http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week602/armstrong.html
Read
a special RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY interview with scholar and
author Karen Armstrong. She has written many books on religion,
including THE BATTLE FOR GOD and ISLAM: A SHORT HISTORY:
On America's response to 9/11:
That's complicated, of course, because America's a huge place, and
it will vary in different parts of the country, different
neighborhoods and different cities. But there has been a
commendable desire on the part of American people to understand
Islam.
An extraordinary thing happened after 9/11. The American people
descended on the bookstores and swept everything on Islam off the
shelves. That is very positive. It didn't happen in the United
Kingdom. British people weren't remotely interested in finding out
more about Islam, but Americans are curious in that way, and when
I went round lecturing, people impressed me with their
tough-minded desire to try to come to terms with all this.
That said, though, there's still a lot of hostility, and for a lot
of people, you don't even have to scratch the surface. The
hostility is still there, and a lot of it is deeply traumatic.
America has been shocked; this is post-traumatic stress syndrome,
and this will be with us for some time, and people are speaking
out of pain, dislocation, and bewilderment. Americans have found
for the first time in their history, really, that they, too, like
the rest of the world, are on the front line.
On improving interfaith relations:
We've got to carry on trying to understand. It's no good falling
back on old patterns of bigotry, because we have enough to be
worried about, goodness knows, without creating extra bogies to
concern ourselves. It's very important that people see what Islam
is, and what it is not, and see these acts of violence, especially
the September 11 acts of violence, as totally unrepresentative of
the Islamic tradition, and so the more education that goes on, the
better -- education on all sides.
Muslims, too, have got to change some of their textbooks to give
their children a better, more balanced view of Jews and
Christians. Christians have got to change their textbooks. I'm
still shocked by the way the Pharisees are presented in some
school textbooks, giving children a very distorted notion of
Judaism.
All of us have got a struggle on our hands. This has been a
terrible wake-up call. We can't afford bigotry. We live in one
world, whether we like it or not, and we cannot afford to live in
ignorance of one another any longer.
On Islam and America:
We often think of Islam as a rather exotic, eccentric, bizarre,
slightly barbarous creed that has really nothing whatever to do
with us. But, in fact, it's profoundly in tune with the whole
American and western ethos.
The heart of Islam beats with the heart of the American people.
The passion that Islam has for equality -- Islam is one of the
most egalitarian religions I know and has always lived out its
egalitarianism. It's at its best historically when it has had
egalitarian forms of government, and [it is] unhappy with
authoritarian forms of government, as it has now. That's one of
the reasons Islam is unhappy, because it has a lot of despots and
bad government and tyrannical government, some of which are
supported by the United States and the West generally.
Similarly [there is] its passion for justice. The bedrock message
of the Qur'an is not a doctrine but a simple command that it's
right to share your wealth equally, bad to build up a private
fortune selfishly, and good to try to create a just and decent
society where poor and vulnerable people are treated with respect.
That is the bedrock message of the Qur'an, and this is surely what
we mean when we talk about decent society and our aspirations in
the West.
And Islam is a religion of peace. Like all the great world
traditions, it recoils in horror from the violence of the world
and struggles through to a position of peace. You can see that in
the life of the Prophet Muhammad. The word "Islam" is related
etymologically to the word "Salaam " -- peace.
On the challenges facing American Muslims:
The whole experience of building an Islamic community in a country
where Muslims are a minority is a new experience for Muslims. The
whole of Islamic law is structured around a place where society is
Islamic. There are leading clerics nobody hears about in the West;
the only person we hear about is Osama bin Laden, but there are
many, many clerics more important than he, some of whom are trying
to work out ways to enable Muslims to develop this rich religious
life, [ways Muslim law] can be adapted to conditions where you're
living in a minority. Muslims are keen to do it, but it's
difficult.
There are Iranian Muslims, Turkish Muslims, Arab Muslims,
Southeast Asian Muslims, Chinese Muslims, Afro-American Muslims --
and all these bring different things to Islam. It's quite
difficult to form a united community out of all this, especially
in a time of tension, in a time when people naturally feel
defensive about their faith, when some of them are being attacked,
when some of them fear for their lives. Many of them are refugees
from oppressive regimes such as Iraq. Then, when they experience
hostility -- graffiti saying "Muslims go home" -- they naturally
feel deeply insecure.
It's very difficult to be creative when you feel under threat. We
all tend to be belligerent in that case, or to resist things,
rather than open ourselves out to new experiences. So that will be
their challenge.
There's also the difficulty of being an American and yet not
really feeling very happy about American foreign policy in their
own former countries, and that is a problem. There are Americans
who also share this perspective, so Muslims are not alone in that.
On what federal agencies need to understand about American
Muslims:
They should not imagine that just because somebody has a Qur'an in
their luggage they are necessarily suspect. The FBI should not
imagine that any Muslim is likely to be a terrorist, that they
belong to a religion that will inspire or incite them toward some
form of terror, violence, or disaffection from the United States.
They should educate themselves about Islam and realize that the
people who committed these evil atrocities on September 11 were
very peculiar Muslims indeed -- Muslims who were drinking vodka
before they got on the doomed aircraft at 7:00 in the morning.
They weren't trying to "blend in"; they were sticking out like
sore thumbs; Muslims who went to nightclubs, who consorted with
women in Las Vegas.
These were odd Muslims, and if they can break a
Muslim law like drinking, then they can break other laws, too,
like the law against killing innocent people and committing acts
of terror. Richard Reed, the British shoe bomber, was a convert to
Islam, and his imam in South London said they had to exclude him
from the mosque because he came in saying, "Find me a jihad." Here
was somebody who joined up because he wanted a fight. Similarly,
an Australian boy picked up in Afghanistan at the same time as
John Walker Lindh -- they were drifters. They went from one group
to another and finally ended up in Islam. These are not ordinary
Muslims who go regularly to the mosque, who hear the basically
peaceful message of the Qur'an. These are people who are spoiling
for a fight, who are angry, who are not living good Muslim lives
in other respects and are not characteristic of the Muslim people
as a whole.
On the religious tolerance of Americans for Islam:
I think they're trying. [There is] the fact that President Bush
made it his business, as did Prime Minister Blair, after the
atrocities, to say that this was not going to be a war against
Islam. President Bush made sure he had a Muslim beside him in the
service of mourning. All this was important. This was new; this
didn't happen at the time of the Gulf War or in Britain at the
time of the Salman Rushdie crisis. There's a long way to go, but
it was a start.
There are a lot of Americans out there [who are], again, hurting,
wounded, winded, shocked, and spoiling for a fight, who don't want
to hear the truth about Islam because they're fighting too many
ghosts and horrors. It's always tempting to want to find a quick
target, but it won't help in the long run. If we encourage the
smallest degree of bigoted attitude towards Islam, we are creating
further problems for ourselves, further acts of terror.
America is a very pluralistic country; it's had a tradition of
overcoming great hostility to other religious groups in the past
-- Catholics, for example. At the time of the War of Independence
against Britain, only one percent of Americans were Catholics, and
they were very much personae non gratae, and seen as a sort
of fifth column. It would have been unthinkable that one day they
would have a Catholic president, and of course they did with John
F. Kennedy. Now Catholics are accepted as part of the scene,
though they're having their own problems at the moment.
The same can happen to Muslims. Someone was saying to me recently
that nearly all our former enemies end up on the White House lawn.
Nelson Mandela, who's now regarded as a saint, was a couple of
decades ago touted by the American administration as a communist
and a terrorist. Arafat has appeared on that lawn. Now, I'm not
going so far to say, goodness me, that Bin Laden will be there --
of course not. But we can overcome these horrors, and we must work
to do so, because if we don't, we will be betraying the traditions
that we hold most dear about ourselves.
We like to think of our western society as being compassionate,
tolerant, respectful of human rights, kinder than these other
oriental despotisms, as we like to imagine them. But if we start
stigmatizing Muslims either at home or abroad, then we will be
betraying the culture, and we'll ultimately lose ourselves, and
that's a prospect that's too awful to imagine.
On the need for Islam to have a reformation:
People who talk about the need for Islam to have a reformation,
"as we did" in the 16th century, show a great ignorance of Islam
and the Protestant Reformation. Islam has had a constant series of
reformations; you can trace most of them right back to the 13th,
14th century, even before. They went back to the basics, got rid
of all recent accretions, and tried to get back to the original
spirit of Muhammad, just like Luther and Calvin.
There was nothing special about Luther and Calvin. People who
think there was something special about the Reformation are
ignorant about world history. Luther and Calvin were typical
pre-modern reformers, going back to basics, getting rid of
medieval accretions, and trying to meet the conditions of their
time, in their case the changing conditions of early modernity.
The Reformation in Europe was in many ways a complete disaster. It
resulted in a great deal of killing -- Catholics and Protestants
killing one another. It was not a reformation that was handled
well. It divided Europe permanently -- we're still trying to get
it back together again. When I look back on all the reformations
I've studied in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim history, that must
be the worst and most ineptly handled.
People imagine that the Reformation somehow changed Christianity
and therefore changed the ethos of Europe. The Reformation came
about simply because there were changing conditions in Europe.
Modernity was beginning, and people could no longer be Christian
in the old medieval way. The Reformation was a product of
modernization.
Muslims have to modernize their societies, and that took us three
or four hundred years; they've only just begun. It's a long,
painful, difficult process. They are having to do it far too
quickly, and they are experiencing many of the same traumas we did
in Europe when we were modernizing: wars of religion, revolutions,
reigns of terror, exploitation of women and children, despotisms,
basic alienation and anomie as conditions change and nothing new
has come to take their place. So we're watching people in the
developing countries, in some part of the Islamic world, going
through a process that we went through ourselves, but we've
forgotten. We think we've been home and dry for so long, so we
think that anybody can just create a democracy in no time at all,
forgetting that it took us hundreds of years to develop both our
secular and our democratic institutions.
On the lessons of 9/11 for people of faith and American Muslims
in particular:
I know what lessons I'd like them to have learned -- that we now
live in one world; that what happens in Gaza or Afghanistan or
Arabia today will have repercussions in the United States or
London tomorrow; that America is no longer protected by its great
oceans or wealth or military prowess. Look what happened to the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the symbols of what we
thought would give us absolute security in the western world.
We have now entered the community of suffering. It is a religious
opportunity, because the great religious teachers all say that
unless our hearts are awakened to compassion, we cannot begin our
religious quest.
Now the people of America know in their own hearts what it might
have been for the people of Rwanda, Lebanon, Bosnia to have
suffered as they did. This could make for a more compassionate
form of religion, a religion that's not concerned just with dogma,
identity, or keeping the various institutions going, but that is
concerned above all with compassion, the one litmus test of every
single one of the world's great traditions. Christianity, Judaism,
and Islam all insist that there's no point in being religious or
saying your prayers unless you are acting justly and honoring the
sacred rights of your fellow human beings.
