Book Review: Islam: A Short History, by Karen Armstrong

As I write (September 2012), the world is currently whipped up with Islamic protests against inflammatory media from the West, the recent killing of a US ambassador by terrorists, and renewed interest in the beliefs and practices of Muslims.  I'm a pastor, and I'm hearing those questions again: "What do Muslims believe?," "Do Muslims want to convert or kill all non-Muslims?," "What do those people have against us?"  I prefer the questions better than some of the direct statements I hear from time to time.  Sometimes people express the feeling that the US should just turn the whole Middle East into a parking lot (a solution not unlike the supposed plan of Muslims to wipe out people unlike themselves).  I've been trying to help folks see our struggle within our situation differently for my whole adult life.

This summer, during a time when the focus seemed to be far from these concerns, I did a very good thing by reading Karen Armstrong's book on the history of Islam.

I've often thought that the best way to understand a situation is to understand how it got to be the way it is.  Folks I talk to are generally unaware that Muslims and Jews have gotten along much better than Christians and either Jews or Muslims for most of their shared history. They usually also unaware that for most of Islam's history they have been the seat of progressive civilization, and that the West only caught up and passed them during the Enlightenment period.  America is a new country and has no old architecture, so we Americans often fail to understand how cultures have long memories and can still be motivated by things that happened a thousand years ago.  Heck, we've basically forgotten the Alamo.

Armstrong's book was so good at getting to the heart of Islamic history and placing it in context with its relationship to the rest of the world.  She helped me develop a deep appreciation of historical causality--how some things I knew had happened came to happen the way they did, and how they affect things in the modern world.

I wish everyone could read this book, if for no other reason than to get a true sense of how diverse and conflicted Islam is.  The questions that come to me about Islam usually assume that Islam is one thing and that whatever one Muslim says about Islam is true for the beliefs of all, that whatever one Muslim does demonstrates the way all Muslims are.  It's one thing to say in a general way, "Oh, but there are many more moderate Muslims than there are radicals."  It's another thing to be walked through all the names, beliefs, practices, political arrangements, and personalities of the various folks who have struggled for the soul of the faith for the last 1500 years.  Their history is not unlike Christian history--they have had many empires and governments that have been very different from each other--some more democratic and egalitarian, some more totalitarian, some more progressive and intellectual, some more regressive and reactionary, etc., etc.  These folks have been of many different ethnic backgrounds and have appropriated Islam into their culture and many different ways.  Mongols, Turks, Indians, Arabs, North Africans, Persians, and many others have dominated Islamic culture at various points and have created brands of Islam that were very different from each other.  The first blood was shed over the leadership of Islam only a generation after Muhammed himself, and the rift that arose from that  killing has not yet been resolved.

Armstrong never makes excuses for those elements of Islam that threaten cultural progress or contribute to violence.  But she does a terrific job of contextualizing and creating understanding.  The theme I perhaps found most helpful was her understanding of the challenge Islamic nations have had getting up to speed with Western cultural and technological advances.  She argues that both Muslim and Western nations were mostly agrarian societies in the 16th century, and Islamic lands had aristocratic classes that were actually much more advanced than the West was at that time (we should remember that the Ottoman Turks conquered the Byzantine Empire only a year after Columbus sailed the ocean blue and more than twenty years before the Reformation began).  From the 1700s onward, the West made extraordinary strides in science, religion, agriculture, philosophy, and every other field.  Democratic governments were formed and open societies were created.  Religious superstition no longer dominated the cultural conversation, and social institutions such as the family were radically revised.

These changes were internally driven within Western culture.  They were full of conflict at every turn and elements of Western culture have reacted against them and continue to attempt to return to an idealized past.  The growing pains of modernity have caused and continue to cause violence within Western culture.  It should be no surprise, then, the Islamic culture should react when it is drawn into a progressive culture that has been imposed from the outside rather than developed from within. It should be no surprise that the masses would revolt and react, especially since Western reforms in Islamic lands are often championed by elites and the benefits of advances are not evenly distributed.  Islam is suffering the adolescence of modernity just as western culture struggled with tenements, child labor, widespread corruption, revolutions and civil wars, and all kinds of problems in the 19th century.  We have our fundamentalism, too, and our society progresses and reacts all the time.

Again, Armstrong clearly doesn't think that Islamic reactionaries are justified.  She wants to see cultural progress, democratic reforms, gender equality, etc. around the world.  She helps us see how the turmoil in the Middle East is a painful part of the process of a global culture coming into being when a significant portion of the world created the reforms and advances that will determine the world's collective culture for.  We should not be surprised that many Muslims resist (even violently), when most westerners are ambivalent about modernity.  I certainly have my own concerns (cf Karl Barth following WWI)!

I'll have to read the book a couple more times to get all the empires and religious movements straight, to be sure.  Considering its depth and the remarkable ground it covers, the book is very accessible and compact (about 200 pages).  Many people I meet want to understand why Egyptians riot violently because of an obscure movie, and hate the US because the movie exists though Americans would have never heard of the movie if not for the riots.  They may have very nice Muslim doctors who seem very different than the people they see on the news from their doctors' home countries.  They may not understand what the difference between a Sunni and a Shi'ite might be, though they can remember when Protestants and Roman Catholics killed each other.  Armstrong's book is very helpful in understanding the texture of differences between Muslims by demonstrating how those differences developed.  Islam has a prominent place in the world's challenges and is in a period of rapid growth and transformation.  The West's relationship with the Islamic world will certainly play a major role in determining what the future will hold.  We live in a democracy, so our opinions truly matter, whether they are based on the truth or not.  We owe it to the world and to our children to know something meaningful and true about 1.2 billion people with whom we share the planet.