Karen Armstrong: The Battle of God

By PHILIP CULBERTSON

The events of September 11 caused many people to wonder if the world had gone mad. The surprising and brutal attack alerted us to the dangerous rage of a certain type of Islamic fundamentalism.

The purpose of Armstrong's book is to document the rise of fundamentalism, not only in Islam, but in Judaism and Christianity as well, and to explain how fundamentalism's fear of modernity and secularism's disdain of faith-based ideologies fuel each other on the stage of international politics.

Armstrong carries academic credentials in all three religions. She is a former Catholic nun, teaches at London's Leo Baeck College for the Study of Judaism, and was awarded the 1999 Muslim Public Affairs Council Media Award. She is internationally recognised as a brilliant scholar of religion.

While dense, this, her 12th book, is brilliantly structured and written, allowing the reader to track the rise of fundamentalism simultaneously in Israel, America, and the Middle East - all in response to the growing perceived threat of secularism and "godless" humanism.

Because this is a serious book of religious history, it is arranged chronologically. Armstrong begins her study in the year 1492, pivotal in the history of the three religions, which then existed side by side in Spain.

She traces the expulsion of the Jews, the displacement of Islamic authority, and the assertion of a kind of hegemonic Christianity. And virtually simultaneously, in what was probably the most significant paradigm shift in history, scientific rationalism began its ultimately successful campaign for the loyalty of the Western mind. Copernicus, Nietzsche, Kant, Hegel, Descartes, Hobbes, Sartre, Freud, Darwin and Einstein - to name but a few - shaped a new "religion" of logical empiricism, human self-reliance and progress at all costs.

Ancient Greece could hold, in appropriate tension, two ways of understanding the world: mythos (the world of gods and goddesses, of symbol and ritual) and logos (the world of logic, ethics, classical philosophy and nascent psychology). The rise of scientific rationalism upset the presumed balance, by privileging logos and seemingly disenfranchising mythos.

But however much rationalism promised progress toward a better future, it could not address issues such as truth, social morals or the meaning of life - these have always been the domain of mythos. Because scientific rationalism appears to have so little heart, the devotees of mythos became increasingly alarmed, and ultimately resistant, to the point of retrenchment and eventual attack.

Armstrong follows this struggle between mythos and logos over the course of 500 years, primarily in the United States (the political power of the religious right), Israel/Palestine (the settlers of militant orthodoxy and the intifada), and selected Muslim countries of the Middle East (primarily Egypt and Iran).

She does not specifically address the Taleban - for this the best source is probably Ahmed Rashid's Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (Yale University Press) - nor document the al Qaeda network. She does, however, explain brilliantly how fundamentalism's fear of modernity becomes terrorist rage when mythos is confused with political ideology. She also cites the shortcomings of modernism, particularly its refusal to grant any empathy to the victims it creates or understanding of the resentment it inspires.

I have been a student of Christianity, Judaism and the Middle East for 30 years. My father was even a professional colleague of the Shah of Iran. And I would be the first to admit what a confusing morass of misinformation, conflicting ideologies, political chess and rage and despair the Middle East appears to be.

Armstrong's book skilfully elucidates both the religio-political philosophies at work there, and the human cost. Alarmingly, she also points out how the present split in Christianity - between the left and the right - continues to create the same carnage of faith, even to the point of Christians damning each other.

This fine work of religious history has left me both significantly enlightened and deeply saddened.

HarperCollins

$19.95

* Philip Culbertson is the Director of Pastoral Studies at St John's Theological College.