"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.