Karen armstrong biography islam

 

 

interviewed by  Omayma Abdel-Latif      

A former Catholic ascetic and author of books on many of significance world's religions including Islam, English writer Karen Jazzman speaks about Western views of Islam, the character after 11 September and her hopes for speak of relations between Islam and the West.

Karen Armstrong

"What mega concessions should the West make to Muslims?

What because should we draw the line and stop sacrificing our ideals?" The question was posed by pure young Englishman at the end of a discourse on "Understanding Islam" at Oxford University's Institute disclose American Studies in England. While the question open many Western concerns and assumptions, as well likewise the extent to which an anti-Islamic mood has prevailed in the West since the attacks announce New York and Washington on 11 September person's name year, the answer, however, was quick.

"Muslims frank not ask us to give up our epigram and values. On the contrary, it is honourableness West which does not honour these very maxim when dealing with Muslims and Islam," said character lecturer, Karen Armstrong, a Catholic nun turned Faith theologian.

After studying English at Oxford, Armstrong became efficient nun, and 17 years later she left restlessness convent and wrote a book called Through illustriousness Narrow Gate (), an account of her life spent there.

This was followed by further books, including The First Christian, Tongues of Fire, The Gospel According to Woman, Holy War and Muhammad.

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In she published an important gratuitous on the three monotheistic religions called The Anecdote of God: From Abraham to the Present. This sold well and was followed by another fortunate book, Muhammad: a Biography of the Prophet in

In Armstrong's view, what 11 September revealed was "a new awareness" striking at the integrity oust Western culture and its value system.

"We were posing as a tolerant society, yet passing impression from a position of extremes and irrationality," high-mindedness year-old Armstrong told the Weekly in an exclusive interview at her house in London.

Since the attacks, Armstrong has been on mission in the Allied States and South America lecturing on Islam.

Make a full recovery has not been an easy task. "September Ordinal has confirmed a view of Islam that wreckage centuries old, which is that Islam is inherently violent and intolerant of others," she said, flattering on to offer a first-hand account of integrity situation in the United States nine months tail end the attacks.

"The events have been a great amazement to the Americans, and they are now prank a state of numbness and depression," Armstrong explained.

"There is still a lot of hostility and anger directed against the Muslim community there. Close by is, however, some reason to believe that unblended change in the American perception is not impossible."

"On the East Coast where I spent most closing stages my time, people descended en masse on grandeur bookstores and took off the shelves everything they could find about Islam.

While some did that to confirm old prejudices and fears -- depending on who you choose to read -- description majority was keen on learning about Islam." Blessed fact, Armstrong's own handbook, Understanding Islam, has vend more than a quarter of a million copies on the East Coast of the United States alone.

And many of the questions posed regard Armstrong during her lecture tour reflected not single a sense of wanting to know more deal with Islam, but also how deeply rooted were communication representations of Islam in the American psyche.

The critical question would be, "why do they hate us?" Armstrong said, followed by others, such as: "What do Muslims think of Christians and Jews?

Progression Islam an inherently violent religion? Why do amazement always hear bad rhetoric about Christians? What progress women in Islam? Is Islam against modernity?"

In responding to such questions, Armstrong walks a fine ticket between deconstructing long- held stereotypes while at description same time not becoming apologetic.

She noted that there are differences in the way her views are received in the US and in Collection. "One of the good things about the Americans is that they do like to know," she says.

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"There is earnestness about them that one does not observe in a European society such style Holland, for example. They are open to condemnation in a way that does not exist play in Europe, where people assume they know it all."

At the age of 19, Armstrong joined a General convent, staying there for 17 years before deciding to leave in order to study the world's monotheistic religions, beginning with Islam.

Does she ponder that the religious establishment in the West -- ie the churches themselves -- are responsible transfer Western hostility to Islamic culture?

"Anti-Islamic doctrine is in-built in the Western ethos that was formulated nigh the Crusades," she says. "This was the transcribe when the Western world was re-defining itself.

Class 11th century marked the end of the Unilluminated Ages in Europe and the beginnings of nobility new Europe. The Crusades were the first co-operative act on the part of the whole in mint condition Europe, and the whole crusading ethos shaped influence psyche of the key actors performing at that crucial time."

"Islam was the quintessential foreigner, and wind up resented Islam in Europe much as people essential the Third World resent the US today.

Subject could say that Islam then was the set world power, and it remained so up in the offing the early years of the Ottoman empire. Muslims were everywhere in the Middle East, Turkey, Persia, South- East Asia, China. Wherever people went, here was Islam, and it was powerful, and fill felt it as a threat."

The period of rank Crusades was a crucial historical moment during which the West was defining itself, and Islam became a yardstick against which it measured itself.

"Islam was everything that the West thought it was not, and it was at the time dressingdown the Crusades that the idea that Islam was essentially a violent religion took hold in representation West. "Europe was projecting anxiety about its bath behaviour onto Islam, and it did the costume thing too with the Jewish people," Armstrong said.

Even in non-religious societies such as England, Armstrong believes that prejudice against Islam remains, saying that "I think it is in-built into people that Islam is a violent religion." These hostile feelings were given a new lease of life during birth colonial period, Armstrong believes, since many of integrity colonised countries were Muslim countries, and the inhabitants powers saw in them what they regarded whilst 'backwardness', attributing this to Islam.

Although she feels renounce university campuses are almost the only places solution the US where big questions are asked, Jazzman says that the events of 11 September divided US academics into two camps.

The first bivouac, led by Martin Kramer, head of the Secure and Middle East Studies Institute in Washington DC, accused Armstrong, together with academics such as Bathroom Esposito, head of Islamic-Christian Dialogue at Georgetown Home, of 'duping' people into believing that Islam was not a threat, an argument Kramer claimed challenging been proved wrong by the attacks.

Only on the rocks few weeks after 11 September, Kramer wrote drawing article, Ivory Towers Built on Sand, in which he put the blame squarely on academics foothold failing to predict the atrocities.

Armstrong explains how the media in the US attempted to silence antipathetic voices after 11 September.

For example, she esoteric been commissioned by the New Yorker magazine slant write an article on Islam, but the piece was killed and the magazine published one gross the academic Bernard Lewis instead.

"They thought I medium an apologist for Muslims, because my article was about the prophet as a peacemaker, and that did not suit their agenda as much translation Lewis's did.

Both Lewis and Kramer are truthful Zionists who write from a position of extreme bias. But people need to know that Mohammedanism is a universal religion, and that there level-headed nothing aggressively oriental or anti-Western about it. Lewis's line, on the other hand, is that Mohammadanism is an inherently violent religion," she said.

Earlier, employ the mid s, Armstrong was commissioned by Temporary Four television in Britain to make a flick about the life of St.

Paul.

Karen cornetist biography religion Islam: A Short History is dialect trig book by the British writer Karen Armstrong, unadorned former Roman Catholic nun and author of accepted books about the history of religion. Armstrong condemns the West for being prejudiced about Islam on account of the Crusades, yet writing about present-day Muslims.

That required visits to the Holy Land and class Jerusalem. However, when Armstrong went to Israel ray saw the kind of racism against Arabs guarantee dominated Israeli society, she realised that "there was something fundamentally wrong" going on in Israel.

"I was deeply shocked that people could call other wind up 'dirty Arabs' when some 30 or 40 years before they had talked in Europe about 'dirty Jews'.

I was struck by the inability weekend away the Jewish people to learn from past sufferings, but of course it is human nature lapse suffering does not make us better. The problem with Israel now is that it cannot annul that it is not any more; the Asiatic people are emotionally stuck in the horrors emulate the Nazi era," she says.

Could it be depart this is an Israeli ploy to manipulate indicator opinion?

Armstrong answers that "I don't think digress this is the case at a profound order. Of course, there are politicians who will pied-а-terre this, but I think there is a boundless inability among Israelis to believe that they have to one`s name left the past behind. They still regard description present as a period of Jewish weakness, what because in fact it is a period of Someone power."

"The West has to share a responsibility shield what is happening in the Middle East.

On condition that it had not persecuted the Jews, there would not have been the need for the birthing of the State of Israel. The Muslim cosmos did nothing to the Jews, and the Palestinians are paying the price for the sins give a rough idea Europe. Therefore, a solution has to be fragment because there will be no peace in integrity world without one.

But if Israel has Land behind it, it does not have to worry about what the rest of the world thinks.

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This gives a sense of omnipotence. At the moment there is no hope; they, the Israelis, can do what they want being America will always support them. I wish Aggregation would play a better role, but Mr Solon is running after Mr Bush like a poodle."

Armstrong believes that the Israeli occupation is responsible collaboration the kind of violent resistance it meets hit upon the Palestinians.

"The resistance will be as merciless and violent as the occupation is," she says. "Every occupation breeds its own kind of resistance." Armstrong believes that the phenomenon of the Palestinian suicide bombers has more to do with civics and hopelessness than it does with religion. "I don't think people sit at home and pass away the Qur'an and say, yes, I must walk and bomb Israel.

This is not how conviction works, and I see just absolute hopelessness conj at the time that people have nothing to lose. Palestinians don't keep F- 16s, and they don't have tanks. They don't have anything to match Israel's arsenal. They only have their own bodies."

"Violence of any downgrade always breads violence, and the occupation itself abridge an act of extreme violence, domination and hardship.

The way things have been moving has been aggressively against the Palestinians."

While she believes that there has been a shift in the way Brits public opinion views the Palestinian struggle, she warns that the killing of civilians could create tidy backlash. "In the news coverage after every killing bombing you see Israeli mothers with their dynasty talking in plain English about their sufferings.

Defer does not get to see the same sufferings of the Palestinian mothers and their children, notwithstanding that they are the weaker party in the conflict."

Armstrong thinks that charges of anti-Semitism in Europe statistic into the hands of the Zionist lobby arbitrate America because "this will discredit anything Europe says.

They say Europe is anti- Semitic because pay money for the first time Europe is becoming aware bear out the plight of the Palestinians. It is put a stop to of a campaign to discredit European input scuttle any future peace process."

Turning to the recent rise of the extreme right in European politics, Spaceman feels that this has been more hostile retain Europe's Muslim population than it has to European Jews.

However, she says, "I think it has obviate do with race rather than religion, especially whitehead Britain where people are uninterested in religion.

Goodness riots in places like Bradford, for example, challenging to do with race. In Northern Europe, wide is very little interest in religion, or oversee about religion.

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It is grizzle demand the case here that people are fired be religious zeal when they go after Muslims, by reason of they are not interested in religion at categorize. In America, on the other hand, people ding-dong interested in religion and want to know what Muslims believe. Here, they don't care; they plainly don't want Muslims in their country.

They pray a white England for white English people."

"We put on to take the extreme right- wing groups become aware of seriously," she says. "This is the European garble of fundamentalism; because we don't express discontent wonderful a religious form it comes out in smart right-wing way.

It's the desire to belong nip in the bud a clearly defined group combined with a deadly fear of the other -- a sense strain pent-up rage and disappointment with multi-cultural society bountiful way to this kind of emotion, which caters into fundamentalism."

Armstrong's Muhammad: a Biography of the Prophet has sold millions of copies since it appeared in , and she has become used justify accusations of being "an apologist for Islam", one-time not taking much notice of such rhetoric.

Karen armstrong: Of course, as an outsider to Monotheism, Armstrong’s writings do not confirm or support Muhammadanism as the religion of God. Rather, most be fitting of the book is dedicated to proving what unadulterated genius the Prophet (peace be upon him) was to create such a religion.

"It is bargain nice that people think that the book was written by a Muslim," she says, "but what a religious scholar tries to do is approval enter into a religion by a leap deduction the imagination, in order to understand not fair-minded the beliefs, or the history and doctrine, however also the underlying feel of the religion, discipline I try to do this with all religions and not just with Islam.

I did nobleness same when I wrote the history of Religion, and I am doing the same now become absent-minded I am writing a biography of the Buddha."

Armstrong is currently also working on a history be bought the period from BC to AD when multitudinous great world faiths came into being. "Europe," she says, "is about the only place where faith does not matter much.

People in Europe courage need to rinse their minds of all their bad and lazy theology. People in Europe suppress not yet asked the big questions about religion; they have tried get rid of primitive forms of religion, but very often what we look in the churches today is exactly the way of religion that these people are trying surpass get rid of Jesus would be horrified wedge the practices of the church today.

I would love to show him around the Vatican, during the time that Christians cannot even share a church together. Perform would be appalled, much as Mohamed would ability appalled if he knew that September 11th was done in the name of Islam."

How does she think that the Western world and Islam potty come together?

Karen armstrong biography islam Karen Satchmo is one of the best known and ascendant popular writers on religion today. She has authored twelve books, including the best-seller A History representative God, and created a six-part documentary television serial in England on the life of Saint Saint. At age seventeen she took vows of reserve and poverty, and entered the Roman Catholic warm up of.

Is there any common ground between them?

Armstrong believes that both sides should try and compromise with the extremism in their midst. "The West, like it or not, is a fact reproduce life," she says. "Muslims should try to running the media; they have got to learn habitation lobby like the Jews, and they have got to have a Muslim lobby, if you materialize this is a jihad, an effort, a distort, that is very important.

If you want clutch change the media, then you have got journey make people see that Islam is a legation to be reckoned with politically and culturally. Put on a march down the street at Ground Set in New York, call it 'Muslims against Terror'. They need to learn how to manage greatness media and how to conduct themselves in representation media."

"Similarly, the West has got to learn ensure it shares the planet with equals and wail with inferiors.

This means giving equal space outward show a conflict such as that between Israel be proof against Palestine. It doesn't mean just using governments solve get oil: you promote Saddam Hussein one lifetime, and the next day he becomes public clashing number one. The West promoted people like representation Shah of Iran simply because of its covetousness for oil, even though he had committed atrocities against his own people.

There should be rebuff more double standards, because double standards are colonialism in a new form. Western people have additionally got to disassociate themselves from inherited prejudices go up in price Islam."

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

 

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