Islam: A Short History | Karen Armstrong

this week on bug notes our guest is author Karen Armstrong she joins us to discuss her recent book Islam a short history Karen Armstrong can you remember the first time you were interested in writing about God at first I had no intention ever of being a writer in the first place for many many years I thought I'd finished with God after I left the convent I went through a long dark period when I really was weary of religion and and wanted nothing more to do with it I thought that period in my life was over and I fell into all this by accident more than anything else I had been a schoolteacher and I lost my teaching job because I'm an epileptic and I had already published a volume of autobiography which wasn't about God it was about me am i what I thought was lost quest for God the God I didn't find but I because on the strength of that I got off a television work in Britain in the field of religious broadcasting I was invited to make a documentary series on some Paul and I began all this in a very very skeptical spirit I went to Jerusalem and I worked with is an Israeli film company on st. Paul and I my my purpose was a bit debunking that none of this was obviously true I could you know there were all kinds of preferences and religion had done some awful things in the past that was my general line but something was beginning to happen to me subliminally because in Jerusalem I came in contact with other faiths really for the first time my own religious background had been essentially Roman Catholic and I found that I knew nothing whatever about Judaism I seen it simply as a prelude to Christianity or Islam but in Jerusalem way these three faiths jostle uneasily side-by-side you can't really avoid thinking about them and you begin to see the profound interconnection between the three religions and so I began really to I was curious and I started to read and my broadcasting career at that time involved perhaps interviewing Jews and Muslims and it started to get to me I began to see that there was much more to monotheism to the idea of God that then I'd thought despite my religious background and when I began to research my history of God it was a long period of research that lasted for about three or four years I began still began in this skeptical spirit I mean I thought that I was going to find that over the centuries Jews Christians and Muslims had adjusted the idea of God to suit their particular needs and in a way I did found that but I found it a lot more and a lot deeper things are astonishing things things that I'd never thought about and I began to see that there was a lot in these monotheistic traditions that were really speaking to me that I could really relate to and in the course of writing and I'm studying therefore I came back to a sense of the divine and so I I owe great debt of gratitude to these other religions which also gave me back a sense of what my own tradition the tradition I had been born into had been trying to do at its best where are you at this stage in your life well I usually describe myself perhaps flippantly as a freelance monotheists I I draw sustenance from all three of the faiths of Abraham I can't see any one of them as having the monopoly of truth any one of them as superior to any of the others I has its own particular genius and each its own particular pitfalls and Achilles heels but recently I've just written a short life of the Buddha and I've been enthralled by what he has to say about spirituality about the ultimate about compassion and about the the necessary loss of ego before you can encounter the divine and I that all the great traditions are in my view saying the same way much the same thing coming despite their service differences the religious experience of humanity has been remarkably unanimous and that I find very endorsing because instead of seeing your own tradition as one lonely little quest idiosyncratically crying in the darkness you can see it as part of a giant human search for meaning and value in a flawed and tragic world I'm havin terrain Denny where as yet I feel I'm still searching and yet perhaps that's one of the things I learnt from my study of the divine is that you of course you there is no last word about God once you say well now I've arrived now I I don't need to think about anything else then you've really lost the plot because the divine or the ultimate is is infinite and so I'm I've moved a long way but I feel I'm still moving we asked you here to talk about this little book Islam but as you know we can also talk to you about this book a big book called the battle for God which has been out this year and you just mentioned another book a small book for penguin I guess penguin it's what part of the penguin live series where do you live I live in London there all your life no I I grew up in the Midlands Worcestershire and then moved into Birmingham and I was educated in a convent school in Birmingham how many Catholics are there in Great Britain I'm not sure but certainly we were very conscious of being a minority and Catholicism is extremely unbrushed with all its smells and bells and extravagances and gestures you know regarded is really pretty bad taste by the British so it's a thing I often share with Jews that you never really feel quite English growing up as a Catholic at least in in the 1950s in Britain you were very we kept very much to ourselves we were had our own schools we didn't mix much socially we weren't encouraged in those days even to attend other people's religious services so you did it was a sort of little tight subculture we looked at what we call the non Catholic world with sort of aversion it was a rather it was a ghetto kind of experience much of our education religious education was geared up to answering all the hostile questions that we were certain were going to a sailor sweat as soon as we left the gates of our convent schools and went into universities that and learning answers about why we go to confession or why believe in the infallibility of the Pope but of course I didn't didn't go to university at that point I I went into a confidence instead what year did you go into the cognate 1962 hardest day seven years I went in the ludicrously young age of 17 and left in 1969 having entirely missed the 1960s I heard my first Beatles record in 1970 real close to we it was not a cloistered order it was a teaching order but in those days this is before the reforms of the Second Vatican Council had taken effect we were we were close that while we were training so that we never read the newspapers I never heard of Vietnam for example when I left the the convent in the found in Oxford where I was at the university everybody was marching and protesting about this place I've never heard of so it was it was a strange experience coming out into a totally transformed world a bit like the story of Rip Van Winkle who goes to sleep for a hundred years and wakes up and find society transformed around him and that made the process of leaving the religious life which had done with great regret much harder I hadn't left out of my convent thinking great now I can sort of fall in love and wear beautiful clothes and earn lots of money and travel I left with great sorrow I had really wanted to be a nun and I was knew I would be a bad one I just didn't have very few people can live a life of complete chastity forever of poverty never never owning anything and obedience always doing somebody else's will and remain mature and hope and there were a few nuns in there who really had done that and they were superb human beings and they remained an impersonal inspiration to me but I knew I wasn't going to be one of them I was going to be one of those other nuns that I saw taking back little satisfactions here and there you've written quite a few books how many of the books you've written I counted 11 or so I suppose it is there's some more that have been published not in this country but only in in the UK how many have been published in this country I'm not sure to be honest I think I'm probably about eight or nine and they are still available one of them is not publishers have asked if they can do it and I haven't wanted to do it it's the sequel to my first book my first book was an autobiographical account of my life in the convent the sequel to that which I called beginning the world was about the six years after leaving the conference which was with the worst and lowest point of my life I existed at that time in a state of pure grief and I was suicidal and utterly miserable but I don't think I wrote about it very well I think I wrote about it far too closely on close to the experience and so I it's not a good book in my view and I haven't wanted republished which one of your books has sold the most history of God any idea how many oh I'm not sure I'm not sure I think I think it must be about half a million copies but it's also been translated into thirty other languages so I've no idea out of all that to be honest I have agents who check those sales figures with absolutely eagle eyes but I'm usually immersed in the next project the next book you can easily as a writer and I've noticed people getting obsessive about figures and whether their books are in the bookshop bookstores and you know why it hasn't sold here and white and I think you're best leaving that alone or there are other people who love dealing with that stuff and a good at it and I I personally don't they but I think that the figures have been remarkable and it was a surprise to us because I couldn't find a publisher in Britain when I first proposed the idea and the first publisher in the United States to see it turned it down so its success has been a delight to me but a a surprise to if you go to the World Book they'll show you that there are six billion people in the world that there are two billion Christians of which a little over just a tiny bit over a billion are Catholics Roman Catholics that more than Roman Catholics are about a billion one are Islamic about 700 million are Hindus I'm doing this for a reason to ask you why why would the and that this just came out in and noticed from the Catholic Church where they said that they were the true church yeah again stated that why is that necessary to say something like that what's behind the motive on that yeah I think I think III read that statement and I felt only sadness because I think one of the great gifts of the twentieth century was the discovery of the depth of other people's traditions and there are wonderful movements are going on whereby people in faith communities that were normally used to be it at odds with one another that where people are reaching out and beginning to see the profundity of other people that and learning from other people not leaving their own traditions necessarily but drawing nourishment from more than one more Christians I believe read Martin Buber than Jews and Jews read Paul Tillich and Harvey Cox now I like this I've found faith my faith endorsed by knowing that millions of other human beings are doing the same and having the same ideas and that tells me something very profound and important about our humanity that these are the questions these are the kind of solutions we reach for when we're looking for significance in a dark and sorrowful world full of pain and I found the this pluralism this growing pluralism endorsing and helpful as I as I've tried to say but other people find it profoundly threatening I didn't mention you know we go through the numbers again they're a million Roman Catholics a million Islamics 700 million Hindus 15 million Jews only 15 million Jews how is it that 15 million Jews can be have have so much dialogue over the years about being Jewish what is that about well of course if the Jews have had a very tragic history and especially the last thousand years in Europe since the time of the Crusades Jews have been threatened with you know their very existence has been threatened therefore perhaps Jews are thrown up more than most of us against those ultimate questions why am I here what is there a god what why be Jewish when it brings so much suffering and persecution do you know why and from all your study that the Jews have been so persecuted what's the reason behind it it's very it's complicated and it's not Universal in that Jews would not persecute it in the same way in the Islamic world at all the this was a European disease and I think it has more to had more to do with the embattled European identity Europe unlike the Greek Orthodox world of Byzantium fell to the barbarians the Roman Empire fell civilization virtually came to a halt for hundreds of years and Europe entered a period that's got known as the Dark Ages but it was a it was a struggle and people were starving couldn't farm the land adequately and it was sort of regarded as a pagan backwater in at the time of the Crusades we began to make our comeback on the international scene with the Crusades with the first cooperative act of the new Europe as she struggled back onto the world stage and eventually Europe and later the United States overtook the other core cultures this other civilizations and this has been and this is an unparalleled phenomenon for an out-group to overtake so spectacularly so in the process I think there was great strain Europe had to build a new identity we felt inferior and we hate we didn't just hate Jews we hated everybody everybody else we hated Muslims we hated Jews we hated the Greek Orthodox Christians of Byzantium who looked down on us as though we were thugs we were we were trying to forge a new Christian identity and that often meant using other people as a foil to show us what we were not and very often the fantasies that we evolved about both Jews and Muslims reflected buried worries about our own identity in our own behavior was at the time of the Crusades for example when Christians were fighting their own brutal holy wars in the Middle East against Islam that wet Christian scholars monk scholars in Europe had it declared Islam to be an essentially violent faith that they was a projecting that worries about their own behavior which was hard to square with the compassionate ethic of the gospel with putting it onto Muslims with Jews I think those strange myths that grew up about how Jews would kill little children at Passover and use their blood to make Matt Soze this is a really bizarre fantasy and shows the disturbance in the European psyche and that such an obit an extraordinary idea should take such deep fold but I think this Jew as this image of the Jew as the child Slayer shows an almost eatable fear of the parent face an absolutely visceral fear of the faith from which Christianity was born and it also perhaps even reflects but buried worries about the Eucharist and so these are not rational fears and later Hitler was able in his secular crusade to use the all these weird folk terrifying awful hag ridden folk myths to fuel his Nazi Holocaust so it's nothing to do with Jews I mean they they would just have the misfortune to be living in Europe and what we found it we found it in Europe almost impossible to live side by side with people of other religions as the crusades showed and later you know even catholics and protestants started fighting one another and it was what for all these reasons this cycle of religious violence that your founding fathers at the period of the Enlightenment separated church and state and enlightenment philosophy was an attempt to get beyond all this darkness of the past and enters we thought a new period of light and reason this small 200 page book published by the modern library called Islam want to ask you some about this how did it come about because there's a whole series of new small books yes it seems to be the thing and they're lovely to write you know because it says they're not too burdensome and and it gives you a chance to wreath look at something that you're you know well because I've studied Islam now for years but right as an extended essay upon it and I think when I was asked I was I was approached by a British publisher with whom I'd worked for some time and asked if I'd like to do this in this series and it seemed to me a very good idea because I do think we need to know more about Islam in the West it's a religion about we still haven't overcome our medieval terror of it yet we haven't we haven't done a revisionist look at Islam yet and people want to know about it actually in the West they do but they're not necessarily going to go and look at some huge three-volume Magisterial tome about even those work about Islam that's too daunting this I hope and my intention was this will give you a taste of some of the bare facts of what happened what the truths are how Islam evolved what are its various moods and so that and give people the end a list of what they can read if they if they're interested in finding out more one of the great benefits to someone who knew not much is you have dates and when things happen you have definition of terms and people can we start with the word Islam hmm where is it what's it mean it means surrender Islam it requires human beings men and women to make an existential surrender their entire being to Allah to God and to give up the posturing and prancing ego that's always calling attention to itself a Muslim is a man or a woman who has made that surrender of his being and the first thing one of the first things that Muhammad's the Prophet asked his followers to do when they began to convert to Islam in Mecca in the early 7th century was to prostrate themselves in prayer several times a day facing at that point Jerusalem because they were turning away from their pagan traditions in Mecca and reaching out to the god of the Christians and Jews whom they were now going to worship but it was hard for Bedouin Arabs who didn't believe in kingship and courts to grovel on the ground like a slave they didn't do that but the eye that characteristic prostration of Muslim prayer is designed I think to teach Muslims at a level deeper than the rational about the abandonment of what I call that posturing ego what or what is Muslim mean Muslim it means it's simply a Mersenne who makes Islam a person who makes that surrender to God it comes from the same root as Islam again numbers are six million Muslims in the United States yes and about 6 million Jews in the United States yes and there's this someone told me that soon they were going to get larger why do we hear so much more about Judaism in the United States and Islam well uh it's because uh Jews because of their tragic history of living often in a hostile environment in Europe have learned to organize very well as a community as a minority there they are the world experts that are living in minority as a minority and this is new to Muslims I know in London that at the time of the salman rushdie crisis concerned muslims asked the Jewish community in Britain to help them to deal with this kind of thing because and you have to understand that Muslims in this country as in Britain have come from all they're not in they're not a homogenous group they've come from all over the Muslim world from India and Pakistan as well as the Middle East from you know from Southeast Asia from Central Asia from Turkey and all the people have their own ethnic customs their own versions of Islam and they asked that they're new in the very difficult art of living as a minority organizing making their needs felt getting a lobby together you know there's this is this is something that they are that they that they are conscious I think many are conscious that they need to learn and to expand and they are as I say often turning to the Jews for help do Muslims have believed in a her after oh yes yes they do and they have that yes they believe that there will be a paradise and a Hell in the Last Judgement let me ask you about all word about Jews do they believe my hair after mmm Judaism it's in a kind of optional irony that it's not so important and personally myself I think that the the afterlife is a bit of a religious red herring and it if you gear your entire life in and your ethical behavior entirely towards getting a reward in the afterlife that's no more a religious activity than paying in your annual installments into your retirement annuity to secure yourself a comfortable life retirement in the Hereafter it's it's it's the religion supposed to be about the loss of the ego not ensuring its ultimate survival in optimum conditions so in most most of the world religions it's a bit of a you know in Buddhism for example it's a mystery we don't know this is what we have even some pool said I have not seen ear has not heard nor has it entered into the heart of man what what what is coming to us can't remember the numbers on Buddhism but it's not it's smaller than Hindus what's the difference between being a Buddhist and being a Muslim oh well being being a Buddhist being a man with Jews Christians and Muslims have to share the same tradition they share the same Abrahamic tradition one God one God a divine being a divine a one single deity supernatural deity Buddhists however find that idea of God a bit limiting about that idea of the divine a bit limiting because it's very and very often they they're putting their finger on something very often when when Jews Christians all Muslim some talk about God they can sometimes make him a bit like us just like one of ourselves writ large with likes and dislikes similar to our own and sometimes this God has been used to bad affect the Crusaders went into battle crying God wills it when they murdered Jews and Muslims obviously God desired no such thing but the Crusaders were projecting their own loathing and of these rival faiths on to a deity that they'd created in their own image and likeness now Muslims are weary of that kind of behavior so they prefer to say very that we that the ultimate the ultimate reality wishes Nirvana nirvana is it cannot conceive it you cannot talk about it you can only get intimations of it and they are far less interested than Christians are in doctrines they're not interested in believing things or in theology it's a question of religious practice really the Buddha you can say founded a method a method of reaching the divine have you been to Mecca no nobody can go to Mecca unless your your you are you are a Muslim how do you prove you're a Muslim well I suppose you you it's I don't think you have I'm not don't think you have to actually provide papers or anything but I certainly wouldn't obtrude myself on on to a holy city again somebody's will I mean people who Europeans did do this in the past they dressed up as Muslims and join the Haj as observers I think that's not very good behavior when is the Hajj its takes place in the month of the Hajj it's one in one month every year and because the Muslims have a lunar cycle their years are different so the year gets earlier and earlier and earlier or later and later each year so it's it's it's a sort of moveable month it's a month when Muslims will get if they can and if their their circumstances permit it they will gather in Mecca to meet go through these extraordinary its wrought rites which predate Islam which predate the Prophet Muhammad but which he reinterpreted and gave them a monotheistic significance but it is the peak experience of a Muslims spiritual life Muhammad lives you said in the seventh century yes how important is he now today to a Muslim very important who was he he was manure was a genius he was a merchant of Mecca concerned merchants of Mecca where is mattre it's in what we now call Saudi Arabia in the Arabian Hejaz how big a place is it well it's pretty big now but in in in Muhammad's time it would have been obviously a much much smaller place but what it had was this shrine this ancient granite cube which was very very ancient in Muhammad's time no one knew who where it had come from but it was regarded it was the most important shrine in Arabia and the twin on a 20 mile radius from Mecca this was a sanctuary and all violence was forbidden there and this sanctuary enabled them was the the Arabs to gather in Mecca and trade because they were free in because of the ban on violence from the laws of vendetta and counter Vendetta which were decimating the entire Arabian Peninsula this is not because the Arabs had an inherent tendency to violence but because they arrived here in those days long before the discovery of oil was a very desperate place it was you can see that arraign there's not hardly anything growing there were very very very few resources and everybody was in competition for them and that meant that a tribe was often fighting for survival but Mecca had this had this that this sanctuary and PITA they've developed a market economy the market economy meant that the old tribal values were decaying people were getting built getting rich quick there was a general stampede for wealth and new capitalism and the old tribal values of solidarity and concern for the poor a weaker members of the tribe were disappearing and there was a spiritual malaise right the way through Arabia people were aware that their circumstances were changing and the old paganism wasn't working for them anymore they knew about Judaism and Christianity they felt that they were they knew that they were more advanced religions but the Christians whom they met used to jeer at them and say that they've been left out at the divine plan because God had never sent them a profit and they hadn't got any scriptures themselves God hadn't bothered about the Arabs and so there was a feeling of inferiority and then Mohammed who was very very deeply concerned about this spiritual crisis both in Mecca and in Arabia as a hoe began to have extraordinary religious experiences and from he he composed or believed he had the God had spoken through him a new Arabic scripture how how do you know that this happened and why did people believing the how do we know we know more about Muhammad's than we know about the founder of any other faith having just written a life of the Buddha I know how little we know because Buddha was living in 500 BC where there when there's no historical records know there was writing was not yet known in the subcontinent we're not even sure what century the Buddha lived in but Mohammed is a lot lot late a lot lot later than Jesus even and there was and the first biographers who make we're really trying to write history in our sense quoting their sources and they don't whitewash the Prophet they don't make it they don't this is not hagiography they're not writing a highly idealized portrait they show him warts and all he's a very human figure how long did he live he started having his revelations in when he was forty years old and he lived another 23 years so he was in his early sixties when he died when when you go to Jerusalem and you wanted to what you were going to ask me why did people believe him yeah they believed him because it worked and this is something that religion Islam gave them a sense of the ultimate meaning and value of life when they practiced it it's a simple faith it doesn't have a huge theological structure in fact the Quran is rather sort of dismissive of theological speculate which it big is the Quran mmm it's a it's much smaller than the Bible have you read it of course of course I've read it but it's important to note too that it's called Quran which means recitation it was meant to be listened to it's recited aloud as indeed was the Christian Bible until modern printing made it possible for everybody's wearing their own coffee and modern literacy enabled people to read it themselves why do I see it spelled two ways because because they of course in in Arabic the there's an entirely different calligraphy and so people have either write it it's cooler on and people sometimes write spelt that Kor a an or Qur aan who wrote it oh well the Prophet Muhammad that Muslims would say that the Prophet but it was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad who spoke these words as was common in a preliterate society as it has same happened with the Buddhist scriptures people had better memories than they than we do we are losing our memories with all our books and electronic aids they learnt it by heart and they would and they would listen to it the beauty of the Quran which does not come out in translation was one of the great reasons why the scripture took effect it's extremely beautiful in Arabic I remember the first time I became aware of this I was in those far-off days when I was filming in Israel with an Israeli film company and I had a Palestinian taxi driver who they've Israeli sent me out back to my hotel through the West Bank with this taxi driver picked up some of his mates on the way home and they were all highly secular young men drinking beer they never went near the mosque and suddenly the Quran came on the car radio now if I'd been driving around secular godless London with a bunch of beer drinking news and the New Testament had come on they have to say that people would have lunged for the off button but these young men were transfixed and they kept try - very very excitedly trying to translate it for me because it's very very dense the poetry is very very dense and the meaning is triple layered sometimes and they were saying it's so it's current is so beautiful I wish you could understand it and I thought this is powerful stuff still it's speaking directly to the heart and of course the pub you can see the Prophet Muhammad as a poet as well as a prophet and very frequently the most frequently perhaps religious people express themselves in terms of art rather than in logical discourse I started to ask you about the juror ISM as you know you go to Jerusalem you have the Western Wall the Wailing Wall and right up above it's the Temple Mount it's so close how did that come about and what's the story of when Muhammad left earth oh yeah the night the Night Journey this is there is a story told about the Prophet Muhammad it was first told about a hundred years after his death that he had a vision and it some of the Muslim sources are very clear that this was a vision like a dream experience or like a the rapture of a mystic not a sort of a flight where he sort of flew physically like an astronaut through the sky his wife said that he did not leave his bed the entire tuck there for the entire length of the Night Journey another tradition says that at the beginning of his journey he turned and knocked off from his side to taste a glass of water from the side of by his bedside and when he returned it was just hitting the floor so the Muslim sources are clear that this was a vision and I think it's a very very interesting one he the Prophet was working alone it was a monotheists on his own with no help from any other tradition working out problems of monotheism that Jews and Christians had struggled with but in community with scriptures to help them and he was doing it by himself I think the story of him coming to Jerusalem shows his yearning which is was very is very very strongly expressed in the Quran to bring the Arabs from far-off Arabia into the heart of the monotheistic family when Muhammad arrives on the Temple Mount he is greeted by all the great prophets of the past who welcomed him into their midst as the newcomer physically there there are in the head this is that this is I say is a great vision it's all vision well some Muslims today who've got the Western bug of literalism would now interpret this literally but as I tried to indicate the sources make it clear that this is a vision which doesn't necessarily mean it's not true but this is a vision it's telling us something about the Muslim spirit and this Ilkka this this night journey becomes a sort of archetypal motif in islamic spirituality so weak so in his vision he is greeted by all the great prophets of the past who recognized him as one of themselves and he preaches to them and then he begins like a Jewish throne mystic Jews had visions where they would ascend through the seven heavens and arrive at the throne of God at school throne mysticism and they didn't really think they were flying through seven hands this was an effete of imagination of feet of an interior journey descent into the depths of the self it's the the night journey is very similar to throne mysticism he goes up through the seven heavens and at each one in each one he meets the prophets of the past he meets he meets and talks to Moses and to Aaron and to Jesus and to Enoch and finally at the threshold of the divine sphere is Abraham the father of all three faiths and so it is also a pluralistic vision which expresses a strong pluralism in the Quran that the Prophet did not believe he had come to found a new religion called Islam that was the one true faith and that cancelled out the others time and time again the Koran points out that Mohammed has not been sent to cancel out the teachings of past prophets like Moses or Jesus but he's come to give the same message to the Arabs who hadn't had a prophet before and so so that that that message is Muhammad never asked Jews and Christians to convert to Islam because they had their own authentic revelations you pronounce a Caliphate a caliphate yes Kenneth what is that well Muslims then founded a great Empire and like they they then needed a ruler so a caliph is simply the representative representative of the Prophet he was the person who would be as it were the delegate or the the standing for the Prophet later he as Persian ideas took hold he became seen as the representative of God rather on the line of the old middle-eastern monarchies is it the same as the Pope no no it isn't because the Pope is in charge it has only a tiny little state where's the belief is simply a temporal ruler is simply like the king always very care of today no the Caliph at the Abbasid Caliphate was destroyed by the Mongols and it had already become as I show in my book a dead letter because it was impossible in those days before modern communications and modern methods of police to hold an empire of that magnitude it stretched from the Himalayas and to the Pyrenees as a sort of corporate unity one of the things you noticed when you go through your chronology time chronology which goes on for a lot of pages yeah caliphate assassinated so-and-so murdered assassinated assassinate assassinated assassinated now what is all that what you know if you look back at history and when Dan pipes is your number of last year he said that a hundred and sixty nine million people were killed by other humor in the twentieth century alone if this religion is if there is a God and there is why what's going on well I think you're talking particularly about the early years of Islam the period of what is though the four caliphs known as the rashidun the righteous ones who only only I think only one of whom died in his bed one of them was killed by a prisoner of war a persian prisoner of war one was killed in a mutiny of Arab soldiers one was killed by a fan a Muslim fanatic who'd separated himself from the rest of the community feeling that they weren't pious enough for him now the thing about we know that of course religion makes huge demands on people and all the religions fall down the monotheists have always yeah you know even though their religions are about love and compassion they've all had periods of violence the biblical stories are filled with violence to the Muslims however asked themselves precisely this question they saw their caliphs that beloved companions of the Prophet his closest friends who were all they may not have been the best of rulers but they were all devout men those first four and they asked themselves precisely what you've just asked me what's going on and whereas other traditions tend to so Muslims have always looked closely at history to discern the divine hand in history and because of the trauma of those early years and those assassinations and the disgrace of visas there Sassa nations fade muslims began to develop islam develop new forms of muslim law developed forms of muslim piety and constantly one of the themes of the book one at one of the themes that i discovered and found interesting was how frequently a political catastrophe gazing at a political catastrophe gave muslims impetus to make a new religious improvement to try and counteract this terrible tendency we have as human beings to maim and kill each other often in you know for a high idea we all have it and the religions at their best at their best you always have to add those three little words because not all religion is good religion is like any other human activity and it can be gravely abused but religions are in part designed to try to counter this cruel cruelty we have whereby we human beings need to kill our own kind let me ask you a question that may not be answerable if all the religions of the world that you studied which one did you find people that believed the strongest well when you say belief do you mean accepting the tenets of the faith you know as we said we're talking about the numbers of billion Roman Catholics the billion Muslims in the world we vets I don't know what it is seven billion Protestants in the United States who which of these faced have the strongest where people believe I mean you know they often say that you know I don't know what the percentage is a small percentage of Catholics go to church even though they say the Roman Catholic and you know what Europeans don't go to church he don't I mean in Britain only 6% of the population attend a religious service on a regular basis and I same with the Catholics all over the Europe yep I think in Europe I think we've had a very different experience of the 20th century from Americans and I think that that has led to people asking very hard questions about faith which in the religious establishments are not always addressing it's sufficiently how do you believe in all wise all compassionate God after Auschwitz it's a whole powerful God it's very you know these questions we gaze into the darkness of history as the Muslims did after with those awful assassinations and we then search our hearts for some significance because we're meaning seeking creatures I think the religions today to come to your point are all in one way in another in crisis but our world is changing just so quickly we've developed we developed in the West that was what my book battle for God was about we've developed in the West an entirely new society kind of society a new kind of civilization one unprecedented in world history and that has transformed the world our scientific technology means that we can look at the world from outer space we have which our perspective has changed massively we can we have greater mobility great apparently greater power over us over our material circumstances than any other human beings have ever had before and yet the eternal questions remain but sometimes the older traditions don't speak to these new conditions in the same way so all the faith's I think are in a process or should be in a process of delving into their traditions and trying to make them speak to these totally these circumstances which the founders of faith could not have envisaged but this has always been the case because religion has never been static we cannot believe in God in the same way as the Christians at the time in the time of Jesus or Jews as that in the time of Moses we can't we ask where - our world is two different and therefore if the religions are to survive are to survive they must be made to address these Nusa and this is a struggle this is a hard struggle what have you learned since you know how many years even writing books I wrote my first book in 1981 what have you learned about Americans since you've written books about God oh I've learned how you're very keen on saying you're a secular country and of course you are but you're also very very religious and now you see in Britain we have a rather simplistic start a stereotyped view of Americans as all fundamentalist basically religious Christianity for example is all fundamentalist and half clapping and sort of exorcism speaking in tongues or very hardline and conservative that was the view I had of America until I published history of God and started traveling around the can and talking to Americans and I have been so impressed by the when I go to a bookstore or go to a conference and then large numbers of people who come with really profound searching questions and they won't take a facile answer there's something very exciting I think happening in religious terms in the United States it's a great joy to me to come here to talk theology I've just come to you from a meeting where I meet I've meet friends colleagues who love talking about Jews Christians was all talking about religion now in the UK everyone my friends will think I'm mad to be one of my luck friends said recently when she heard about written this little book on Islam Oh Karan when you're going to write something interesting religion is a sort it sort of passe it's sort of a dead letter here it's vital alive and people are searching and I love coming here for that reason it gives I think it is interesting of course they've not got any good answers yet but then of course as I said to you earlier these that the answers are not generally available you mean we're in a we live in a world where we expect instant answers you know you log in God on your computer and up comes a whole lot of information but the religious quest isn't like that it means a lot of struggle a lot of searching but I think there's a lot of open-mindedness and and sincere seeking going on in America what in history that you study do you not believe what do I not believe in other words all the things that we've heard over our lives about what God is and in the different churches and all I mean take your own Roman are you no longer a Roman town no I say I usually called myself freelance monotheists these days but what about the Roman Catholic Church did you used to believe that you just threw why is that oh I don't I don't believe in a anybody telling other people what to believe that the the the whole idea of saying infallible papacy for example this is something Korea the availability the Pope was made of Liggett and obligatory belief for Catholics in 1870 it was about the same time that Protestants in the United States were involving a belief in the infallibility of Scripture that people were seeking certainty in the changing world of modernity why did they create an infallible Pope because because modernity that our modern society that I spoke of was opening out questions that's what modernity does it he opens out huge questions leaves them unanswered and goes on to the next month huge confusion old ideas torn down nothing to take its place and a lot of people find this on frightening and so long to find a focus that they can absolutely believe in I think the quest for absolute certainty is one of the things I was enthralled by what I'd studied his for history of God was to find that the best monotheists best Jews Christians and Muslims all said there can be no human certainty about the divine that none of our doctrines can be more than provisional do you have a sense of whether people when they read a lot more I mean a lot of people just accept their faith and born into a family and never even question it but do people believe more or less about the religion the more they read oh I think I it what it depends entirely on the individual I think a lot of people in Europe but the more they read the more they think religion is rubbish and I'm not sure that this is a particularly bad thing because atheism historically has always been the denial of a particular conception of the divine or the sacred not a denial a blanket denial of the sacred per se Jews Christians and Muslims were all called atheists in an early stage of their history by their pagan contemporaries not because they didn't believe in God because obviously they did but because their ideas about the divine were so different that they seemed blasphemous to most of their pagan neighbors and I think that sometimes people have been fed very bad inadequate lazy field I've mentioned you know the problem of Auschwitz where any of his L said that that God that the god of Western classical theism died in Auschwitz that God died and so to say in a facile way oh well God knew what he was doing and this this isn't good enough I think we should theology should be like poetry we should a poem is hard work to write you have to wait for it for a long time it's not something that just you just reel off automatically and so I think a quite a lot at the time when people just here read facile answers then they reject the whole thing because it's because it's bad always other people read and and read about other tradition this week on book notes our guest is author Karen Armstrong she joins us to discuss a recent book Islam a short history Karen Armstrong can you remember the first time you were interested in writing about God at first I had no intention ever of being a writer in the first place for many many years I thought I'd finished with God after I left the convent I went through a long dark period when I really was weary of religion and and wanted nothing more to do with it I thought that period in my life was over and I fell into all this by accident more than anything else I had been a schoolteacher and I lost my teaching job because I'm an epileptic and I had already published a volume of autobiography which wasn't about God it was about me am i what I thought was lost quest for God the God I didn't find but I because on the strength of that I got offered television work in

Channel: Muslim-Americans on C-Span - Unofficial

Views: 6,071

Rating: 4.7551022 out of 5

Keywords: Islam: A Short History, islam, Karen Armstrong, muslim, at the Modern Library in New York., religious history of islam, Islam: A Short History (Modern Library Chronicles)

Id: YnXjta5kV0k

Length: 57min 56sec (3476 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 26 2018