July/August 2002

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Considering The Battle for God

Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God, A History of Fundamentalism. Ballantine Books, NY, 2000. Paperback edition published February 2001.

This is another fascinating book by Karen Armstrong, a skilled and prolific interpreter of religious traditions, her most notable book being A History of God about the 4000-year religious quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

The central theme of this book is that Fundamentalism is an historically recent religious movement that is a response to modern secular culture. As Armstrong says in the preface:

"For almost a century, Christians, Jews, and Muslims have been developing a militant form of piety whose objective is to drag God and religion from the sidelines, to which they have been relegated in modern secular culture, and bring them back to center stage. These 'fundamentalists,' as they are called, are convinced that they are fighting for the survival of their faith in a world that is inherently hostile to religion. They are conducting a war against secular modernity, and in the course of their struggle, they have achieved notable results."

The book starts with the forced conversion and expulsion of the Jews in Spain in the fifteenth century--a period which witnessed the emergence of a modern centralized state. In this context, the Spanish Inquisition was not an attempt to preserve an archaic world, but a modernizing institution employed to create national unity. In Spain, the chief victims of the Inquisition were the Jews. Over 100,000 Jews were also forced into exile. These Sephardic Jews experienced a spiritual as well as a physical dislocation of the sort that makes the individual's very existence feel threatened. The experience of these people was an extreme form of the uprooting and displacement that other peoples would experience under aggressive modernization. Because their universe had so drastically changed, they developed new traditions to match their new conditions. One of the responses was reflected by the Safed Kabbalah whose new creation myth that gave comfort in these new circumstances. Other responses included "secularism, skepticism, atheism, rationalism, nihilism, pluralism, and the privatization of faith." These were the initial responses to modernization.

By the end of the nineteenth century, modernization had many discontents. To quote, "The dynamic optimism that had inspired Hegel's philosophy had given way to perplexing doubt and malaise--People felt obscurely afraid. Henceforth, at the same time as they celebrated the achievements of modern society, men and women would also experience an emptiness, a void that rendered life meaningless; many would crave certainty amid the perplexities of modernity; some would project their fears onto imaginary enemies and dream of universal conspiracy."

It is out of this situation that fundamentalist movements have arisen in all three of the monotheist faiths, and similarly in other traditions such as Hinduism as well. Fundamentalism gives certainty and meaning in a world that seems to have none. It gives a purpose to life, and a way of responding to and living in a changing world. Underlying the fundamentalist response is a fear of annihilation and destruction. However at the same time that fundamentalists reject modernity, they often incorporated elements of it by being innovative in practice and in rejecting old traditions.

In recent decades, fundamentalism has played a major role in countries as different as Iran, Israel, Egypt, and the United States. The course of these movements has yet to play themselves out. From one perspective, fundamentalism can be viewed as a response to the failures of modernism and its economic and social order. Thus one can view fundamentalism not as a problem, but a symptom.

I'd like to close with some quotes from Karen Armstrong that appear in the Reader's guide at the back of the second edition.

"Fundamentalism cannot be defeated, and, in a sense, fundamentalists have won a great victory. Today no government can ignore it."

"But, on another level, fundamentalism represents a defeat for the religious traditions that fundamentalists are trying to preserve, because they tend to downplay compassion, which all the world's faiths insist is a primary religious virtue, and overstress the more belligerent and intolerant aspects of the tradition."

"We have to try to make the huge imaginative effort to put ourselves in the shoes of fundamentalists because they threaten our values just as we threaten theirs. If we understand a bit more clearly what the fundamentalists really mean, if we learn to read the imagery of fundamentalism, we take the first step in learning about and understanding each other. You can make war in a minute, but peace takes a long time."

I strongly recommend Karen Armstrong's book for those who want to understand more about the fundamentalist movements in the modern world.

--David White is a student of history and cultures and a member of Friends Meeting at Cambridge.

"Before the crusades, Europeans knew very little about Muslims. But after the conquest of Jerusalem, scholars began to cultivate a highly distorted portrait of Islam, and this Islamophobia, entwined with a chronic anti-semitism, would become one of the received ideas of Europe. Christians must have been aware that their crusades violated the spirit of the gospels: Jesus had told his followers to love their enemies, not to exterminate them. This may be the reason why Christian scholars projected their anxiety on to the very people they had damaged....

"At a time when feudal Europe was riddled with hierarchy, Islam was presented as an anarchic religion that gave too much respect and freedom to menials, such as slaves and women. Christians could not see Islam as separate from themselves; it had become, as it were, their shadow-self, the opposite of everything that they thought they were or hoped they were not.

"In fact, the reality was very different. Islam, for example, is not the intolerant or violent religion of western fantasy. Mohammed was forced to fight against the city of Mecca, which had vowed to exterminate the new Muslim community, but the Koran, the inspired scripture that he brought to the Arabs, condemns aggressive warfare and permits only a war of self-defence. After five years of warfare, Mohammed turned to more peaceful methods and finally conquered Mecca by an ingenious campaign of nonviolence. After the prophet's death, the Muslims established a vast empire that stretched from the Pyrenees to the Himalayas, but these wars of conquest were secular, and were only given a religious interpretation after the event.

"In the Islamic empire, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians enjoyed religious freedom. This reflected the teaching of the Koran, which is a pluralistic scripture, affirmative of other traditions. Muslims are commanded by God to respect the "people of the book," and reminded that they share the same beliefs and the same God. Mohammed had not intended to found a new religion; he was simply bringing the old religion of the Jews and the Christians to the Arabs, who had never had a prophet before. Constantly the Koran explains that Mohammed has not come to cancel out the revelations brought by Adam, Abraham, Moses, or Jesus. Today, Muslim scholars have argued that had Mohammed known about the Buddhists and Hindus, the native Americans or the Australian Aborigines, the Koran would have endorsed their sages and shamans too, because all rightly guided religion comes from God.

"But so entrenched are the old medieval ideas that western people find it difficult to believe this. We continue to view Islam through the filter of our own needs and confusions. The question of women is a case in point. None of the major world faiths has been good to women but, like Christianity, Islam began with a fairly positive message, and it was only later that the religion was hijacked by old patriarchal attitudes. The Koran gives women legal rights of inheritance and divorce, which western women would not receive until the 19th century. The Koran does permit men to take four wives, but this was not intended to pander to male lust, it was a matter of social welfare: it enabled widows and orphans to find a protector, without whom it was impossible for them to survive in the harsh conditions of 7th-century Arabia....

"We can no longer afford this unbalanced view of Islam, which is damaging to ourselves as well as to Muslims. We should recall that during the 12th century, Muslim scholars and scientists of Spain restored to the west the classical learning it had lost during the Dark Ages. We should also remember that until 1492, Jews and Christians lived peaceably and productively together in Muslim Spain--a coexistence that was impossible elsewhere in Europe.

"At the beginning of the 20th century, nearly every single Muslim intellectual was in love with the west, admired its modern society, and campaigned for democracy and constitutional government in their own countries. Instead of seeing the west as their enemy, they recognised it as compatible with their own traditions. We should ask ourselves why we have lost this goodwill."

--Karen Armstrong From The Guardian, June 20, 2002

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