Karen Armstrong OBE is a historian of religion, whose books on the
traditions of India, China, Judaism, Christianity and Islam have been
translated into forty-five languages. They include, A History of God, which was
an international bestseller; The Battle for God, A History of Fundamentalism; Islam: A Short
History, Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time; Buddha; The Great Transformation: The
Origin of Our Religious Traditions and most recently Fields of Blood;
Religion and the History of Violence. In 2007 she was appointed by
Kofi Annan to the High-Level Group of the UN Alliance of Civilizations with the
task of diagnosing the causes of extremism. In 2008, she was awarded the TED
Prize and began working with TED on the Charter for Compassion, created online
by the general public, crafted by leading thinkers in Judaism, Christianity,
Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism. It was launched in the fall of 2009
and has become a global movement. Also, in 2008 she was awarded the Franklin D.
Roosevelt Four Freedoms Medal. In 2013, she received the British Academy’s
inaugural Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Transcultural Understanding and in 2015 the
ISESCO prize for educators. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
and a Trustee of the British Museum.
Below is a transcript of the introduction of her talk:
I am told repeatedly in eerily the same number of
words every time, religion has been the cause of all the wars in history, and
that’s a very odd remark because we know that the two world wars were not
fought for religion but for secular nationalism. Military historians tells us
that we never go to war for a single reason; there are always multiple factors,
interlocking factors involved, territorial, political, cultural and above all,
economic, the competition for scarce resources. And similarly, experts in
terrorism tell us that, whatever the motivation for a terrorist atrocity,
terrorism is always inescapably political, and yet it seems to me that we make
a scapegoat of religion, piling all the blame on that and not examining all the
factors that are before us, and at this very dangerous moment in history, we
need clarity.
Part of our problem is that we in the west have
developed a very peculiar view of religion, dating back to the 18th
century enlightenment, when we separated religion from politics. Before the
enlightenment, what we called religion, spirituality permeated all aspects of
life. So by trying to take politics, for example, out of religion, would be
like taking the gin out of a cocktail. So when people thought politically in
religious terms, this wasn’t because they were too stupid to distinguish things
which were essentially distinct, rather questions such as injustice and
inequity, human pain, poverty, suffering, these are matters of sacred import.
And the prophets of Israel, for example, would have
had no time for people who said their prayers nicely in the temple, but did not
address themselves to the plight of the poor or allow their rulers to get away
with war crimes and other atrocities. Now, similarly, when we’re looking at a
situation today, it’s often said, if only people would stop mixing religion
with politics, and Islam in particular is seen as something inherently violent.
This is a myth that has taken deep root in the western world since the time of
the crusades, when it was actually Christians inflicting a gratuitous violence
on the Muslim world, rather a projection of their own unease about their
behavior onto the enemy.
But we really must try to avoid all these
stereotypical ways of looking at Islam, we can’t afford that kind of myopia.
People are always saying, well, we had a reformation, they need to reform
themselves as we did. This shows an absolutely embarrassing ignorance of
Islamic history, which is punctuated continually with movements of renewal and
reform, just like any other faith. There are many political factors that are
involved in the distress in the region in the middle east, not least, the
colonialist. The French and the British, who set up the nation states that we
have in the region today, they almost set them up to fail, making them
inherently unstable.
Now we’ve got plenty evidence about the role of Islam
in the atrocities that we’ve been thinking about all day, but they don’t get
much traction in the west. Gallop, for example, did the biggest poll that it
had ever undertaken after 9-11 in 35 Muslim majority countries and they
discovered that, when they asked the question, were the 9-11 attacks justified,
93% of respondents said, no, they were not justified. And the reason they gave
for this were entirely religious, they quoted the Koran which says, to kill a
single person is to destroy a whole world. The 7% who said they were justified,
their reasons were entirely political.
If religion is not all about violence as the myth
says, then what is it about and what should religion be doing to
counter-balance this appalling state of affairs. In 2008, I won the TED prize
and TED gives you a wish for a better world which they promise to make happen
and I knew at once what I wanted because I got absolutely sick and tired of
hearing religious leaders coming together and pronouncing on some abstruse
point of doctrine, condemning this or condemning that and they never mentioned
compassion, even though my studies showed me that whatever I was writing about,
whether it was a history of God, a history of Jerusalem, a history of
fundamentalism, I kept being drawn back inexorably to the issue of compassion.
Every single one of the major world faiths has developed
its own version of what is called the golden rule, never treat others as you
would not like to be treated yourself, and said that this is the essence of
faith, the test of true spirituality; and if the world needs anything at the
moment, it is compassion.
Check out the full lecture:
Check out her Compassion Charter:
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