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Karen Armstrong's Islam, a Short History

Karen Armstrong's Islam, A Short History


Karen Armstrong is a former nun in the order of The Society of the Holy Child Jesus. As she found her life in the convent too restrictive in the spiritual sense (a fact covered in her 1982 Through the Narrow Gate), she set her quest for God on an independent route, writing books on the Christian, Judaic and Muslim religions: The Gospel According to Woman: Christianity's Creation of the Sex War in the West (1986), A History of God (1993), In the Beginning: A New Interpretation of the Genesis (1996), Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths (1996), The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (2000). The common trait of all these books is the author's attempt to understand these religions beyond cultural constraints and stereotypes. It is in this vein that we should understand her Islam, A Short History, written in 2000.

Islam, A Short History is Armstrong's condensed, but very informative account of Muslim history beginning with Muhammad's revelation in 610 AD and ending in the present day. The main historical moments covered in the book are: seventh century leaders, the two fitnahs, and the role of the Umayyads therein; the Sunnis, the Shiits and the Sufis and their respective religious beliefs; the religious and political tensions of the eighth and ninth centuries which led to the fall of the caliphate; in Armstrong's opinion, the fourteenth century crusades were ultimately conducive to the formation and settling of the Ottoman Empire. In her analysis of contemporary Islam world, Armstrong compares Christianity and Islamism and points out that Islamic fundamentalism is essentially undistinguishable from Christian fundamentalism. According to Armstrong, fundamentalism is "a global fact that has surfaced in every major faith in response to the problems of our modernity" .
One of the original points that Armstrong makes in her book is the observation of the separation between religion and faith in many religious traditions. Islam, in her opinion, distinguishes itself from all of these traditions through the grounding of religion in history, from the very beginning:

In Islam, Muslims have looked for God in history. Their sacred scripture, the Koran, gave them a historical mission. Their chief duty was to create a just community in which all members, even the most weak and vulnerable, were treated with absolute respect. The experience of building such a society and living in it would give them intimations of the divine, because they would be living in accordance with God's will. A Muslim had to redeem history, and that meant that state affairs were not a distraction from spirituality but the stuff of religion itself The political wellbeing of the Muslim community was a matter of supreme importance. Like any religious ideal, it was almost impossibly difficult to implement in the flawed and tragic conditions of history, but after each failure Muslims had to get up and begin again.

Thus, Muslim religious history and acts of faith are intimately connected to political events, they were articulated in response, or as a reaction to external geo-political factors. In this light, Armstrong re-evaluates the contemporary misconceptions of Islamic fundamentalism, suggesting that many of the religious expressions of the Muslim have to be grounded in the discovery of oil, as well as in the Muslim world's economic stagnation and its socio-economic anachronism with respect to the modern Occidental world.

One of the main arguments that Armstrong is attempting to put forward in her book is that the Western perception of the Islam world and religion was much distorted by interpretations lacking the fundaments of Muslim history and culture. In this book, she takes the task to correct these misinterpretations, mainly arguing that any historical, social or political account of the Islamic world should be understood in terms of an incessant quest for God. To the Western world, secularized as it is, between a public non-religious life and a private quest for divinity, any interference of the religious in the public sphere might seem problematic. However, Armstrong believes that the contemporary clashes between the West and the East should be understood from this vantage point. In her opinion, the intensification of fundamentalism in the late twentieth century is directly proportional to the rapid advances in modernization in the Occident. Her solution to this seemingly insoluble problem is that once the pressure of adapting to Western modern standards is lifted from the Muslim world, these fundamentalist expressions will be much diminished.

Armstrong's deconstruction of the clichés and stereotypes associated with Muslim believers is one of the foremost achievements of the book. For instance, the prejudice about Islam's enslavement and oppression of women is quickly disparaged by pointing to the example of Muhammad who passed out laws to prevent the aggressive treatment of women as early as the seventh century. In other respects, the Koran also proved more "enlightened" than Christianity, granting women the right to divorce and the possibility to inherit long before the Christian world did. Armstrong tackles with the problematic issue of the Jihad with much wisdom and open-mindedness: she finds that for the Muslim, holy war is acceptable only in case of defense, but never as an imposition on other religions.
Her main point that, ultimately, it is not inherent features of one religion or the other that dictate or favor fundamentalism but rather whole societies response to historical moments of crisis – such as the crisis of modernity and globalization which Christians, Jews and Muslims experience alike today – that sets the ground for extremist actions. As she points out, jihad, originally means "struggle" or "effort" – man's struggle to find God (much like the Christian struggle of Jacob with the angel):

Social justice was...the crucial virtue of Islam. Muslims were commanded as their first duty to build a community (ummah) characterized by practical compassion, in which there was a fair distribution of wealth. This was far more important than any doctrinal teaching about God. In fact the Quran has a negative view of theological speculation, which it calls zannah, self-indulgent whimsy about ineffable matters that nobody can ascertain one way or the other. It seemed pointless to argue about such abstruse dogmas; far more crucial was the effort (jihad) to live in the way that God had intended for human beings. The political and social welfare of the ummah would have sacramental value for Muslims. If the ummah prospered, it was a sign that Muslims were living according to God's will, and the experience of living in a truly islamic community, which made this existential surrender to the divine, would give Muslims intimations of sacred transcendence. Consequently, they would be affected as profoundly by any misfortune or humiliation suffered by the ummah as Christians by the spectacle of somebody blasphemously trampling on the Bible or ripping the Eucharistic host apart.

In this analysis, one of Armstrong's chief merits is to foreground the gap between idealized images of religions and their respective historical backgrounds. Historically, Armstrong argues, Islam has had the resources to overcome various crises provoked by the clash between history and religion and there is no reason to believe that today's crisis will not be superseded too.




Works Cited:

Armstrong, Karen. 2000. Islam, A Short History. Modern Library Chronicles.
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Posted by: Natalie Saturday

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