|
"It seemed to me that
by our perpetual denigration
of Islam, we had not learned
any of the lessons of the
1930s in Europe. It was
this kind of systematic
denigration of a people
which made Hitler’s
concentration camps
possible."
"Religion is not about
believing, or thinking things, or
holding opinions. It’s about
doing things, behaving in
a way that changes
you at a profound level."
"Unfortunately, not many
religious people really want
to be compassionate. They
often prefer to be right. "
"Properly understood,
religion can be a source of
peace. But when it’s
interpreted by egotism,
greed or selfishness--the
very things religion is
struggling to free us
from--it can become
lethal."
The Koran is not
interested in “belief.” Islam
is a pragmatic religion
that’s connected with
doing things, with fasting
during Ramadan, with giving
alms to look after the
poor and vulnerable people
in your society.
There’s far more violence in
the Bible than there is in the
Koran. The jihad, meaning
holy war, against an external
foe, is a very new
development.
When conflict becomes
endemic in a region, it
affects everything we
do--our dreams, our
fantasies, our
relationships, and
aspirations, and our
ambitions--and it affects
religion.
"When warfare has
become chronic in a region,
such as the Middle East or
Afghanistan or Kashmir,
religion gets sucked
in, and it becomes part of
the problem. "
"The more violence
becomes chronic, the
more people
lose faith in the
ordinary
political processes."
|
May/June
2008
THE NEXUS INTERVIEW
Jesus and Jihad
Karen Armstrong on the Iraq war, 9/11,
God and compassion
Karen Armstrong was once dubbed the “runaway nun.”
She later called herself “a freelance monotheist.”
Armstrong has rarely shied from controversy. As a free-thinking
and highly respected expert on religious history, her
outspoken commentary on religion has raised eyebrows,
ruffled feathers, and alternately alienated and endeared
her to audiences around the globe. At times outrageous—she
once compared Pope John Paul II to a Muslim fundamentalist—at
others deeply empathic, she is unfailingly meticulous
in her research.
Born in central England to a family of Irish descent,
Armstrong became a nun in her late teens, and spent seven
years in the Society of the Holy Child Jesus convent.
Her time there resulted in Through the Narrow Gate (St.
Martin’s Press, 1982), in which she lamented the
profoundly restrictive life in a nunnery. She went on
to study English at St. Anne’s College in Oxford,
and started on her Ph.D. When her thesis on the poet Tennyson
was rejected by an external examiner, she left academia
without completing her doctorate and embarked on a career
as an English teacher.
Several years later she was commissioned by a television
station in the UK to write a documentary on the life of
St. Paul, an assignment which led her to Jerusalem. Her
experiences there transformed her views toward religion,
and proved the ultimate basis for her work to follow.
In spite of her reputation as a blunt commentator on the
naiveties and hypocrisies of various faiths, Armstrong
remains compassionate, and has earned respect, awards
and accolades from a number of esteemed institutions,
and from people of many nations and religions. Earlier
this year, she was one of three winners of the internationally
prestigious TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Award
presented in California earlier this year.
Her latest works include Muhammad: Prophet for Our
Time (Harper Eminent Lives Series, 2006), The
Great Transformation (Knopf, 2006) and The Bible
(Grove Atlantic Books, 2008). In these books Armstrong
suggests an optimistic view of what unites, rather than
divides, religions.
Ms Armstrong has been interviewed on TV, radio and online
by Bill Moyers, Terri Gross, Brian Lehrer, Charlie Rose
and many others. She speaks around the world about fundamentalism
and the religious history underlying modern events.
Here, she shares her views on the war in Iraq, the events
of 9/11, and the pervasive and deeply troubling split
between Islam and the West.
What originally inspired
you to write about religion?
KA: I find the subject of religion absolutely
fascinating, and it’s of profound importance to
our understanding of humanity as a whole. And it is a
sort of spiritual quest for me. My study has very much
become my prayer. When I’m at my desk working, I
will occasionally have moments of great awe and wonder,
and a sense of transcendence--similar, I am told, to the
kind of uplift that Jews get when they’re studying
Torah and Talmud.
You have been referred to
as a freelance monotheist. Can you clarify that?
KA: I said that once in a moment of light-hearted
flippancy, and it’s followed me around in a dogged
way. What I meant was that I draw nourishment from all
three of the religions of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity
and Islam. But I cannot see any one of them as superior
to any of the others. Each has its own genius, each its
own particular flaws and failings. Since that time, I’ve
gone beyond monotheism, and I also have studied and am
inspired by Buddhism, by the Chinese religions, by Hinduism.
Do you believe in God?
KA: That’s a more complex question
than you might think. First of all, the question of “belief”
has become massively important in the Western world since
the time of the Enlightenment--so much so that we now
call religious people “believers,” as though
this is the chief thing they do. But in my view, religion
is not about believing, or thinking things, or holding
opinions. It’s about doing things, behaving in a
way that changes you at a profound level and gives you
intimations of a reality that we call “God,”
or “Brahman” or “Tao.”
Secondly, when you say “God,” that also has
to be analyzed. If you’re thinking of a giant personality
or a cosmic big brother, that’s not my notion of
God--nor, as I explained in The History of God, has it
been the view of the most distinguished monotheists in
all three of the religions. Judaism, Christianity and
Islam all insist that, while God contains the idea of
personality, God transcends personality, and goes way
beyond it in ways that we can’t describe.
They also said that it’s very limiting to say that
God “exists.” God does not exist like a chair
or another human being or the atom. God is not an unseen
reality, whose existence can be demonstrated in any way
that we understand. Our notion of existence is far too
limited to apply to God. Therefore, we can only get intimations
of this. And we get it not by believing, by accepting
certain articles of creed, but by behaving compassionately,
by observing the rituals that help to give us a sense
of this transcendence. But believing, I think, is an overprized
virtue that’s peculiar to Western Christianity.
But don’t other religions
place value on believing? Isn’t it true in Islam
that if one feels great faith in Allah and the prophet,
one derives certain benefits in one’s life?
KA: But “faith” in Islam
does not mean “belief.” Unfortunately Muslims,
like Jews and everybody else, have been infected by our
Western notional sense of religion.
The Koran has no time for orthodoxy; it refers to it as
“zannah,” which could be described as self-indulgent
guesswork about matters that nobody can be certain of
one way or the other, but which makes people quarrelsome
and stupidly sectarian. The Koran is not interested in
“belief.” It is a pragmatic religion, and
all five pillars of Islam are connected with doing things,
with fasting during Ramadan, with giving alms to look
after the poor and vulnerable people in your society,
making the Haj and so on.
Even the shehadah, often called the Muslim proclamation
of faith, is not meant to be a creed. It says “I
bear witness that there is no God but Allah, and that
Mohammed is his prophet.” The point is not that
you’re accepting this as a notion or an idea, but
that you bear witness in your life, so when we look at
you and your behavior, we can see that there is no other
God but Allah in your life, no other no other supreme
value--no other goal, no other ideologies such as patriotism,
materialistic ambition or earthly love. Unfortunately,
as Westernization has spread, some Muslims today speak
just like Christians of believing things, and of “faith”
as being the acceptance of certain doctrines.
Karen, did your study or
focus change after the events of September 11, 2001?
KA: My books about Islam and fundamentalism
had already been written before September 11 so, I can’t
say the focus changed. But my life changed, in that I’m
much more in the public eye talking about these matters.
I had been very disturbed for a long time before September
11 by the way in which Western people spoke about Islam.
That’s what prompted me to write about Mohammed
and Islam and also about fundamentalism in all three of
the monotheistic religions.
It seemed to me that by our perpetual denigration of this
religion, we had not learned any of the lessons of the
1930s in Europe. It was this kind of systematic denigration
of people, of a religious tradition, that made Hitler’s
concentration camps possible. I had an inchoate sense
that we were heading for something terrible. I couldn’t
have imagined 9/11. Its evil genius was precisely that;
it was inconceivable. But it fulfilled my worst forebodings,
rather than change them.
Did your view--or your life--change
again after the U.S. invaded Iraq in March of 2003?
KA: Well, I couldn’t believe that
Britain and America would be stupid enough to do that
at first.
Why do you say stupid?
KA: Well, I think if we’d had a
different president in the White House, that wouldn’t
have happened. It’s been an absolute catastrophe.
One of the things I discovered when writing my book on
fundamentalism (The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in
Judaism, Christianity and Islam; Harper Collins, 2000),
was that when you attack these movements, they become
more extreme. That is a classic case, in that the war
on Iraq has inspired more terrorism. Now this terrorism
is not primarily religiously motivated; the motivation
is political. But it’s a form of political activity
that is expressed in a religious guise, just as other
fundamentalisms are highly politicized forms of faith
in all three of the monotheisms.
But the invasion of Iraq was an absolute gift to Al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda it had been badly damaged after the war in Afghanistan.
But the images of the occupation of Iraq, especially the
American occupation, and then the horrible revelations
of Abu Ghraib, and, of course, the ongoing catastrophe
of Guantanamo--this has fed the conviction in many parts
of the world that the West is engaged in a new crusade
to destroy Islam. And recruitment to Al-Qaeda has greatly
increased as a result of that war.
It was an illegal war in the first place; international
law forbids going to war for regime change. In order to
get the vote through in the British Parliament, Tony Blair
had to insist that we were going to war because of the
weapons of mass destruction, which contravened international
law. And when there were found to be no WMDs, that made
the war illegal. And I know that Blair’s Downing
Street was, and remains, very much concerned that there
may be, in years to come, charges of war crimes laid against
Bush and Blair for this illegal war.
Sadam had absolutely nothing to do with September 11.
He was, in fact, one of the targets of Al-Qaeda. He was
a secular ruler, not a Muslim ruler, and that was why
Al-Qaeda was going to target him. There was no Al-Qaeda
in Iraq before the invasion of Iraq; Sadam would simply
have wiped them out. Now, as we know, sadly, Al-Qaeda
is operative in a country that is basically non-viable.
We spoke in 1993 for a Nexus
interview about the rise of fundamentalism, especially
in Christianity in the United States. At that time, Islamic
fundamentalism wasn’t so prominent on the world
stage. Do you now see fundamentalism as being a destructive
force, a neutral force, or as helping to bring spirit
and God into the public sphere?
KA: Fundamentalism, whether we like it
or not, is here to stay. But it’s a word that’s
much abused. Fundamentalism is not necessarily violent.
Of the innumerable people whom we might call fundamentalists,
only a tiny proportion takes part in acts of terror. Most
fundamentalists are simply trying to live what they regard
as a good religious life in a world that seems increasingly
hostile to religion. At the most, they may launch a counter-offensive,
but it’s usually in the form of propaganda or campaigning
for school prayer, that kind of stuff.
But these extreme movements are all routed in a profound
fear; they’re convinced that modern, secular or
liberal society wants to wipe out faith. The fact that
fundamentalism is rooted in fear makes it a worrisome
project; when people feel their backs are to the wall,
as they do in all three of the major world faiths, that’s
when they can lash out and become aggressive. In their
zeal to protect the tradition they feel to be in danger,
fundamentalists have tended to distort the faith by dwelling
more on the belligerent aspects of scripture that exist
in all of our holy texts, and by downplaying those that
speak of compassion and sacred respect for the rights
of the other.
But it must also be said that fundamentalism has developed
in a kind of symbiotic relationship with a modernity,
secularism or liberalism that has been experienced as
invasive, aggressive and hostile. That has been true in
the Muslim world and in the Christian world. So liberalism
has also contributed to this development.
When did American fundamentalism
start?
KA: Fundamentalism began in the United
States when the liberals attacked the conservative Christians,
quite viciously, about the time of World War I. This became
even more pronounced when fundamentalists in Tennessee
tried to ban the teaching of evolution in the public schools.
That led to the so-called “Monkey Trial,”
the Scopes trial of 1925, which made fundamentalists more
extreme than before.
Because of the ridicule
they experienced in the press?
KA: Yes. They disappeared from the scene,
and we thought we’d finished with them. But, in
fact, they were simply biding their time, creating their
own sacred enclaves, building their own bible colleges,
publishing houses and television channels, and they would
burst forth again in the late 1970s.
Before the Scopes trial, fundamentalists in the United
States may have been literal in their interpretation of
scripture, but they became much more militantly literal
afterward. Before the Scopes trial, creation science had
been the activity of only a small minority of fundamentalists;
after the trial, creation science became the flagship
of the movement. Before the Scopes trial, fundamentalists
had often been on the left of the political spectrum,
willing to work alongside liberals and socialists in the
slums of the industrializing northeastern cities. After
the Scopes trial, they swung to the far right, where they’ve
remained. That’s a typical example of what happens
when you attack an extreme movement, even if it’s
just a media attack; you’re likely to make it more
extreme, because it confirms their deep suspicion that
you really do want to wipe them out.
We’ve seen how extreme
interpretations of religion can bring about violence;
do you think religions and passionate faith in God can
bring about peace?
KA: Yes, I do. But it’s got to
be good religion. Religion isn’t necessarily good,
some of it can be very inept indeed. When I was writing
my book called The Great Transformation: The Beginning
of Our Religious Traditions (Anchor, 2007), I discovered,
rather to my surprise, that when the great world faiths
emerged--Confucianism and Taoism in China, Hinduism, Buddhism,
Jainism in India, monotheism in Israel, the catalyst that
changed the old pagan forms of faith was a revulsion from
the violence of their time. In place of this violence
all these major faiths insisted on the ethos of compassion
and the Golden Rule: Do not do to others what you would
not like them to do to you; that was first propounded
by Confucius, 500 years before Christ. Rabbi Hillel, an
older contemporary of Jesus, said the Golden Rule was
the essence of Judaism, that everything else was commentary
on it.
All these faiths also insisted that you could not confine
your compassion to your own group. You had to have what
one of the Chinese sages called jian’ai - concern
for everybody. Love your enemies, said Jesus. And the
Koran is a very pluralistic scripture, which insists that
all rightly guided religions come from God.
Unfortunately, not many religious people really want to
be compassionate. They often prefer to be right. In religions
around the world, there are people who prefer to feel
special, or evoke ancient myths of divine election, or
denigrate other people, because this inflates their ego.
But it is ego, said the great sages, that holds us back
from what we call “God” or “the Divine”
or “Brahman”, “nirvana,” or “the
Tao.”
Properly understood, religion can be a source of peace.
But when it is interpreted by egotism, greed or selfishness--the
very things religion is struggling to free us from--it
can become lethal.
It seems we have many of
the same “I’m right, you’re wrong”
intolerances in secular Western society, do we not?
KA: Yes, our political discourse is based
on the premise that there’s only one way. Look at
the way your presidential campaign is being run at the
moment, with all this vitriol. This is an inheritance
we got from the secular tradition of ancient Greece, where
democracy was highly combative. Our discourse in the media,
in academia, in courts of law are based on the “one
side is right, the other side is wrong” ethos. As
that Western ethos spreads throughout the world, it has
had an effect upon religion. We’re in a very intolerant
time. Do you remember Mr. Bush, after 9/11? He said “He
who is not with us is against us.” It was an unfortunate
remark at a moment of deep confusion, and a huge opportunity
was lost. At that point, there was a wave of sympathy
throughout the world for America. On September 11, there
were demonstrations of sympathy for America in Tehran.
All that good will, which could have been a tremendous
opportunity to bring something positive out of that catastrophe,
was squandered.
RD: What about jihad or
holy war? From where does the concept spring? Is it justified
by commonly revered interpretations of the Koran?
KA: There’s far more violence in
the Bible than there is in the Koran. Jihad, meaning holy
war against an external foe, is a very new development;
the first major Muslim thinker to put it at the center
of his ideology was the Pakistani ideologue Mawdudi in
the 1950s. He was aware this was a highly controversial
notion. The word “jihad” means “struggle,
effort.” Muslims are required to make an effort
on all fronts, social, political, economic and intellectual.
The effort is to put God’s will into practice in
a tragic world. And sometimes they will have to fight
a war of self defense, as did Mohammed in his war with
the leaders of Mecca, who were out to destroy the Muslim
community.
So the Koran preaches that it’s sometimes unfortunately
necessary to go to war in order to preserve decent values,
rather as the allies went to war against Hitler in the
1930s and ‘40s: very reluctantly, but because it
seemed the only way to contain this threat. That is the
teaching of the Koran. War is always an awesome evil.
But unfortunately, there are regions in the Muslim world
where violence has become endemic due to conflicts which
have been allowed to fester. This is particularly the
case in the Middle East. The Middle East has been bedeviled
by a long war between the Arabs and the Israelis which,
on both sides, has become a holy war. Originally, on both
sides, this was a perfectly ordinary, secular conflict,
a dispute about territory. But it went on and on, and
now there is religious Zionism in Israel and a sort of
resistance movement that has expressed itself in Islamic
terminology. But the Palestine Liberation Organization
(PLO) was originally a highly secular organization.
So when conflict becomes endemic in a region, it affects
everything we do. It affects our dreams, our fantasies,
our relationships, our aspirations, our ambitions--and
it affects religion. And when warfare has become chronic
in a region, such as the Middle East or Afghanistan or
Kashmir, religion gets sucked in, and it becomes part
of the problem.
Osama Bin Laden, for example, is fighting a war against
imperialism--not against religion, but against imperialism.
The major motive is Western invasion and occupation of
Muslim lands. This has accounted for the rise in jihad.
The trouble is, the more violence becomes chronic, the
more people lose faith in the ordinary political processes.
They’re then likely to take the kind of ghastly,
unlawful means that we’ve seen, that have shifted
warfare into a different zone. But the major impetus for
this has been political, and this originally political
problem has escalated and segued into a religious expression.
The United States has been
at war in Iraq for five years, longer than our involvement
in World War II, longer than the Viet Nam war. Do you
see this same danger occurring in the United States?
KA: Well, yes, except this war is quite
a long way away from the U.S. I know your soldiers are
getting killed, but far more Iraqis are getting killed,
which the U.S press rarely mentions. But your wars, since
the Civil War--which was the first massive, industrialized
war of the modern period, and which was a terrible trauma
for the United States--you haven’t had a war on
your own territory. You haven’t had soldiers in
your streets. You haven’t had foreign bulldozers
crushing houses, as they have in Gaza. You haven’t
had occupying armies. You may see the warfare going on,
but it’s a long way away.
What was shocking to the American people about September
11 was that it was on your own soil again. Now, it’s
different for us in the U.K., because we’ve basically
given up religion. Religion is virtually dead in England.
But we’re used to terrorism here. We had the Al
Qaeda attacks in London on July 7, 2005, and we had IRA
bombings for a long time. I was born in the last year
of the war, and my parents were used to bombs raining
down on their heads night after night. When I was growing-up
in Birmingham, my city looked like Ground Zero for my
entire childhood--endless bomb sites around and unexploded
bombs constantly being found.
America hasn’t had that yet. You had that one great
horror. But your wars are all a long way away. You haven’t
got soldiers in the streets and no electricity, as have
the people of Iraq. You haven’t got endless checkpoints,
as they do in Israel, where you wait for hours and hours
and you still aren’t allowed through, where women
are giving birth at these checkpoints, where you’ve
got tanks coming through your district. That’s the
sort of situation that will have an affect on everything,
including religion.
I view you are an ambassador
of sorts, because you have compassion for other religions,
both personally and in your scholarship, a compassion
that many lack. Some of your critics would have us view
the Koran and Islam very differently than the way you
do. What do you think we here in the United States will
need to do to heal the situation between our country and
Islamic peoples?
KA: Some of my critics are not representative
of the American people. I travel around your country a
lot, and I find a huge willingness to learn about Islam.
I was in California just a couple of weeks ago, and thousands
of people turned up to hear lectures about Islam and to
ask questions. When I was in the United States after September
11, I was very impressed by how willing many Americans
were to hearing tough things about their country’s
foreign policy. You couldn’t find a copy of the
Koran in the bookstores, because everybody was trying
to find out about what happened.
That’s one of the good things about America; you’re
very interested in what one can light-heartedly call self-improvement.
You love going to lectures and book signings. We don’t
do that in the U.K. We sort of arrogantly think we know
everything. But Americans want to learn, and they’re
not afraid to disagree with the country’s policies.
When I was lecturing in the States, often to packed audiences
across the country, if I was critical at all of the Bush
administration, I’d get a standing ovation in the
middle of my speech.
So you have enormous numbers of people in your country
who are trying to learn and want to be informed. The best
approach now it to try and increase that.
What you do need, however, is a better media. I think
that your news coverage is, quite frankly, appalling.
RD: How do you mean?
KA: In the British press, we have some
newspapers that are passionately supportive of Israel,
and others which are sympathetic to the Palestinians;
we have a spectrum of views and beliefs that is very much
reflected in our news. When, for example, the prime minister
appears on a television program or radio show in London,
he’s not just handed a mic and told to speak to
the people; he’s interrogated and grilled and given
a really tough time. That’s what democracy is.
Our newspapers, in the run up to the Iraq war, were highly
critical of the war; they lambasted Blair, and when he
appeared on television, he would be grilled by our interviewers.
You don’t quite have that somehow; it’s almost
as if the media is obligated to support the powers that
be. And God bless America; I hope He does. I love America.
I love my country, too; but I feel that my love for my
country is much more important than my loyalty to a particular
bunch of politicians who happen to be in power at the
moment.
I think you need to be more informed. I’ve heard
such catastrophic ignorance about the Muslim world in
the United States. I mean, people have actually asked
me--and these are not uneducated people, but university
professors--where the Palestinians come from. And I say,
“Well, Palestine.” And they look astonished.
They seem to think they marauded in off the desert or
something and occupied Jewish land.
And there is huge ignorance about Iraq or Iran; there’s
very little knowledge of those massively complex countries.
Or Pakistan, for example; the coverage you give to Pakistan
is so sparse, very few people in the United States realize
how secular Pakistan is. All your news of Pakistan has
to do with the Taliban and assassinations and things.
So you’re saying we
need to be better informed via the media?
KA: Yes; I wouldn’t have to do
all the work that I do in the United States if you had
a media that did this for you. In the run up to the Iraq
war, even our comedy programs were presenting the history
of our British involvement in Iraq in very clever skits
that were historically accurate. So that by the time we
entered the war, the republic was against it, and Tony
Blair took us to war against the express will of the majority
of the British people. But we were at least informed.
And you also said we’re
a very religious country compared to Great Britain…
KA: Yes, you’re one of the most
religious countries in the world--the second most religious
after India, I believe. Britain and Western Europe are
beginning to seem endearingly old-fashioned in their secularism.
The rest of the world is going with you; they’re
becoming more religious.
What’s happening in
Western Europe? Why is it becoming less religious?
KA: I think it’s largely because
of our horrific experience during the 20th Century, with
two world wars on our own territory, and atrocities in
which the churches were all implicated—that has
made us wary of religion. But Western Europe is becoming
distinctly peculiar, and the rest of the world is becoming
more religious.
If we want to keep that religion healthy, the trick is
to make sure that the environment in which religious movements
develop is healthy. The West has a very bad record of
supporting governments. Sadam Hussein was originally our
protégé to get cheap oil, and to fight our
battle with Iran. Instead of promoting these appalling
rulers who cause malaise and violence in a country, we
need to adopt more disinterested, long-term policies.
You said earlier that all
three monotheistic religions, in fact all religions, have
at their heart something like the Golden Rule. Do you
see a way that we can all use this rule to get closer
to compassion?
KA: I think we need to look at our traditions
very clearly and closely, because our traditions are huge
and complex. None of these traditions, whether it’s
Jewish, Christian or Muslim, are monolithic. All of them
have aggressive strands; the compassionate strand may
be the core, but it has often gotten overlayed by all
kinds of secondary issues, like doctrinal conformity or
sexual ethics.
You’re so good at self-improvement in the United
States, at attending lectures and reading groups, and
learning about different things. Use those strengths to
study scriptures and look at the centrality of compassion.
We need to demand that our pastors and religious leaders
give us more information and context, instead of sitting
passively in our pews, our synagogues and Mosques. Instead
of accepting what we’re given, we need to demand
to hear more about compassion and tolerance and appreciation
of other faiths and respect for the stranger, loving your
enemies. This is the best way to shift religion into a
better and healthier mode.
|
