BRIDGING THE GREAT DIVIDE; WE AND THE WEST

A former Catholic nun and author of books on many of the world's religions including Islam, English writer Karen Armstrong speaks about Western views of Islam, the mood after 11 September and her hopes for better relations between Islam and the West.

"What more concessions should the West make to Muslims? When should we draw the line and stop sacrificing our ideals?" The question was posed by a young Englishman at the end of a lecture on "Understanding Islam" at Oxford University's Institute for American Studies in England. While the question revealed many Western concerns and assumptions, as well as the extent to which an anti-Islamic mood has prevailed in the West since the attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September last year, the answer, however, was quick. "Muslims did not ask us to give up our ideals and values. On the contrary, it is the West which does not honour these very ideals when dealing with Muslims and Islam," said the lecturer, Karen Armstrong, a Catholic nun turned Christian theologian.

After studying English at Oxford, Armstrong became a nun, and 17 years later she left her convent and wrote a book called Through the Narrow Gate (1981), an account of her years spent there. This was followed by further books, including The First Christian, Tongues of Fire, The Gospel According to Woman, Holy War and Muhammad. In 1993 she published an important work on the three monotheistic religions called The History of God: From Abraham to the Present. This sold well and was followed by another best-selling book, Muhammad: a Biography of the Prophet in 1996.

In Armstrong's view, what 11 September revealed was "a new awareness" striking at the integrity of Western culture and its value system. "We were posing as a tolerant society, yet passing judgment from a position of extremes and irrationality," the 58-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 United States and South America lecturing on Islam. It has not been an easy task. "September 11th has confirmed a view of Islam that is centuries old, which is that Islam is inherently violent and intolerant of others," she said, going on to offer a first-hand account of the situation in the United States nine months after the attacks.

"The events have been a great shock to the Americans, and they are now in a state of numbness and depression," Armstrong explained. "There is still a lot of hostility and anger directed against the Muslim community there. There is, however, some reason to believe that a change in the American perception is not impossible."

"On the East Coast where I spent most of my time, people descended en masse on the bookstores and took off the shelves everything they could find about Islam. While some did this to confirm old prejudices and fears -- depending on who you choose to read -- the majority was keen on learning about Islam." In fact, Armstrong's own handbook, Understanding Islam, has sold more than a quarter of a million copies on the East Coast of the United States alone. And many of the questions posed to Armstrong during her lecture tour reflected not only a sense of wanting to know more about Islam, but also how deeply rooted were media representations of Islam in the American psyche.

The key question would be, "why do they hate us?" Armstrong said, followed by others, such as: "What do Muslims think of Christians and Jews? Is Islam an inherently violent religion? Why do we always hear bad rhetoric about Christians? What about women in Islam? Is Islam against modernity?"

In responding to such questions, Armstrong walks a fine line between deconstructing long- held stereotypes while at the same time not becoming apologetic. She noted that there are differences in the way her views are received in the US and in Europe. "One of the good things about the Americans is that they do like to know," she says. "There is earnestness about them that one does not observe in a European society such as Holland, for example. They are open to criticism in a way that does not exist in Europe, where people assume they know it all."

At the age of 19, Armstrong joined a Catholic convent, staying there for 17 years before deciding to leave in order to study the world's monotheistic religions, beginning with Islam. Does she think that the religious establishment in the West -- ie the churches themselves -- are responsible for Western hostility to Islamic culture?

"Anti-Islamic doctrine is in-built in the Western ethos that was formulated during the Crusades," she says. "This was the period when the Western world was re-defining itself. The 11th century marked the end of the Dark Ages in Europe and the beginnings of the new Europe. The Crusades were the first co-operative act on the part of the whole new Europe, and the whole crusading ethos shaped the psyche of the key actors performing at this crucial time."

"Islam was the quintessential foreigner, and people resented Islam in Europe much as people in the Third World resent the US today. One could say that Islam then was the greatest world power, and it remained so up until the early years of the Ottoman empire. Muslims were everywhere in the Middle East, Turkey, Iran, South- East Asia, China. Wherever people went, there was Islam, and it was powerful, and people felt it as a threat."

The period of the 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 of the Crusades that the idea that Islam was essentially a violent religion took hold in the West. "Europe was projecting anxiety about its own behaviour onto Islam, and it did the same 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 the colonial period, Armstrong believes, since many of the colonised countries were Muslim countries, and the colonial powers saw in them what they regarded as 'backwardness', attributing this to Islam.

Although she feels that university campuses are almost the only places in the US where big questions are asked, Armstrong says that the events of 11 September divided US academics into two camps. The first camp, led by Martin Kramer, head of the Near and Middle East Studies Institute in Washington DC, accused Armstrong, together with academics such as John Esposito, head of Islamic-Christian Dialogue at Georgetown University, of 'duping' people into believing that Islam was not a threat, an argument Kramer claimed had been proved wrong by the attacks. Only a few weeks after 11 September, Kramer wrote an article, Ivory Towers Built on Sand, in which he put the blame squarely on academics for failing to predict the atrocities.

Armstrong explains how the media in the US attempted to silence opposing voices after 11 September. For example, she had been commissioned by the New Yorker magazine to write an article on Islam, but the article was killed and the magazine published one by the academic Bernard Lewis instead.

"They thought I am an apologist for Muslims, because my article was about the prophet as a peacemaker, and this did not suit their agenda as much as Lewis's did. Both Lewis and Kramer are staunch Zionists who write from a position of extreme bias. But people need to know that Islam is a universal religion, and that there is nothing aggressively oriental or anti-Western about it. Lewis's line, on the other hand, is that Islam is an inherently violent religion," she said.

Earlier, in the mid 1980s, Armstrong was commissioned by Channel Four television in Britain to make a documentary about the life of St. Paul. This required visits to the Holy Land and to Jerusalem. However, when Armstrong went to Israel and saw the kind of racism against Arabs that dominated Israeli society, she realised that "there was something fundamentally wrong" going on in Israel.

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