Karen Armstrong - Lecture
Dartmouth College 22 October 2001

Notes and comments by Jack Folsom

Karen Armstrong is one of the leading authorities on the world's religions. Because of the September 11 attacks and the retaliation against the Taliban, her latest book, Islam - A Short History (Modern Library, 2000) is now on the best seller list.

At issue, Ms. Armstrong began, is the ongoing Muslim humiliation by what Muslims perceive as the secular, godless West. The problem is made worse by the widespread ignorance of Islam in the U.S., plus the superficiality of media programming dealing with Islam. Karen Armstrong, herself a former TV presenter in England, was invited to appear on the NBC Today show to explain the complexities of Islam in two minutes or less! Islam for years has had a bad time in the media, she said.

Ironically, the attack on the twin towers in New York was a well-planned media event with television in mind, she said. Get everybody watching after the first airliner hit, then send in the second airliner to be shown live, in a conflagration right out of the Book of Revelation. That image of the burning towers, shown over and over again, is etched into our brains as the new icon of the 21^st century, she said -- a horror that consumes us with fear. That icon is, in the biblical sense, a Revelation.

Now the question is, how do we deal with our fear? she asked. There is a good way, and there is a destructive way. "The real miracle of revelation is that it's an ongoing process," she said. The ancient visions of the Prophets speak to us in our own time (I was reminded as she spoke of a previous icon, the image of Challenger exploding in the sky). The Prophets (later she discussed Mohammed) always contemplated history. They foresaw the collapse of Israel. When the Temple did fall, they knew, that fall was necessary for a renewal of faith. The same was true for Mohammed: the collapse of the old ethos, making way for the new (later she discussed the importance of witnessing and experiencing suffering on the pathway to awareness and Understanding). "We too must scan current events and discern the Divine Presence," she said. We have the terrible unveiling on September 11^th as dramatic evidence of (extremist) fundamentalism's response to modernity -- the religionists' response to the secular and rational domination of the value system of the West.

Karen Armstrong pointed out that fundamentalism "is rooted in fear" -- presumably the fear of suppression and annihilation by the forces of modernity. Secular modern society, fundamentalists fear, is going to wipe out religion. The result is hatred and violence, and not just by Muslims. The attack on New York and Washington, Jerry Falwell smugly declared, "is God's judgment on godless America." Small-towners in heartland America, Karen Armstrong said, "feel colonized by DC, Harvard, and Yale," the secular, rational power elites. In contrast to those people walled off by (small-town, church-centered) conformity in the 20^th century, she said, "secularization was a liberalizing process for us" -- meaning that "we" who over time freed ourselves from authoritarianism learned to think for ourselves. Which I'm sure is why "liberal" is such a dirty word among those who fear the collapse of their Temple. Unfortunately in the Muslim world, the processes of modernity happened too quickly, creating fear and loathing. Armstrong cited the reformist edict of Ataturk in the 1920s, requiring immediately the wearing of western dress under penalty of imprisonment or even death. A similar edict in Iran by the elder Shah Rheza Pahlevi set in motion the backlash that deposed the younger shah and swept the fundamentalist Ayatollah Khoumeni into power, in turn setting in motion violent anti-Americanism.

Ironically, Karen Armstrong said, fundamentalism often grows in symbiosis with modernity. Extremism increases as modernity progresses, now apparently into an era of "post-fundamentalism," an era of people who kill, of supposedly devout Muslims who drink vodka before they kill, in violation of Mohammed's commandments. The problem with extremism, she said, is that if you try to suppress it, it becomes more extreme.

So now we get to what Armstrong considers to be a positive response to fundamentalism. "The only way to start is to try to listen to what these fundamentalists are trying to tell us." We need to understand their fears and anxieties, their rage, so that we can respond better than we have. Future generations will curse us, she said, for our cruel Iraq policy, and for our "globalization" policy, in which, for example, the shirts we buy at the Gap are made by Muslim slave labor in Indonesia. Armstrong spoke of the tragedy in Britain of the Afghan asylum seekers, desperately trying to walk through the Channel Tunnel or dying in sealed vans on ferry boats, and now most recently, successful refugees being attacked because they are Muslim or "Arab-looking." Britain has tried to be another "gated community," she said, but in this age of technology, the media have created one world. "It will come to us, as with the terrorists," she said, and we can no longer ignore or deny the reality of the outside world. We need to look out at the world and feel responsibility, she said, not get stuck in a trap of hatred and anger because of the icon of the burning towers, the icon that fills us with dread.

As Mohammed declared to the rich and prosperous, you can't be OK surrounded with barricades in a false sense of security. The prostration of worshippers in the mosque teaches a lesson about humility in the presence of God. Likewise for us in the West, our new nakedness and vulnerability can bring us to a new state of mind, an understanding of our reality in the world and hence a new sense of God. 'It can be a positive thing for Americans in our feelgood culture to witness suffering," she said. This is an important moment on the spiritual path. "We can't wall out suffering in a fool's paradise." It's a prison, not a shelter, imprisoning us in an inauthentic part of ourselves. At this point I was thinking of the "Disneyfication" of America, in which all days are sunny, and all stories have happy endings. No reality allowed!

The most important virtue, as religious tradition asserts, is the virtue of compassion. And that compassion begins within the self: "if you deny your own pain, you deny the pain of others too," she said. Many of us lack the custom of openly expressing our pain, for example, our grief at someone's death and instead we are told (or tell ourselves) to "get a grip" and get back to work. On the point about compassion, Armstrong then recalled the wisdom of Rabbi Hillel: "Do not do unto others what you would not have done unto you," he said. The ability to reach out to others brings you into the presence of God. Susan Armstrong then clarified the meaning of Jihad: it means the struggle to put the will of God into practice. A lesser Jihad might be an external battle against perceived enemies of God ("holy war"), but the greater Jihad is the struggle of people to reform themselves and overcome evil with good (this clearly shows how the terrorists have perverted the Muslim religion (just as other religious fanatics have perverted their religion, like those who shoot abortion doctors or beat up gays and lesbians).

During the question period, a young Muslim-American expressed his conflicting emotions as a traditional Muslim living in a modernist world. Karen Armstrong replied that all religious faiths are having trouble with modernity, particularly fundamentalist Christians, who are locked into the literal "Word" of the Bible and the dogmas that have sprung from it. "Is it possible to co-exist?" she was asked, to which she lamented the huge ignorance about Islam in the West, which for hundreds of years has linked Arabic stereotypes to those of anti-Semitism.

Another questioner asked, "Given all the violence of religion, wouldn't it be better to scrap religion altogether?" Karen Armstrong replied that after having been a Roman Catholic nun for some years, she went through a period of anti-religion herself. "Been there, done that!" she said. Now she feels differently: it's not all violence. "There's bad religion, just like bad cooking, bad sex, and bad art," she said. At the worst, if you have a faulty ego, you create an idol in your own image, as Hitler did, for example (and many an American cult leader, I thought). The heart of good religion, like that of great art or music, is our human need for ecstasy, she said. "We seek this to feel fully alive, in the face of our fear of annihilation. Religion is an art form at its best." The test of a good religion, she said, is that it leads to practical compassion. That is a very difficult agenda to carry out, especially in the face of rage and violence (I don't think she meant turning the other cheek in the present situation, but rather acts of relief from oppression and misery -- what some might call "outreach"). The WWII Holocaust was even more disastrous because of uncaring (on both sides of the Atlantic). The Nazi-era images of Auschwitz and Dachau are a reconstruction of medieval images of Hell -- the absence of God. All sense of the sacred is lost (just as with the images of the burning towers in New York, with people jumping to their deaths). When asked by an Episcopal priest (who is also a Dartmouth professor) what churches should now do, Karen Armstrong replied that churches should not take too narrow a view of community. What is needed is a reaching outward, not to convert but to know and understand those people "out there." We must continue (and, for some of us, just begin) the effort of finding out.

Finally came the big question: "Is the war a mistake?" Her reply: "Yes." There was a time, she said just after the attacks when nearly the whole world was together on the need for bringing the perpetrators to justice. That was the time for real sharing of intelligence, when we even had folks like Muhamar Quaddafi on our side. Now the support in the Muslim world is being shaken by our attacks on what they perceive as innocent and oppressed people. In effect, I thought, insufficient intelligence has been a handicap all along, and now we are locked into a war that will only cause more cycles of rage and terrorism. Leaving the hall, I thought that pacifism is no solution either. The terrorists want us not only to be afraid but also to retaliate. The more we attack, the more unrest will there be in Muslim nations. "This is goood!" exults bin Laden. "Soon choice morsels like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia will become even more unstable, and the masses will overthrow those regimes and bring Us to power! Think of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal! And if the American fools choose the pacifist route and withdraw before we are in power, well, we just goad them with even worse terror!"

Overall, I'd say, this is not a time when we should be saying 'Have a Nice Day' and placing our trust in our leaders to get us out of this mess. Nobody really knows what to do, or what to expect. I will admit that making a lot of noise and dropping bombs and waving flags, etc. makes a lot of people feel good -- patriotic fervor is a kind of ecstasy too, after all. Americans especially love "winning the game," but this time I don't think we really understand what the game is, because it's part of a new and unfamiliar paradigm.