Islam: A Short History

"I think the fact Karen was a nun makes her more sympathetic to faith in general. Most of us writers with faith respect other people’s decision to follow a different path, and it’s that respect that comes across loud and clear in this short history. Whenever people who don’t really read ask me how to get a snapshot of Islam, I point them to Karen Armstrong’s book, because it’s a wonderful entry point and you could knock it out in a couple of weeks by dipping in and out. This is dense history, but she makes it very accessible and, as opposed to Lings, she takes the archaic language out—in an entry-level book that’s necessary. And yet it’s comprehensive in so many ways. At the front of the book there is a wonderful timeline, if you don’t read anything else, at least read that to get a sense of what happened and when! The book brings us right up to the modern period, Karen even covers the Islamic presence in Europe, which a lot of people neglect. You know that’s my bugbear. She talks about the Iberian presence—not enough in my opinion and she neglects one or two other important European emirates I would have put in, but I think she can be forgiven given the huge job she was doing and the general blind spot for that particular history. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I love the fact that Karen even discusses the early theological, intellectual and spiritual divides that most people don’t understand. It’s bizarre how sometimes people can come from say a Christian background and are able to tell you all about the different Christian sects and groups. But then when they talk about Muslims, its as if we are one monolithic group of people, very frustrating. Every religion has divisions and different sects, and Karen explains how that came about in a very digestible manner, offering the reader glimpses of really interesting figures from each movement along the way. She’s also comfortable contextualising incidents and quite brave, especially around incidents that are sometimes weaponised—for example, the way the massacre of the men of the Jewish tribe of Qurayzah in Madinah came about, during the time of the Prophet—an incident often cited—cynically—as the beginnings of anti-Semitism in Islam. Those that say this then conveniently neglect the next 14 centuries of coexistence and flourishing together in almost every corner of the world, as though that never happened. She presents the context and explains why there was a ruthlessness to it— telling readers ‘it would be a mistake to judge it by the standards of our own time’ – this was the world they all lived in and those were the rules of that world. I appreciated she was trying to be fair, and trying to show that nothing happens in a vacuum. That was the seventh century. It was a brutal world. Many things happened then that most modern Muslims wouldn’t put up with today, because humanity has evolved. When I pick up a book on Islam, I turn to the sources. Not many popular books will provide them. I loved that Karen didn’t use too many orientalist voices, in the Saidian sense. There are one or two in there, they’re unavoidable. But then she goes to the more empathetic and sympathetic Western scholars such as Montgomery Watt and John Esposito. Of course, the great Edward Said is in there, and others that I really admire like Annemarie Schimmel. And then, she cites a host of respected Muslim sources including Lings’ book, which is a thumbs up from me. All of that made me feel it was a book that I could take a lot from as a Muslim. In every book there are flaws and there are good things, you take the good and leave the bad. Some of her interpretations are not how I would have read things, but that’s inevitable and she’s not a Muslim and is looking at his life as an outsider. Scholars of Sīra, the study of the Prophet’s life, might find flaws in the book. But I’m not a scholar and I felt, given it is talking to a Western audience, it’s a great introduction as is Karen’s biography of Muhammed ."

"There are countless books on Islam but Armstrong’s is Islam 101. It is accessible and provocative, and provides plenty of food for thought for the Western reader. Karen Armstrong is unique as a historian of religion. She’s a religious historian—pious herself—and she takes religion very seriously. She makes it very clear throughout the book that she wants to correct the stereotypes about Islam and Muslims. She aims to provide a more authentic portrait of Islam, providing what she calls an accurate interpretation of Islam and Muslim lives. So, she focuses a great deal on the religious practices of Islam. She used to be a nun. To some extent, she neglects some aspects of Muslim history, such as economic and military history, and even some of its spiritual aspects. She concentrates mainly on the religious and political aspects of Islam. The book focuses on the politics of Islam, because politics is central to Muslim life, has always been and will always be. Karen Armstrong reminds Western readers that Muslims have struggled to try and establish a just life, to create a better society. Justice lies at the very heart of the Muslim search for a better future. And this is why politics is the bread and butter of Muslim life and has been for centuries. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Some have criticised Armstrong for the narrowness of her approach. But she is interested in Islam today, as opposed to earlier periods, although she doesn’t overlook earlier periods. Her best chapter is the chapter that focuses on the period 1700-2000. That comes back to the encounter between the Arab/Islamic world and the West. Her comparative treatment of fundamentalism is brilliant. But the most important contribution of this book, I would say, is not her humanism, or her attempt genuinely to understand Islam and Muslims, but her placing of politics centre stage. Armstrong examines the tensions and dialectics between tradition and modernity, between religious tradition and secularism. She shows how modernisation has greatly impacted the Islamic world and Muslim life. She argues that modernity and modernisation in the West took place across several centuries, while in the Muslim community modernity was imposed on Muslims from the outside, culminating in colonialism and post-colonialism. Muslims are modernising and trying to come to terms with modernity, while also resisting external intervention and colonialism. And this conflict has done a great deal of damage to the relationship between Islam and Muslims and Christianity and Westerners. And that’s why this chapter is very important. It tells us a great deal about Muslim efforts not only to come to terms with modernity, but to resist repeated and intense Western intervention in their own internal affairs. One of her critical points as I remember is that for Muslims it’s much more important to live a just life than to hold the right belief. Justice is more important than the right belief. And that’s why she spends so much time and space on talking about Islam’s search for a better community. That’s why Islam does not really recognise any kind of separation between the political and religious because Muslims believe that, in order to establish a just community, you need to have a religious community. Islam protects and defends a just community. Absolutely. She tells the journey of Islam from its birth in Arabia in the sixth century, to 2000. She talks about the tensions and the contradictions between tradition and modernity. The book analyses the implosion of the Muslim community after the death of the Prophet Mohammad. It talks about the differences between Sunni and Shia Muslims in Iraq and Alawite and Sunni Muslims in Syria and Turkey—the Sunnis and Shia in various countries. She reminds us that the Sunni-Shia divide in Islam is not doctrinal, in contrast to the big divide in Christianity between Catholic and Protestant. The Sunni-Shia divide is political and ideological. But it’s not philosophical or doctrinal. That’s why Armstrong’s is Islam 101. It begins with the birth and the emergence of Islam, the big debates within Islam, the expansion of Islam, and Muslim life. She looks at what matters in Muslims’ lives and the question of tradition and modernity, secularisation and the encounter with the West, in particular, how modernity impacted Muslim societies, mostly in negative ways."