of science in the material world has rewired our brains, made us tone-deaf to myth. “Is it true?” we keep asking, meaning, “Did it really happen? Is it literally true? If not, we’re not interested.”

She draws on 2,000 years of Christian theology and mysticism to demonstrate rich alternative ideas of the divine. Back in the 4th century AD, long before Wittgenstein and Derrida, Bishop Basil of Caesarea understood all about the limits of language, and stated them rather more clearly, too. “Thought cannot travel outside was, nor imagination beyond beginning.” God is, by definition, infinitely beyond human language. Earlier still, the Christian scholar Origen (185-254) discussed the “incongruities and impossibilities” in scripture. The fact that Dawkins et al think that pointing out the Bible’s imperfections undermine Jewish or Christian belief only demonstrates their ignorance of the traditions they presume to undermine. Of course it’s not meant to be understood literally, the early Christians seem to sigh across the centuries.

Armstrong further shows how even the words “I believe” have changed, and become scientised, to mean “I assert these propositions to be empirically correct.” Yet the original Greek pisteuo means something much more like “I give my heart and my loyalty.” In the gospels, she says, quoting the great German theologian Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus himself sees God not as “an object of thought or speculation, but as an existential demand.”

Yet thanks to the misapplication of science to religious faith, we remain literal-minded and spiritually immature, frightened of the silence and solitude in which the Ancient of Days, the Unnameable, might be experienced, though never understood. We need to think of God not as a being, but as Being. Armstrong points us towards a vast tradition in all religions in which, in essence, you can ultimately say nothing about God, since God is no thing. In Islam, all speaking or theorising about the nature of Allah is mere zannah, fanciful - guesswork. Instead, try “silence, reverence and awe,” she says; or music, ritual, the steady habit of compassion, and a graceful acceptance of mystery and “unknowing.”

As a haunting example, she recounts this unforgettable story. Among the many Jews who lost their faith in Auschwitz, there was one group who decided to put God on trial. How could an omnipotent and benevolent deity allow this horror? Either he didn’t exist, or he wasn’t worthy of their love anyway. “They condemned God to death. The presiding rabbi pronounced the verdict, then went on calmly to announce that it was time for the evening prayer.” God is dead — but, Armstrong suggests, all we have lost is a mistaken and limited notion of God anyway: a big, powerful, invisible man who does stuff. Instead, we need to recapture the spiritual imagination, sensitivity and meditative humility of the pre-moderns, who she so admires.

The Case for God simmers with a quiet spiritual optimism. It is dense and brilliant, chastening and consoling. Whether or not it sells as well as the latest Hitchens or Dawkins will be a measure of us, not the book.


See also the related Wild Reed posts:
In the Garden of Spirituality - Paul Collins
In the Garden of Spirituality - Jesse Lava
In the Garden of Spirituality - Adrian Smith
In the Garden of Spirituality - Patrick Carroll
In the Garden of Spirituality - Joan Timmerman
Conversing and Arguing with the Theology of Philip Pullman
Darwin’s Darkest Hour
Pan’s Labyrinth: Critiquing the Cult of Unquestioning Obedience
Time for a Church for Grown-Ups
Dialogue is Key in Moving Beyond Theological Impasses
Is Dialogue Always Possible?
Keeping the Spark Alive: Conversing with “Modern Mystic” Chuck Lofy
The Holarchical Church: Not a Pyramid But a Web of Relationships
Bishop Gumbleton: “It Isn’t the Church You’re Being Asked to Say Yes To - It’s Jesus”

Opening image: Michael J. Bayly.

A Dangerous Medieval Conviction

Karen Armstrong, one of the world’s preeminent thinkers and writers on the history of religion, has written an insightful commentary for The Guardian of London in response to the recent controversy surrounding Pope Benedict XVI’s comments on Islam.

During a lecture in Bavaria, the Pope quoted the words of the 14th-century Byzantine emperor Manuel II (pictured at right): “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

The Pope’s choice of quotation, says Armstrong, reflects a “medieval cast of mind”. Furthermore, “coming on the heels of the Danish cartoon crisis, [the Pope’s] remarks were extremely dangerous. They will convince more Muslims that the west is incurably Islamophobic and engaged in a new crusade.”

Following is the full text of Armstrong’s commentary.

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We Cannot Afford to Maintain
These Ancient Prejudices Against Islam

Karen Armstrong
The Guardian
September 18, 2006

The Pope's remarks were dangerous, and will convince many more Muslims that the west is incurably Islamophobic.

In the 12th century, Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny, initiated a dialogue with the Islamic world. “I approach you not with arms, but with words,” he wrote to the Muslims whom he imagined reading his book, “not with force, but with reason, not with hatred, but with love.”

Yet his treatise was entitled Summary of the Whole Heresy of the Diabolical Sect of the Saracens and segued repeatedly into spluttering intransigence. Words failed Peter when he contemplated the “bestial cruelty” of Islam, which, he claimed, had established itself by the sword. Was Muhammad a true prophet? “I shall be worse than a donkey if I agree,” he expostulated, “worse than cattle if I assent!”

Peter was writing at the time of the Crusades. Even when Christians were trying to be fair, their entrenched loathing of Islam made it impossible for them to approach it objectively. For Peter, Islam was so self-evidently evil that it did not seem to occur to him that the Muslims he approached with such “love” might be offended by his remarks. This medieval cast of mind is still alive and well.

Last week, Pope Benedict XVI quoted, without qualification and with apparent approval, the words of the 14th-century Byzantine emperor Manuel II: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

The Vatican seemed bemused by the Muslim outrage occasioned by the Pope's words, claiming that the Holy Father had simply intended “to cultivate an attitude of respect and dialogue toward the other religions and cultures, and obviously also towards Islam”.

But the Pope’s good intentions seem far from obvious. Hatred of Islam is so ubiquitous and so deeply rooted in western culture that it brings together people who are usually at daggers drawn. Neither the Danish cartoonists, who published the offensive caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad last February, nor the Christian fundamentalists who have called him a paedophile and a terrorist, would ordinarily make common cause with the Pope; yet on the subject of Islam they are in full agreement.

Our Islamophobia dates back to the time of the Crusades, and is entwined with our chronic anti-semitism. Some of the first Crusaders began their journey to the Holy Land by massacring the Jewish communities along the Rhine valley; the Crusaders ended their campaign in 1099 by slaughtering some 30,000 Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem. It is always difficult to forgive people we know we have wronged. Thenceforth Jews and Muslims became the shadow-self of Christendom, the mirror image of everything that we hoped we were not – or feared that we were.

The fearful fantasies created by Europeans at this time endured for centuries and reveal a buried anxiety about Christian identity and behaviour. When the popes called for a Crusade to the Holy Land, Christians often persecuted the local Jewish communities: why march 3,000 miles to Palestine to liberate the tomb of Christ, and leave unscathed the people who had – or so the Crusaders mistakenly assumed – actually killed Jesus? Jews were believed to kill little children and mix their blood with the leavened bread of Passover: this “blood libel” regularly inspired pogroms in Europe, and the image of the Jew as the child slayer laid bare an almost Oedipal terror of the parent faith.

Jesus had told his followers to love their enemies, not to exterminate them. It was when the Christians of Europe were fighting brutal holy wars against Muslims in the Middle East that Islam first became known in the west as the religion of the sword. At this time, when the popes were trying to impose celibacy on the reluctant clergy, Muhammad was portrayed by the scholar monks of Europe as a lecher, and Islam condemned – with ill-concealed envy – as a faith that encouraged Muslims to indulge their basest sexual instincts. At a time when European social order was deeply hierarchical, despite the egalitarian message of the gospel, Islam was condemned for giving too much respect to women and other menials.

In a state of unhealthy denial, Christians were projecting subterranean disquiet about their activities on to the victims of the Crusades, creating fantastic enemies in their own image and likeness. This habit has persisted.

The Muslims who have objected so vociferously to the Pope’s denigration of Islam have accused him of “hypocrisy”, pointing out that the Catholic church is ill-placed to condemn violent jihad when it has itself been guilty of unholy violence in crusades, persecutions and inquisitions and, under Pope Pius XII, tacitly condoned the Nazi Holocaust.

Pope Benedict delivered his controversial speech in Germany the day after the fifth anniversary of September 11. It is difficult to believe that his reference to an inherently violent strain in Islam was entirely accidental. He has, most unfortunately, withdrawn from the interfaith initiatives inaugurated by his predecessor, John Paul II, at a time when they are more desperately needed than ever. Coming on the heels of the Danish cartoon crisis, his remarks were extremely dangerous. They will convince more Muslims that the west is incurably Islamophobic and engaged in a new crusade.

We simply cannot afford this type of bigotry. The trouble is that too many people in the western world unconsciously share this prejudice, convinced that Islam and the Qur’an are addicted to violence. The 9/11 terrorists, who in fact violated essential Islamic principles, have confirmed this deep-rooted western perception and are seen as typical Muslims instead of the deviants they really were.

With disturbing regularity, this medieval conviction surfaces every time there is trouble in the Middle East. Yet until the 20th century, Islam was a far more tolerant and peaceful faith than Christianity. The Qur’an strictly forbids any coercion in religion and regards all rightly guided religion as coming from God; and despite the western belief to the contrary, Muslims did not impose their faith by the sword.

The early conquests in Persia and Byzantium after the Prophet’s death were inspired by political rather than religious aspirations. Until the middle of the eighth century, Jews and Christians in the Muslim empire were actively discouraged from conversion to Islam, as, according to Qur’anic teaching, they had received authentic revelations of their own.

The extremism and intolerance that have surfaced in the Muslim world in our own day are a response to intractable political problems – oil, Palestine, the occupation of Muslim lands, the prevelance of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, and the west's perceived “double standards” – and not to an ingrained religious imperative.

But the old myth of Islam as a chronically violent faith persists, and surfaces at the most inappropriate moments. As one of the received ideas of the west, it seems well-nigh impossible to eradicate. Indeed, we may even be strengthening it by falling back into our old habits of projection. As we see the violence – In Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon – for which we bear a measure of responsibility, there is a temptation, perhaps, to blame it all on “Islam”. But if we are feeding our prejudice in this way, we do so at our peril.


Karen Armstrong is the author of Islam: A Short History.