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Armstrong was in Cairo as a guest of the American University |
Scholar: There is no clash of civilisations
Armstrong was in Cairo as a guest of the
American University
By Firas Al-Atraqchi in Cairo, Egypt
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/91F01EE9-B0CF-4780-8B40-823C9D06B47E.htm
Tuesday 20 December 2005, 17:12 Makka Time, 14:12 GMT
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The writings on Islam of Karen Armstrong, one of the foremost authorities
on monotheistic religions and traditions, have come into public focus after the
11 September 2001 attacks on America.
Born in 1944, Armstrong began her journey to faith as a Roman Catholic nun but
left her order in 1969 when she embarked on a doctoral study of Lord Tennyson.
She later left academia and, following a brief teaching stint, began researching
the life of St Paul for a documentary series.
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This eventually led to a re-examination of religions and several books
on the subject including A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism,
Christianity and Islam; Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths; Muhammad: a
Biography of the Prophet; The Battle for God; and Islam: A Short History.
Armstrong is currently teaching Christianity at London's Leo Baeck College
for the Study of Judaism. Her latest publication focuses on the birth of
compassion in the pre-Christian Axial Age.
Firas Al-Atraqchi, Aljazeera.net's contributing editor, recently caught up
with Armstrong in Cairo where she was delivering lectures on religion as
part of the American University in Cairo's English public lecture series.
Aljazeera.net: What is the common denominator linking all the faiths you have
studied?
Armstrong: I would say compassion and the Golden Rule, ("don't do to
others as you would not have done to you") which is what they all teach. I was
with the Dalai Lama a couple of months ago and he said all religions teach
kindness. He said: "My religion is kindness."
Compassion doesn't mean we have to feel warm affection for people - we have to
learn to feel with them, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and
put another there.
We have to do that globally to learn other nations, other people, are as
important as ourselves. If we don't like people speaking against our culture,
bombing or terrorising us, we shouldn't do it to others.
Which direction is Islam taking in the West? Why does there seem to be
turmoil for Muslims who have lived for generations in the West?
Armstrong:
At the moment, Muslims are reeling under the impact of 9-11 and it's very
uncertain where they are going. Some have put their heads down and don't want to
raise them above the parapet at all while others are horrified by what happened
but find their voices are not listened to.
"Since 9-11, hostility towards Islam has accelerated which is endemic in our
society"
Some - as we have seen by our own British bombers - are appalled by the pictures
coming out of Guantanamo, Iraq and Abu Ghraib and daily from Palestine. This
feeds into an alienation that they feel from their own British culture they were
brought up in.
Since 9-11, hostility towards Islam has accelerated which is endemic in our
society. On the other hand, these images of people being beheaded on TV just
reinforce these old stereotypes and make it more difficult for Muslims to feel
at home.
It is very difficult to know where they are going.
But there is no clash of civilisations in an ontological way.
At the beginning of the 20th century when Muslims first began to encounter the
modern West, they recognised it as congenial to their own traditions. But then
bad foreign policy - Palestine, Suez, the support of tyrannical dictatorial
rulers, and the rush for oil (which often meant that ethics were overlooked) -
has alienated many in the Muslim world and made them feel the West is a double
dealer.
On the part of Western politicians, there is a failure to see the contradictions
in their own policies. You can't be talking about free speech one moment and
threatening to bomb Aljazeera tomorrow. This is not consistent.
I was with Desmond Tutu - I am on a United Nations committee called Alliance of
Civilisations which tries to bring people together - and he was saying how
appalled he was that Tony Blair was trying to push through a law allowing
detention without trial for 90 days.
Tutu recalled when they were fighting apartheid in South Africa the British had
always been coming to the government and telling them you can't put people in
jail without trial.
You can't be democratic or part of the modern world if you practise this sort of
thing and yet here they are doing that, never mind Guantanamo Bay where people
have been held for a very long time without trial.
The race riots in France and Australia, they involved Arab and Muslim youth.
Is this a harbinger of things to come?
Armstrong:
I don't know much about the riots in Australia as I have been travelling,
but the French riots had very little to do with Islam and much more to do with
deprivation and ostracising, racism. There's been trouble brewing in France for
so long with the immigrant communities which are kept in some type of ghettoes.
Similarly, with our British bombers, they were kept in a part of Yorkshire, in
northern England, that I have never visited. And that is indicative - I wouldn't
go there.
But there are places where Pakistani youths are at the bottom of the pile. They
have very little chance for advancement. There were in 2001 race riots there,
before 9-11. It is race and second classism, a sense that there is no way they
can make their way forward in society.
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The riots in France
were not |
Nothing much was done after the 2001 race riots in the UK. And they are now
beginning to reap the rewards of that. Disaffected people look at images coming
from Guantanamo Bay and Iraq and this ignites something in their soul.
We are not talking about a universal Islamic Jihad and it was wrong of the
papers to call these Muslim riots; these were just riots about deprivation and
discrimination.
In your book, Battle for God, you wrote that fundamentalist religious
movements claim God as their own. What are the similarities and differences
between the various fundamentalist movements?
Armstrong:
I've concentrated only on the ones in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Most
of them began in fear - a fear of annihilation. All groups are convinced that
modern secular liberalist society is going to wipe them out.
This is true across the board.
When they feel that their backs are against a wall, that's when they become
aggressive, defensive and worried.
A profound hinging on this is a loss of identity - people not knowing where they
are and feeling their values have been marginalised and kicked out of the way.
This produces a sense of frustration and impotent rage. They have a desire to
bring God and all religion back to centre stage.
This expresses itself in an exaggerated vision of the enemy; all of them have
cultivated blown-up versions of the enemy which reflects a great deal of their
own sense of menace.
In some cultures, this fear and dread is hardening into rage and it was quite
clear when I finished this book; some fundamentalism was becoming more extreme
and moving into a new phase.
Why is Christian Fundamentalism such a powerful force in North America?
Armstrong:
It has gradually been making its way to the forefront and many in the US
feel alienated by the secularist, intellectualist, and sophisticated discourse
of New York, Harvard, Yale and Washington, DC.
Many people in small town America have for a very long time felt colonised by
this ideology, just as colonised as people in Egypt felt by the British or in
Syria by the French.
There is therefore a struggle. All culture is always contested. Since the 1970s
there has been a concerted movement to bring what they call Old Time
Christianity back to centre stage, back to the position it held before modernity
really took root in 20th-century America.
People like George Bush - he isn't as stupid as he is often depicted, but he is
not a great intellectual - represent many of the values of small town America.
He has simplistic views of the Middle East; he's hardly ever stepped foot out of
the country [before becoming president]. He's not very typical even though he
comes from a very rich family; nevertheless he seems to speak for small-town
America.
They have used the democratic and political process very skilfully to come from
a marginalised position and over the years bring themselves back to centre
stage.
It does not have universal support. In the last election, America was split
pretty evenly down the middle and there are Americans who abhor this type of
discourse. There are people in the Democratic party who are beginning to create
a religious discourse on the left. Jim Wallace is doing that and a rabbi in San
Francisco - Rabbi Lerner - has just written a book called The Left Hand of God
to reclaim religion.
Americans at the moment seem to be more attuned to a religious than secular
discourse.
Can you tell us about your new book focusing on the Axial Age?
Armstrong:
I just finished it and it will be out in the UK in March and in the US in
April. It is already out in Holland.
The Axial Age is the period from 900 to 200 BCE when all the world's religions
which have continued to nourish humanity came into being or had their roots. You
can consider Christianity and Islam as later flowerings of the Axial Age ideals
of monotheism.
This included the emergence of Confucianism and Taoism in China, Hinduism,
Buddhism and Jainism in India.
In Europe, you had the Greeks and philosophical rationalism.
It is not just an exercise in spiritual archaeology, because I hope the book
will give some indications of perhaps where we may be going wrong today. It
seems to me that in our various institutions we are creating exactly the kind of
piety people like the Buddha wanted to get rid of.
The essential teachings of the Axial Age were in every case - except for Greece
- a rejection of violence. And as a consequence of that the cultivation of
compassion and the Golden Rule "don't do to others as you would not have done to
you".
That seems to be the basis of religion; they weren't interested in metaphysics
or doctrine or orthodox theology at all.
Some have called you a healer idealist while others point to your description
of Islam and say you must be a Muslim. How do you describe yourself?
Armstrong:
I wouldn't say I am an idealist because I am far too pessimistic to be an
idealist. But I have a strong sense of dread, a prickly feeling that we have
been here before and we can't go down this road again.
I first got it during the Salman Rushdie crisis - a feeling that in Europe we
have been here before. We have cultivated a distorted vision of a people for a
thousand years and this ended in the death camps in the 1930s. And we can never
go down this road again.
When I started to hear people talking in this loose-lipped way about Islam, I
felt a sense of real fear that somebody, even if it had to be me, had to correct
these perceptions.
Furthermore, I really admire the Muslim tradition so much. The Prophet Muhammad
is the most magnificent example who inherits the most appalling situation - in
Arabia at the time there was a bloodbath - and brings peace out of it. And at a
great personal cost to himself.
And not only that, but he bequeathed to humanity a scripture that has helped
millions of human beings to make sense of their lives.
To have such a combination of very strong spiritual genius with political genius
is extraordinary. So there is that admiration.
At the height of Islam's power, Muslim theologians were so pluralistic and
daring and affirmative and inspiring; people like Ibn Arabi and Rumi.
I was very alienated from religion by my own experiences as a young nun and
wanted nothing to do with religion.
But it was the study of Islam and Judaism, but Islam particularly, that brought
me back to a sense of what religion could be at its best.
It gave me an entirely new perspective on things. Even though I am not a Muslim,
I have absorbed so much of Islam that it has become a part of me.
I used to describe myself as a freelance monotheist because I draw inspiration
from all - I cannot see any of them as superior. And that has now spread to
Buddhism and all the rest.
I see all of them just equal, each with its own genius and with its own flaws.
At the moment, I would describe myself as convalescent; recovering from a bad
religious experience by the study of these other traditions which continue to
inspire me and feed me.
So your books, then, can be considered a spiritual quest?
Armstrong:
Yes, yes certainly.
Have you found God?
Armstrong:
Oh, yes. But that word - God - is not easy to define and once you do define
it, what you really have is a projection because, Allahu Akbar, God is Greater
than anything we can conceive. I see my study as a form of prayer.
When I am working at the library or at my desk, I have moments where I am deeply
touched within and lifted momentarily beyond myself.
The discipline of trying to put myself out of my post-enlightenment 20th-century
rationalism and the feeling of superiority and into the mind of the Prophet and
the mystics of long ago teaches me about compassion and to feel with others.
And that spills over into my personal life. I get very upset now by unkindness
in any form. I have a thinner skin than I used to have.
So have I found God? As the Chinese would say: "I am on the way." The Now is the
point; what's important is the why you're actually on the way and not to be so
concerned by the destination.