Karen Armstrong

For the operatic soprano, see Karan Armstrong.

Karen Armstrong
Occupation	Writer, Academic
Nationality	British
Alma mater	Oxford University
Website
http://charterforcompassion.org/

Karen Armstrong FRSL (born 14 November 1944), author of twelve books on comparative religion, is a frequent commentator on the British Broadcasting network (BBC). A former Roman Catholic nun, she went from a conservative to a more liberal and mystical faith. Armstrong first rose to prominence in 1993 with her book, A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, an international best seller that is now required reading in many theology courses. She has emphasized the commonalities of the major religions, asserting that they each stress the importance of compassion, as epitomized in what is known as the Golden Rule.

Awarded the $100,000 TED Prize in February 2008, Armstrong called for drawing up a Charter for Compassion, in the spirit of the Golden Rule, to identify shared moral priorities across religious traditions, in order to foster global understanding and a peaceful world. It was presented in Washington, D.C. in November 2009. Signatories include Prince Hassan of Jordan, the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Sir Richard Branson.

Early life

Armstrong was born at Wildmoor, Worcestershire, into a family of Irish extraction who, after her birth, moved to Bromsgrove and later to Birmingham. In 1962, while still in her teens, she became a nun in the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, a teaching order, in which she remained for seven years. Once she had advanced from postulant and novice to professed nun, she enrolled in St Anne's College, Oxford, to study English. Armstrong left her order in 1969 while still a student at Oxford. After graduating with a congratulatory First, she embarked on a DPhil on the poet Tennyson. According to Armstrong, she wrote her dissertation on a topic that had been approved by the university committee. Nevertheless it was failed by her external examiner on the grounds that the topic had been unsuitable. Armstrong did not formally protest this verdict, nor did she embark upon a new topic but instead abandoned hope of an academic career. She reports that this period in her life was marked by ill-health stemming from her life-long but, at that time, still undiagnosed temporal epilepsy, according to her memoir, The Spiral Staircase, as well as by the stress of readjusting to life outside the convent.

Career

In 1976, Armstrong took a job as teaching English at a girls' school in Dulwich while working on a memoir of her convent experiences. This was published in 1982 as, Through the Narrow Gate, to excellent reviews. That year she embarked on a new career as an independent writer and broadcasting presenter. In 1984, the British Channel Four commissioned her to write and present a TV documentary on the life of St. Paul, a project that involved traveling to the Holy Land to retrace the steps of the saint. Armstrong described this visit as a "breakthrough experience", one that defied her prior assumptions and was the inspiration for virtually all her subsequent work. In A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, she traces the evolution of the three major monotheistic traditions from their beginnings in the Middle East up to the present day and also discusses Hinduism and Buddhism. As guiding "luminaries" in her approach, Armstrong's acknowledges (in The Spiral Staircase and elsewhere) the late Canadian theologian Wilfred Cantwell Smith, a Protestant minister, and the Jesuit father Bernard Lonergan. In 1996, she published Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths.

Juan Eduardo Campo, author of the Encyclopedia of Islam (Encyclopedia of World Religions) (2009), included Armstrong among a group of scholars whom he considered as currently conveying a "more or less objective" (as opposed to polemical) view of Islam and its origins to a wide public in Europe and North America. She is in demand as a speaker on the Abrahamic tradition; in the last decade increasing interest in and debate surrounding Islamic issues has brought her even wider visibility

Armstrong's The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (2006) continues the themes covered in A History of God and examines the emergence and codification of the world's great religions during the so-called Axial age, identified by Karl Jaspers. In the year of its publication Armstrong achieved the distinction of being invited to choose her eight favourite records for BBC Radio's Desert Island Discs programme.

In 2007, Armstrong was invited by the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore to deliver the "2007 MUIS Lecture".

Armstrong is a fellow of the Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars and laypeople which attempts to investigate the historical foundations of Christianity. She has written numerous articles for The Guardian and other publications. She was a key advisor on Bill Moyers' popular PBS series on religion, has addressed members of the US Congress, and was one of three scholars to speak at the UN's first ever session on religion. She is a vice-president of the British Epilepsy Association, otherwise known as Epilepsy Action.

Armstrong, who has taught courses at Leo Baeck College, a rabbinical college and centre for Jewish education located in north London, says she has been particularly inspired by the Jewish tradition's emphasis on practice as well as faith: "I say that religion isn't about believing things. It's about what you do. It's ethical alchemy. It's about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness." She maintains that religious fundamentalism is not just a response to but, paradoxically, a product of contemporary culture and for this reason concludes that, "We urgently need to make compassion a clear, luminous and dynamic force in our polarized world. Rooted in a principled determination to transcend selfishness, compassion can break down political, dogmatic, ideological and religious boundaries. Born of our deep interdependence, compassion is essential to human relationships and to a fulfilled humanity. It is the path to enlightenment, and indispensable to the creation of a just economy and a peaceful global community."

Views

Christianity and Islam

In an interview with Bill Moyers, Armstrong compared Christianity to Islam, stating that "Islam is a religion of success. Unlike Christianity, which has as its main image, in the west at least, a man dying in a devastating, disgraceful, helpless death… Mohammed was not an apparent failure. He was a dazzling success, politically as well as spiritually, and Islam went from strength to strength to strength." Armstrong also affirms that “Until the 20th century, Islam was a far more tolerant and peaceful faith than Christianity. The Qur’an strictly forbids any coercion in religion and regards all rightly guided religion as coming from God; and despite the western belief to the contrary, Muslims did not impose their faith by the sword.”

Regarding Armstrong's writing on the Crusades, a lecture by the late professor James M. Powell of Syracuse University called Armstrong's The New York Times Magazine article The Crusades Even Now as following "more in the tradition of a moral sermon than an effort to understand the past" while Thomas Madden criticized her book Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today’s World as "largely an exercise in modern left-wing rhetoric about sensitivity, tolerance, and the evils of Western civilization."

2005 London Suicide bombing

In an interview with Bill Moyers, Armstrong blamed the the Suicide bombings in London on July 7, 2005, on Britain's involvement in the Iraq war, characterizing it a political, not a religious gesture:

I thought that this [the attacks] was virtually inevitable. This is a political matter. And Tony Blair had put us right on the front line by joining with former President Bush. And we were all expecting this in London. There was no great surprise.

The Pope

A critic of certain aspects of Roman Catholicism, Armstrong characterized the Pope as "the world's last, great, absolute monarch. He not only controls doctrinal and spiritual affairs, but also the political, social and economic fortunes of his church. And because he's believed to be directly guided by God, his decisions have the ring of absolute truth, which is strangely out of kilter with the democratic tenor of today's world".

Muslims, Modernity, and the Media

Armstrong believes that all sides must learn to deal with extremism in their midst and advance their interests in a peaceful, non-violent manner. In "The feel of religion" (July 2002), an interview of Armstrong by Omayma Abdel-Latif that is widely reprinted on Islamic websites, Armstrong stressed that:

Muslims should try to use the media; they have got to learn to lobby like the Jews, and they have got to have a Muslim lobby, if you like ....this is a jihad, an effort, a struggle, that is very important. If you want to change the media, then you have got to make people see that Islam is a force to be reckoned with politically and culturally. Have a march down the street at Ground Zero in New York, call it "Muslims against Terror". They need to learn how to manage the media and how to conduct themselves in the media.

In the same interview she continued:

Similarly, the West has got to learn that it shares the planet with equals and not with inferiors. This means giving equal space in a conflict such as that between Israel and Palestine. It doesn't mean just using governments to get oil: you promote Saddam Hussein one day, and the next day he becomes public enemy number one. The West promoted people like the Shah of Iran simply because of its greed for oil, even though he had committed atrocities against his own people. There should be no more double standards, because double standards are colonialism in a new form. Western people have also got to disassociate themselves from inherited prejudices about Islam.

Muslims can run a modern state in an Islamic way, and this is what the West has got to see... There are all kinds of ways in which people can be modern, and Muslims should be allowed to come to modernity on their own terms and make a distinctive Islamic contribution to it.

Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Armstrong told Omayma Abdel-Latif in 2002 that she believed the Israeli Palestinian conflict was a European political creation and not a clash of religions:

The West has to share a responsibility for what is happening in the Middle East. If it had not persecuted the Jews, there would not have been the need for the creation of the State of Israel. The Muslim world did nothing to the Jews, and the Palestinians are paying the price for the sins of Europe. Therefore, a solution has to be found because there will be no peace in the world without one. But if Israel has America behind it, it does not have to worry about what the rest of the world thinks. This gives a sense of omnipotence. At the moment there is no hope; they, the Israelis, can do what they want because America will always support them. I wish Europe would play a better role, but Mr Blair is running after Mr Bush like a poodle.

"I don't think people sit at home and read the Qur'an and say, yes, I must go and bomb Israel," she continued:

This is not how religion works, and I see just absolute hopelessness when people have nothing to lose. Palestinians don't have F- 16s, and they don't have tanks. They don't have anything to match Israel's arsenal. They only have their own bodies.

In her opinion, charges of anti-Semitism in Europe play into the hands of the Zionist lobby in America because "this will discredit anything Europe says. They say Europe is anti-Semitic because for the first time Europe is becoming aware of the plight of the Palestinians. It is part of a campaign to discredit European input in any future peace process." She also believes that part of the problem stems from the Jews still considering themselves solely as victims. "The problem with Israel now is that it cannot believe that it is not 1939 any more; the Israeli people are emotionally stuck in the horrors of the Nazi era."

Andrea Levin, director of the pro-Israeli media watchdog group. CAMERA accused Armstrong as being "among the stable of pro-Palestinian advocates" guilty of "personal bias on scholarship" and selective criticism of Judaism and Christianity but not Islam.

New Atheism

Armstrong has published articles critical of the so-called new atheism (a term applied to a series of best-selling anti-religion books published in recent years). One of "new atheists", Sam Harris had an exchange with her in Foreign policy magazine:

"this is now good for a laugh. But in Kenya elderly men and women are still burned alive for casting malicious spells. In Angola, unlucky boys and girls have been blinded, injected with battery acid, and killed outright in an effort to purge them of demons. In Tanzania, there is a growing criminal trade in the body parts of albino human beings—as it is widely believed that their flesh has magical properties."

Reception

Some have criticized Armstrong and Armstrong's works: in a review published in the New York Sun, historian Efraim Karsh dismissed her her book, Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time, as "thinly veiled hagiography", calling her treatment of the controversial issue of the massacres of the Banu Qurayza tribe "a travesty of the truth". Karsh also argued that Armstrong "overlooks Islam's pervasive mistreatment of its non-Muslim subjects, or Dhimmis as they are commonly known, who have been allowed to practice their religions in return for a distinctly inferior legal and institutional status, rife with social indignities and at times open persecution" and that her "ahistorical analysis" of the treatment of Jews under Islamic rule "ignores the deep anti-Jewish bigotry dating to Islam's earliest days, which made it highly receptive to the worst precepts of Christian anti-Semitism, such as the 'blood libel.'" Daniel Pipes, characterized Armstrong as "a scandalously apologetic . . . former nun with an ax to grind", alleging that her book, Islam: A Short History, contains "factual inaccuracies" and exhibits "moral relativism". An article by Robert Spencer on FrontPage Magazine has called Armstrong "the guardian of Islamic extremism."

Honours

Armstrong was honoured by the New York Open Center in 2004 for her "profound understanding of religious traditions and their relation to the divine."

In 2008 Armstrong was one of three winners who were awarded $100,000 each by the TED Conference's TED Prize. Her TED Prize wish was to initiate an international Charter for Compassion, crafted by a council of leading thinkers in the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, to help restore the Golden Rule as central to religious practice and daily life throughout the world.

In May 2008 she was awarded the Freedom of Worship Award by the Roosevelt Institute, one of four medals presented each year to men and women whose achievements have demonstrated a commitment to the Four Freedoms proclaimed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941 as essential to democracy: freedom of speech and of worship, freedom from want and from fear. The institute stated that Armstrong had become "a significant voice, seeking mutual understanding in times of turbulence, confrontation and violence among religious groups." It cited "her personal dedication to the ideal that peace can be found in religious understanding, for her teachings on compassion, and her appreciation for the positive sources of spirituality."

Bibliography

Journal articles:

• "Women, Tourism, Politics" (1977)
• "The Holiness of Jerusalem: Asset or Burden?" (1998)
• "Ambiguity and Remembrance: Individual and Collective Memory in Finland" (2000)

Books:

• Through the Narrow Gate (1982)
• The First Christian: Saint Paul's Impact on Christianity (1983)
• Beginning the World (1983)
• Tongues of Fire: An Anthology of Religious and Poetic Experience (1985)
• The Gospel According to Woman: Christianity's Creation of the Sex War in the West (1986)
• Holy War: The Crusades and their Impact on Today's World (1988)
• Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet (1991)
• The English Mystics of the Fourteenth Century (1991)
• The End of Silence: Women and the Priesthood (1993)
• A History of God (1993)
• Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths (1996)
• In the Beginning: A New Interpretation of Genesis (1996)
• Islam: A Short History (2000)
• The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (2000)
• Buddha (2001)
• Faith After September 11 (2002)
• The Spiral Staircase (2004)
• A Short History of Myth (2005)
• Muhammad: A Prophet For Our Time (2006)
• The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (2006) ISBN 978-037-541317-9
• The Bible: A Biography (2007)
• The Case for God (2009)
• Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010) ISBN 978-0307595591

Further reading

• The reason of faith Ode magazine, 2009.
• Articles by Karen Armstrong on the 5th Estate blog, fifthestate.co.uk

See also

• Abrahamic religions
• Comparative religion
• Compassion
• Interfaith dialog
• Theology

External links

• Author Spotlight at Random House
• Profile at islamfortoday.com
• Charter for Compassion, charterforcompassion.org
• Interview with Karen Armstrong on "The Bible", readthespirit.com

Audio & Videos

• Karen Armstrong's TED Talk "Let's revive the golden rule", ted.com
• Audio: Karen Armstrong in conversation on the BBC World Service discussion programme The Forum, BBC.co.uk