What Karen Armstrong manifested about Christianity and Islam

I'd like to share this article as something to ponder about in conjunction with Christmas and the upcoming eidul adha celebration.It is an article from islamonline.com (click here).



“The Muslim prophet born in Bethlehem”- Armstrong
12/23/2006 9:00:00 AM GMT


The relationship between Christianity and Islam has become one of the most important issues of our time. This topic could not be more appropriate as Chrisman Eve draws near, as well as Muslims’ Eid ul Adha festival. It’s important to cite incidents from history where Islam and Christianity lived together with no conflict between both faiths' followers. It’s also important to draw lessons from history of both religions to confront the widespread misconception about Islam and Muslims, portrayed by most media organisations in the West and those profiting from a continuing strife between Christians and Muslims, as enemies of Christians.

“In 632, after five years of fearful warfare, the city of Mecca in the Arabian Hijaz voluntarily opened its gates to the Muslim army. No blood was shed and nobody was forced to convert to Islam,” said a recent article by Karen Armstrong (pic above), who was nun before becoming a prolific writer, television broadcaster and prominent figure on the London media scene, known for her writings aimed at helping Westerners, particularly her own countrymen, develop a better understanding of Islam and its Prophet.

When writers talk about the "clash of civilizations", they focus on “a looming conflict between Christianity and Islam”. When neo-cons in the United States articulate their world view, they identify Islam as their enemy. Why has the relationship between Christianity and Islam become so problematic?

In her article on The Guardian, Armstrong, one of the most provocative, original thinkers on the role of religion in the modern world, intended to show “people in the west, who have regarded Islam as the implacable enemy of Christianity ever since the crusades,” that contrary to what’s being said about Muslims nowadays and the active campaign led by hardline politicians and media organisations in the West against Muslims, “for centuries Muslims cherished the figure of Jesus, who is honored in the Qur'an as one of the greatest of the prophets and, in the formative years of Islam, became a constituent part of the emergent Muslim identity.”

“There are important lessons here for both Christians and Muslims - especially, perhaps, at Christmas.

"The Qur'an does not believe that Jesus is divine but it devotes more space to the story of his virginal conception and birth than does the New Testament, presenting it as richly symbolic of the birth of the Spirit in all human beings (Qur'an 19:17-29; 21:91).

Also trying to enlighten people in the West with more understanding of how Qur’an praised Jesus and showed special respect for his figure, Armstrong stated:

“Time and again the Qur'an insists that, like Muhammad himself, Jesus was a perfectly ordinary human being and that the Christians have entirely misunderstood their own scriptures. But it concedes that the most learned and faithful Christians - especially monks and priests - did not believe that Jesus was divine; of all God's worshippers, they were closest to the Muslims (5:85-86).

“Jesus, it was felt, had an affinity with Muhammad, and had predicted his coming (61:6), just as the Hebrew prophets were believed by Christians to have foretold the coming of Christ. The Qur'an... denied that Jesus had been crucified, but saw his ascension into heaven as the triumphant affirmation of his prophethood. In a similar way, Muhammad had once mystically ascended to the Throne of God.

“(Jesus) was a great model for Muslim ascetics, preaching poverty, humility and patience. Sometimes he took sides in a political or theological dispute: aligning himself with those who advocated free will in the debate about predestination; praising Muslims who retired on principle from politics ("Just as kings have left wisdom to you, so you should leave the world to them"); or condemning scholars who prostituted their learning for political advancement ("Do not make your living from the Book of God").”

Stressing that Jesus held a special place within early Islam, Armstrong further stated:

“The Muslim devotion to Jesus is a remarkable example of the way in which one tradition can be enriched by another. It cannot be said that Christians returned the compliment. While the Muslims were amassing their Jesus-traditions, Christian scholars in Europe were denouncing Muhammad as a lecher and charlatan, viciously addicted to violence. But today both Muslims and Christians are guilty of this kind of bigotry and often seem eager to see only the worst in each other.”

“The Muslim devotion to Jesus shows that this was not always the case.”

In her book, Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time, Armstrong attempted to confront the boundless ignorance among non- Muslims about Islam and its Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), as well as Islamophobia that soared noticeably following Sept. 11 attacks on the United States and the smear anti-Muslims campaign that followed the event, negatively affecting lives of many Muslims living in the West.

Armstrong depicted the holy Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) as both a mystic touched by God on a mountaintop and a canny political and social reformer who preached loyalty to God rather than tribe; reconciliation rather than retaliation and cared for orphans and the poor; and in many incidents empowered and supported women, which might surprises many in the West who believe that Islam doesn’t pay much attention to the women’s rights.

In her introductory note to her biography, Muhammad, she writes:

"Islam is a universal religion and there is nothing aggressively oriental or anti-Western about it. Indeed, when Muslims first encountered the colonial West during the 18th century, many were impressed by its modern civilization and tried to emulate it."
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Karen Armstrong biography

(click this for source)

Karen Armstrong spent seven years in the Society of the Holy Child Jesus during the 1960s and later wrote a tell-all book, "Through the Narrow Gate" (St. Martin's Press, 1982) that bemoaned the restrictive life. (The frightened nuns did not know the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 had ended for several weeks; they were not allowed to inquire about the outside world.) Armstrong is still hearing about the book: "Catholics in England hate me. They've sent me excrement in the mail." Readers who have followed her lately are learning her more optimistic ideas about what Islam, Judaism and Christianity have in common with A History of God (Ballantine, 1993), Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths (Knopf, 1996) and The Battle for God (Knopf, 2000) which all focus on what unites the three great monotheist faiths.

Armstrong teaches Christianity at London's Leo Baeck College for the Study of Judaism. It was her first trip to Jerusalem in 1983 that piqued her interest in commonality among faiths. "I got back a sense of what faith is all about." At the time she was an atheist who was "wearied" by religion and "worn out by years of struggle." Born a Roman Catholic in the countryside near Birmingham, England, in 1945, she gave up on religion after her time in the convent. "I was suicidal," she said of life in her late 20s. "I didn't know how to live apart from that regimented way of life."

With an undergraduate degree in literature from Oxford University, she began teaching 19th and 20th century literature at the University of London and worked on a PhD. Three years later, her dissertation was rejected. Without it, she did not qualify to teach at the university level and took a job as head of the English department at a girls' school in London. Not long afterward, she was diagnosed with epilepsy. "After six years at the school I was asked to leave, but nicely," she said. "My early life is a complete catastrophe. It all worked out for the best."

She left the school in 1982 and began working on television documentaries. The story that took her to Jerusalem set her on a new career path and changed her earlier impressions about God. She went from atheist to "freelance monotheist" but has never returned to the Catholic Church or joined any other.

Since her writing career took off, Armstrong's communion with God occurs in the library, where she spends up to three years researching her books, which are as densely packed with detail as her conversations. "I get my spirituality in study," she said. "The Jews say it happens, sometimes, studying the Torah."

Armstrong says, "It's inevitable that people turn to more than one religious tradition for inspiration," she said. "It's part of globalization." She recently read from the Buddhist canon of teachings for her next book. "Religion is like a raft," she said, explaining the Buddha's view of it. "Once you get across the river, moor the raft and go on. Don't lug it with you if you don't need it anymore." She knows that mode of travel: Leave one raft behind to pick up the next just ahead.

She is the author of numerous books on religious affairs which have been translated into forty languages. She is also the author of three television documentaries and took part in Bill Moyers’s television series Genesis. Since September 11, 2001, she has been a frequent contributor to conferences, panels, newspapers, periodicals, and throughout the media on both sides of the Atlantic on the subject of Islam.

In 2005 she published A Short History of Myth, the first volume in an ambitious project undertaken by Canongate Books to retell the great myths of the world - a project that they estimate will take 30 years to complete.

In 2006 she published The Great Transformation, and is now rewriting her biography of the prophet Mohammed. When asked about this project, during an interview on New York Public Radio in 2006 she said, ' "I have rewritten my biography of the prophet Mohammed, based on the latest research - he was not a warrior, but he found himself, like many of the Axial Age sages, in a violent society and he eventually brought peace to the region by practicing a daring policy of non-violence worthy of Ghandi. He stopped the violence and went into Mecca unarmed and forced the Meccans to negotiate with him accepting terms that his followers thought were disgraceful."