The Role of Religion in the New Millennium by Muis Academy

Muis Lecture

2007

Role The

Religion in the New

Millennium Karen Armstrong

Muis Lecture Series The Muis Lecture Series is an annual series organised by the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore (Muis). It features eminent statesmen, intellectual leaders and thinkers of international standing who will deliver the Muis Lecture on topics relating to Islam and its relationship with the modern world. The Muis Lecture Series will also focus on the new trends in Muslim thoughts and ideas in dealing with change and modernity in the

18 June 2007 Ritz-Carlton Millennia Singapore

context of changing global challenges of the 21st century.

Role The

Religion in the New

Millennium Karen Armstrong 18 June 2007 Ritz-Carlton Millennia Singapore

Organised by The Islamic Religious Council of Singapore (Muis) and The Muslim Convertsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Association of Singapore (Darul Arqam)

This publication is a transcription of Muis Lecture 2007 delivered to an audience of 800 on Monday, 18 June 2007 at the Ritz-Carlton Millennie, Singapore. Copyright ÂŠ 2007 Majlis Ugama Islam Singapura Published by Majlis Ugama Islam Singapura Designed & Printed by The Print Lodge Pte Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. ISBN: 978-981-05-9074-1

DISTINGUISHED SCHOLAR’S PROFILE

Karen

Armstrong

aren Armstrong is one of the world’s leading commentators on religious aﬀairs. She is a best-selling author, whose books have been translated into forty languages. Her early work focused on the monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but she has since begun to explore the eastern religions. Her work is scholarly but written for the general reader, and has been appreciated not only by western audiences but also by Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus. She is a broadcaster, columnist, and is much sought after throughout the world as a public speaker. Her focus is not only on theology and spirituality but on the political implications of faith in the modern world.

Karen Armstrong spent seven years as a Roman Catholic nun in the 1960s. She left her teaching order in 1969. She studied English Literature at the University of Oxford, earning the degrees of B.A. and MLitt. She then taught modern literature at the University of London, and headed the English department in a girls’ public school. In 1982, she became a full time writer and broadcaster. Her books include: A History of God (1993), which became an international bestseller; Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths (1996); The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism (2000); Islam: A Short History (2000); Buddha (2001); The Spiral Staircase: A Memoir (2004); A Short History of Myth (2005); The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (2006); and Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time (2006). Since September 11, 2001, she has become chieﬂy known for her work on Islam and fundamentalism, particularly in the United States. She has addressed members of the United States Congress and the Senate on three occasions, has participated in the World Economic Forum, and spoken at an informal debate in the General Assembly of the United Nations. In 2005, she was appointed by Koﬁ Annan to take part in the United Nations initiative ‘The Alliance of Civilisations’ which completed its report on the reasons for the rise of extremism and the best means of stemming this in November 2006. In autumn 2001, Karen Armstrong was Scholar in Residence at Lowell House, Harvard University, where she also delivered the Tillich Lecture (2001), the Peabody Lecture (2002) and the Ingersoll Lecture on Immortality (2005). In addition, she has lectured at Yale, MIT, Stanford, McGill and many other universities and colleges throughout Canada and the United States. She has recently received honorary degrees at Aston University in the West Midlands, where her books are required reading in the MBA course, and at Georgetown University, Washington DC. In the autumn of 2007, she will become the William Belden Noble Lecturer at Harvard.

Transcript

Role The

Religion in the New

Millennium Karen Armstrong

The Role of Religion in the New Millennium

Karen Armstrong

our Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen. It is a great pleasure to be here in Singapore, if only brieﬂy. It is quite a daunting task in forty minutes to address myself to this enormous topic.

There is no doubt that our millennium opened with the disaster of September the 11th in 2001. That event has shattered many of the things that we took for granted during the twentieth century. We are now undergoing a process of transition. None of us knows where we are going at the moment. Things are changing. One example is in warfare. We used to think that our Cold War armies would be supreme. But we have seen in Iraq, and last summer in Lebanon, that big typical armies of the past are no longer effective against guerrillas. War will never be the same again and we are heading for something new. Now, religion is often seen as an absolute clog to progress. I could not count the number of times I had jumped into a taxi in London and the cabby had asked me what I do for a living. And if I have the energy to tell him and engage in the ensuing conversation, he then informs me quite categorically that religion has been the cause of all the major world wars in history. It [the cabby’s view] is not correct. And sometimes, I do not feel I have the energy to go into this, but it is simply not correct. Religion is thought to be inherently violent. It is often supposed, especially in my country, in the UK, to be something that drags people back to the past, makes them unwilling to welcome change, makes people intolerant, entrenches them in received positions, and is divisive. Once you get religion involved in politics, immediately everybody is at loggerheads. There is no doubt that there are problems with religion. Religion is very, very difficult to do well in. It is like an art. A lot of people can learn to play the piano but very few people are going to finish up sounding like Vladimir Ashkenazi. And there is a lot of bad religion around but perhaps it will be kinder to use the Buddhist term, a lot of ‘unskilful religion’ around. Terrorism, for example, actually, in my view, is not inspired by religion. It is a form of ‘religiously articulated nationalism’. In the 19th century, the European idea of nationalism was valiant for a long time. Actually, I think it was one of the bad ideas of the 19th century and caused two major world wars. In other parts of the world, it has never taken root. It was always a foreign idea. People were told to create nation-states and they are turning to other ways to express their identity. A movement like Hamas, for example, is not inspired by the Qur’an to do these [violent] actions. This is simply a resistance movement that expresses itself in religious terms but whose root cause is political. We live in an asymmetrical world where a certain amount of power is vested with a few nations and increasingly other nations are beginning to find ways – unfortunately, by terrorism – to fight back. We are drawn together in our societies like never before, electronically and economically. When one market goes down, there is a domino effect throughout the world. Yet, this closeness has made us polarised, as we are forced to live cheek by jowl with people who are strange and alien to us. So, can religion help us in our situation as we embark on what promises to be a rocky century? Now, there’s no doubt that there is also widespread religious disquiet with modernity. In every region of the world where a modern, secular-style Western government has established itself – that separates religion from its politics – a religious counter-cultural protest has developed, as a conscious and

deliberate reaction. It shows widespread disappointment with the promises of secularism. We often call this type of religiosity as ‘fundamentalism’. I must say at the outset that it is an unsatisfactory term. The word “fundamentalism” was coined in about 1920 by Christian Protestants in America to describe their reform movement – that they were going to go back, as they claim, to the fundamentals of the faith. But it does not translate easily into Arabic, for example. Thus, other groups naturally resent the use of this Western-Christian term which is now hoisted upon them. And it suggests too that fundamentalism is a kind of monolithic movement, whereas in fact all these groups – even within the same faith tradition – have developed independently. Their aim is to drag God and/or religion from the sidelines to which they have been relegated in modern secular culture back to centre stage. And they have certainly achieved some results, because in the middle of the 20th century it was generally taken for granted that secularism was the coming ideology and that never again would religion play a major role in public life. Well, we certainly got that wrong. Now, this is not just a knee-jerk reaction against modernity. These are essentially modern movements that could take root in no time, other than our own. They are essentially attempts to recast the old religious traditions in terms of the 20th, and now the 21st century. Every one of these movements that I have studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is rooted in a profound fear. Every single one of them is convinced that modern, secular or liberal society wants to wipe out religion. Even in the United States, people in small town America feel threatened and colonised, as it were to them, by the alien ethos of Harvard, Yale and Washington DC. And when people feel they are fighting for survival and their backs are up against the wall, that is when they push up barricades. Every one of these movements has usually begun by what is perceived to be an attack by the secularist or liberalist establishment. So, these fundamentalist movements developed in a kind of symbiotic relationship with an aggressive modernity, and with an aggressive secularism. Take, for example, the Scopes Trial of 1925 when the fundamentalists in the United States tried to ban the teaching of evolution in the public schools. They won the case but lost the war. The media did a massive number on them and told them they had no place in modernity. It was a vicious attack. The Christian fundamentalists slunk away and we thought they were finished. In fact, they were doing what other fundamentalists all over the world would do when attacked: they withdrew from the mainstream, created their own institutions, broadcasting houses, bible colleges and publishing ventures. And there they were, planning a counteroffensive which emerged in the late 1970s. My point, however, is this: that before the Scopes Trial, fundamentalists in America tended to be on the left side of the political spectrum. They were willing to work alongside liberal Christians and socialists in the slums of the newly divided and newly industrialised cities. After the Scopes Trial, they swung to the extreme right of the political spectrum where they have remained. When you attack these movements, they become more extreme. It is easy to see why: since these people think that modern society wants to wipe out religion, when we come after them – either

The Role of Religion in the New Millennium

Karen Armstrong

by the media attack or with guns – this convinces them that they were right in their suspicion that modern, liberal society, and even their own liberal co-religionists, are out to get them. Similarly, in the Muslim world, it has been very difficult for Muslims to adapt to modernity because of colonisation. Secularism, which developed very slowly and gradually in the West, has had to be developed far too rapidly in some of these countries. We had in Western Europe three hundred years to develop our secular, democratic institutions. And the new ideas of modernity were able to trickle down and reach all levels of society. But in some of these Muslim countries, secularism has been imposed so rapidly – in a mere fifty years, sometimes – that some people are inevitably left out of this modern process. Whereas a small elite in some of these countries have an understanding of what is going on, there has, for many years, been a large majority who are stuck in the old pre-modern ethos and did not recognise what is happening to their country. When Ataturk, for example, secularised Turkey, he closed down all the madrasahs, forced the Sufi orders underground and compelled all men and women to wear Western dress. These reformers needed their countries to look modern, despite the fact that a large proportion of the people did not understand what modernity was. So, this kind of secularism is not seen as liberating, as in the West, but as an assault on faith. The Shahs in Iran used to make their soldiers go out onto the streets with their bayonets and take off the women’s veils and rip them to pieces in front of them. On one occasion in 1935, Shah Reza Palavi gave his soldiers orders to shoot at hundreds of unarmed demonstrators in one of the holiest shrines in Iran. These people had been protesting peacefully against the obligatory Western clothes. Hundreds of Iranians were killed that day. In this kind of context, as you can see, secularism appears lethal. Sunni fundamentalism developed in the concentration camps, into which President Nasser entered thousands of members of the Muslim Brotherhood, often without trial. Often, these young men had done nothing more incriminating than handing out leaflets or attending a meeting. There [in the concentration camps], they were subjected to mental and physical torture. One of these people was a man called Sayyid Qutb, who entered the camp as a moderate and a liberal. In the camp, he became a fundamentalist when he looked around this disgusting prison and saw his brothers being executed and tortured. At the same time, Nasser vowed to secularise Egypt and separate religion and politics on the Western model; secularism, thus, did not seem benign. He [Sayyid Qutb] therefore developed a religious ideology to counter what seemed to him a great evil. Despite this, however, we have heard a lot of talk about the ‘clash of civilisations’. It is a convenient ploy used by certain politicians, especially in the United States, I think, to make people follow their policies. But it will be entirely wrong to think that as soon as Muslims saw the modern world, they recoiled in horror and crept back into their madrasahs and dusty tomes. When Muslims first encountered the modern West in the early 20th century, they seem to recognise it at a profound level as something deeply congenial to their own traditions. Nearly every single Muslim intellectual, with one exception, was, as I say, in love with Britain and France and wanted their countries to look just like this. In Egypt, the Grand Mufti, Muhammad Abduh, who died in about 1906, hated the British occupation of his country. But he was very much at home in Europe and conversant with European culture. He famously said, after a visit to Paris and when he returned to Cairo: “In France, I saw Islam but no

Muslims; in Cairo I see Muslims but no Islam.” It was a provocative way of saying, in his view, that the modern economy in a country such as France enabled the Europeans to institute greater equality and fairness, greater social equality and justice. And this came closer to the spirit of the Qur’an than was possible in the un-modernised or modernising Muslim countries. In Iran, at about the same time, leading Shiite clerics campaigned alongside secularist intellectuals in Iran to demand from the Shah a constitution, representational government and democratic rule. In 1906, they got their constitution; they won the case. But two years later in 1908, the British discovered oil in Iran and they were not going to let an Iranian parliament scupper their plans for the oil that was used to fulfil the British navy. So, parliament was never really allowed to function freely. But after the achievement of the constitution, the Grand Ayatollah in Najaf said that the new constitution was the next best thing to the coming of the Shiite Messiah because it would curb the tyranny of the Shah and was therefore a project that was crucial to any committed Muslim. It is poignant now to read about this early enthusiasm, which soured in many ways as a result of certain aspects of Western foreign policies – Suez Canal issue, Arab-Israel conflict, and the practice of supporting rulers who were far from democratic in order to get cheap oil. These events made democracy a bad joke. It seemed to many people in the Muslim world that the Western countries were saying, “Yes, we believe in freedom and democracy but you’ve got to have the Shah of Iran or Saddam Hussein or the Saudis ruling you.” So, it is not true that Muslims are inherently and having a knee-jerk reaction against progress. As I have said, we need to come back to the question of political asymmetry in the world and how people often use religion to articulate their distress. It is certainly not the case that Islamic civilisation is endemically opposed to modernity. It is dangerous to maintain that it does. What we have looked at, perhaps, are some unskilful versions of religion because once religiosity turns in any way to violence, it has lost the plot. Every single one of the major world traditions began as a recoil from violence. In one of my most recent books, I had traced the development of the origins of our major religious traditions in China, India and the Middle East. And in every case, the catalyst for religious change was a horror of the violence that was going on. These religions developed and had their roots in societies that were rather like our own – filled with violence on an unprecedented scale. Of course, the violence that they were up against was puny compared with what we are facing today. Nevertheless, it shocked them; and we are talking from about the 9th century BCE. The first movement was the early Hindu priests in the 9th Century BCE who began systematically to take all the violence out of the Indian liturgy. Indian liturgy had been filled with mock battles and competitions of sacred raids because this was a warrior society of ‘cowboys’. In fact, it took them two centuries [to succeed]. The Indian priests, ritualists and scientists managed to persuade the warriors to abandon their sacred war games and take up a more benign form of religion, which increasingly began to concentrate on the inner self. As they started to look within for the causes of violence in the human psyche, they began to discover the inner self, or atma. Yoga developed at about this period in India – it may have been an earlier spirituality; we are not quite sure about that.

The Role of Religion in the New Millennium

Karen Armstrong

Yoga was not, as it often is today, an aerobic exercise designed to help you to lose weight; nor was it meant to be a sort of peaceful experience to make you feel happy and be content with yourself. It was designed systematically to take the ego out of your thinking. And it was not something that you could just do in a light-hearted way like bopping in for a yoga class at the gym for twice a week. It was, pretty well, a full-time job. You had to spend hours everyday to systematically dismantle the ego. Interestingly enough, before you could begin your yoga class in the classical period, you have to undergo with your guru a long period of moral training. Top of the list was ahimsa or non-violence. And that did not simply mean you could not kill: you were not allowed to kill or swat an insect, speak an angry word, and show impatience to anybody – not even to the most annoying monk in the settlement! In your entire being, you had to show peaceable serenity and affability to all. And until your guru was satisfied that this was now second nature, you could not even begin to sit in the yogi position. Ahimsa or non-violence became absolutely crucial in India. Jesus seems to have been a man of ahimsa. In St. Matthew’s Gospel, he [Jesus] tells his followers that they must not retaliate when they are attacked. If struck on one cheek, they must turn the other. So too was Muhammad. Unfortunately, Muhammad was often depicted in the West as a warlord. Like the other founders of the major world religions, he was living in an exceptionally violent period. In the seventh century CE, when Muhammad began to receive his revelations that would later be collected in the Qur’an, Arabia had reached a crescendo of tribal violence. It had reached an unprecedented scale. Muhammad’s whole bias was against the ethos of what he would call jahiliyyah. This is often translated as ‘ignorance’ – and it certainly has connotations of ignorance – but the early Muslim text also has connotations of ‘irascibility’ and ‘aggression’. Jahiliyyah was the proud chauvinism of the desert Arab, whose life was very tough in the Arabian steppes. A tribesman had to be prepared to spring to the defence of his tribe at a moment’s notice. “I am for my tribe,” sings one of the pre-Islamic poet, “right or wrong.” And another poet says, “A true tribesman does not wait to be attacked first and act only in self-defence; the true Arab goes for the pre-emptive strike.” Thus, the ‘true Arab’ does think that his way of life – his sunnah and the sunnah of his forefathers – is the best and nobody else’s comes near it at all. I think as we speak, we can recognise there is quite a lot of jahiliyyah around today, and not merely in the Muslim world. Now, Muhammad set his sights against this and tried to promote instead, the also-traditional Arab virtue of hilma – ‘forbearance,’ and ‘mercy’. It was not as popular as the jahiliyyah thing, but this is what he tried to teach his followers. Of course, we know he had to fight the people of Mecca who were coming after him to exterminate the Muslim community. Arabs did not hang about; if the Meccans had conquered the Muslim community, they would have slaughtered every single one of the men and sold the women and children into slavery. During these five years, the Qur’an began to articulate a war of self-defence, quite different from the jahilic warfare of the Arabs. War, says the Qur’an, is always an awesome evil; but sometimes, unfortunately, it may be necessary to fight in self-defence. It is rather like the Allies who fought Hitler at the time of World War II in order to preserve decent values.

But the minute the enemy asks for peace, the Muslim must lay down his arms and accept whatever terms the enemy offered, even if they were disadvantageous to him. This is what Muhammad did himself: when the war seemed to be turning slightly in his favour, he adopted a policy of ahimsa, or non-violence. He announced to his followers that he was going to make the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. During the Hajj, violence was forbidden. You were not allowed to carry weapons, kill an insect or speak a cross word. So, Muhammad was inviting the Muslims to walk unarmed into the lions’ den and a thousand Muslims from Medina followed him. Indeed, the Meccans sent a cavalry out to kill the Muslim pilgrims but a friendly Bedouin managed to help them to escape, take them around to a Meccan sanctuary via a back route and it was there that Muhammad negotiated with the Quraish tribe and accepted terms that seemed so disadvantageous that the Muslim pilgrims with him were on the point of mutiny. But on the way home to Medina, Muhammad received a revelation in the Surah al-Fatah in the Qur’an, which said that this was a great victory, this was a manifest victory for Islam – that whereas the Meccans had been filled with “the violence of jahiliyyah” and wanting to kill their fellow Arabs who are peacefully making the pilgrimage, the Muslims had been filled with the spirit of sakinah – the spirit of peace. This was what the Muslims had in common with the Jews and the Christians, and with all of the People of God. Violence is essentially non-religious. Even violent speech, unkind remarks or nasty newspaper snide remarks are unreligious. Now, it was not enough simply to forbid violence. All the major world religions promoted compassion instead - the ability to feel with the other. It was a way of dethroning yourself from the centre of your world and put another there. The Qur’an begins every recitation with the Bismillah: ‘In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful.’ Many of them – in fact, nearly all of them – advocate what has been called the Golden Rule: ‘Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you”. The first to promote this was Confucius, five centuries before the Common Era, One of his followers one day asked him: “Master, which of your sayings is the one that is the central thread, the one that pulls it all together?” And Confucius said, “Shu, likening to the self. Look into your own heart, discover what it is that gives you pain and then refuse under any circumstances whatsoever to inflict that pain on anybody else. Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you.” This, he said on another occasion to his followers, should be practiced all day and everyday. He was one of the first people to make it crystal clear that religion was inseparable from altruism. My favourite golden rule story concerns Rabbi Hillel, the older contemporary of Jesus. It was said that one day, a pagan approached Hillel and promised to convert to Judaism on condition that the Rabbi recited the whole of Jewish teaching while he stood on one leg. Hillel stood on one leg and said: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour. That is the Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and study it.” It is a remarkable saying! No mention here of the existence of God, the creation of the world in six days, the exodus from Egypt, Mount Sinai, the 613 commandments or the promised land – things that we take to be central to Judaism. But Hillel mentioned the Golden Rule. And Hillel’s followers in Rabbinic Judaism agreed. Rabbi Akiva said that to love your neighbour as yourself was the grand principle of Torah; and all of the great Rabbis of the Talmudic Period agreed,

The Role of Religion in the New Millennium

Karen Armstrong

with one exception – and that rabbi thought that the simple phrase in the Bible that said, ‘this generation of Adam...,’ was more important because it proved that the whole human race was one. Now, this brings me on to my next point: that the religions are united in the conviction that you cannot confine your benevolence or your compassion to your own group. You have to have what one of the Chinese sages called jen ai – ‘concern for everybody’ – even towards people not in your ethnic or ideological camp. The Buddha used to make his disciples emit waves of benevolence to every single creature on the face of the Earth. Even a mosquito must not be excluded from this radius of concern. It sounds tougher than it is; you were not just supposed to sit there like a 1960s flower child and think that the world is a beautiful place. Instead, you have to start with your own self. And it is often much easier to feel compassion for someone far away than to the people in your own family – the annoying sibling, one’s ex-wife or an irritating colleague. But unless you can break down the bounds of egotism that may put you into an atmosphere of antagonism, you were not progressing. If you can break down this, you would experience, as the Buddhist would say, an ‘enhancement of life, an infinity’ because you were breaking out of the prism of selfishness which holds us back from the divine, holds us back from nirvana, or God as all theists would say. In the Jewish scriptures, in the priestly tradition of the early part, there is a great emphasis on the importance of the stranger. In Leviticus, for example, we have the ruling: ‘If a stranger lives with you in your land, do not molest him; you must treat him as one of your own people and love him as yourself; For you were strangers in Egypt.’ It is the same impulse as shu – ‘likening to the self’ – look into your own heart, look back into your own pain in the past, and refuse under any circumstances to inflict that pain on aliens and strangers in your own midst today. Now, the word ‘love’ did not imply that you were meant to be filled with warm tenderness towards these people or feelings that were neither here nor there; you could whip yourself up into any kind of emotional sentimentality. The word ‘love’ as used in the Leviticus is a technical term. It is a traditional term often used in international treaties in the ancient Middle East. For example, two kings would promise to love each other, which did not mean they have to become best mates; but they had to promise to look out for each other, support each other practically, look out for each other’s best interests and give each other absolute loyalty, that is, defend the other whenever possible. That kind of love and that kind of dedicated support is something that we could all manage. “Love your enemies,” said Jesus in the same spirit. A paradoxical saying, which is meant to show you that you must put your benevolence where there is no hope of any return. As Jesus once said, “There is nothing meritorious about loving those who love you. Do not even the pagans do the same?” You get a nice warm glow and it is nice, reciprocal and it feels cozy like a kind of ‘group egotism’. Instead, you must put your benevolence where there is no hope of any return. When the Prophet Muhammad conquered Mecca without bloodshed, he went and stood beside the Kaabah and invited his tribe, the Quraish to enter Islam. There was no force or coercion implied. The Qur’an is

absolutely definite that “There must be no compulsion in religion.” But nevertheless, Muhammad invited them: “O Quraish,” he said, “God is calling you from the chauvinism of jahiliyyah with its pride in ancestors; But remember all men came from Adam and Adam came from dust.” In other words, we are all in the same boat. None of us has anything more superior than any of the other. And then he [Prophet Muhammad] quoted from the Qur’an, those words where God says to humanity: “O people, We have created you from a male and a female, and formed you into tribes and nations so that you may know one another...” – not that you may exploit, colonise, terrorise, conquer, convert or kill, but so that “you may know one another”. The experience of living in a tribe, nation or community where you have, willy-nilly, to rub up against some recalcitrant people, teaches you to look out; it prepares you for the greater challenge of meeting the more challenging Other in other tribes or other nations. Again, it is this sense of outreach. And the Qur’an is remarkably suited for a world that needs pluralism as never before because it has an outstanding tradition that is not shared by the Jewish and Christian scriptures – of accepting and honouring the other world religions: “O People of the Book,” says the Qur’an. The Qur’an says to the Muslim to tell the People of the Book, “We believe what you believe, your God and our God is One and the same.” The Sufis – the mystics of Islam – had an especially marvellous appreciation of other faiths. It is common for a Sufi in ecstasy, to cry out aloud that he is neither a Jew, a Christian or a Muslim; he is at home equally in a synagogue, a temple, a mosque or a church because when a man has glimpsed the divine, he has left this kind of distinction behind. And earlier in my studies, I came across this quote from the great Sufi philosopher Ibn Arabi in 12/13th Century: “Do not praise your own faith exclusively so that you disbelief all the rest. If you do this, you will fail to recognise the truth of the matter. God the Omnipresent and the Omniscient cannot be confined to any one creed; for he says in the Qur’an ‘Wheresoever you turn, there is the face of Allah’.” Everyone praises what he knows – his ‘god’ is his own creature; and in praising it, he praises himself. Consequently, he blames the beliefs of others – which he would not do if he were just. But his dislike is based on ignorance. I would like to conclude with a story from the Hebrew Bible, a very early story – a rather odd story in some ways, especially as Judaism would later find it very difficult to imagine that God would appear in human form: It concerns Abraham, the father of Jews, Christians and Muslims. It was said that one day Abraham was sitting outside his tent in the hottest part of the day when he saw three strangers on the horizon. Now, strangers in ancient Middle East were dangerous people. They were not bound by the local laws of vendetta. I do not know what it is like in Singapore, but I would have problems with the thought of inviting three total strangers off the street into my own home. But that was what Abraham did.

The Role of Religion in the New Millennium

Karen Armstrong

He ran out in this great heat and prostrated himself before these three total strangers – as though they were gods or kings, brought them back into his encampment, and gave them an elaborate meal, pouring out for these three strangers all the refreshment he could to help them on their journey. And in the course of the ensuing conversation, it transpires quite naturally without any great fanfare, that one of those strangers was Abraham’s God. The act of compassion has led to a divine encounter. The compassion, as all the religions teach, is what brings us into the presence of what Jews, Christians and Muslims call God but which others call Brahman, Nirvana or the Dao. And I think it is a great importance that these were strangers. In Hebrew, the word for ‘holy’ – the word applied for God – is kadosh. It means ‘separate’ or ‘other’. And the otherness of the stranger or the foreigner can give us – if we look hard enough – intimations of that otherness; that is, God. The revulsion or fear that we feel can remind us, “Take us out of our comfort zone and bring us into transcendence!” This kind of religion, if we go back away from our sectarian concerns, can help us in the new millennium. We are now living, as I had said, in a global world. We are bound together as never before. What happens increasingly, in Gaza, Afghanistan or Iraq, aﬀects what happen tomorrow in London or New York. The Golden Rule should become a force in politics; it should also become a force in religion. Compassion is not a very popular virtue, I must say. Sometimes, when I am going around saying this [compassion as a virtue], I see, especially in religious circles, a certain mutinous expression crossing peoples’ faces because they know they ought to be compassionate but what is the fun of being religious if you cannot disapprove of people sometimes? Very often religious people seem to prefer to be right rather than to be compassionate; and here, they are just like secularists. We all prefer that. They glower with righteousness, disapproving of the other’s righteousness, and delight with their own. But we do not need to wait for a major religious leader to come along. We can act upon this call to the Golden Rule, to non-violence, to the appreciation of the Other. I have just come from Malaysia where there is an enormous disquiet among the diﬀerent ethnic communities. We have that in Europe. We have that globally with theories of ‘clash of civilisations’. Yet, religions can help. There is a core in all these traditions: the path of compassion, though often overlaid by secondary goals. It only needs to be discovered and emphasised to help us on our rocky journey through the next millennium. Thank you very much.

The Role of Religion in the New Millennium

Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong with Dr. Yaacob Ibrahim (Minister Of Environment And Water Resources, and Minister-in-charge Of Muslim Affairs), Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan (Minister for Community Development, Youth and Sports, and Second Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts), Hj. Alami Musa (President, Muis), Syed Isa Semait (Mufti of Singapore), Muhd Faiz Edwin Ignatius M (President, Darul Arqam), Imran Andrew Price (Deputy President, Darul Arqam) and interfaith leaders.

From left: Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan, Hj. Alami Musa and Mr. Muhd Faiz Edwin Ignatius M

Participants enjoying the lecture

The Role of Religion in the New Millennium

Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong engaging faith leaders

A participant during the Question-and-Answer segment

Questions &Answers

The Role of Religion in the New Millennium

Karen Armstrong

Questions &Answers

Q: In terms of spirituality, and as an academic person, how do you know beyond the Bible or the Qur’an what happens when you die? Do you go back to God, or are you perhaps reborn in another planet so that it becomes another cycle, like Buddhism perhaps?

A: What happens when you die? Well, who knows! God is transcendent. We are talking here about an absolute mystery. This is part of the human experience – that there is a dimension of human experience that goes beyond conceptual grasp. But, it is also felt to be profoundly congenial to humanity – part of our humanity. I think that is the meaning of the Christian doctrine of incarnation; you cannot think ‘God’ without thinking ‘human’ and that you cannot think ‘human’ without thinking ‘God’. The two are inextricably combined. In Buddhism, the nirvana is not a supernatural state. It is something deeply natural to humanity but which most of us are not capable of. But if we train our spirits, minds and hearts, we can have intimations of it, even be enlightened or ﬁlled with it – just as those of us who are untrained look at the physical feats of the dancer or an athlete and then see what the human body is capable of. We would never probably say that we have come to the end of our quest. The Chinese make a point of calling the Ultimate Reality, as ‘the Way’. It is the constant journey and it is during the journey that you achieve enlightenment, or transcendence. But it is a ‘way’, we are not a ‘destination’. We are indeed returning, but right up to our last gasp, we are never ﬁnished. So, if you are going to ask me what is coming in the next world, I would like to say as St. Paul did: “I have not seen, neither I have heard nor have it entered into the heart of man what things awaits those who love Him.” The Buddha would always refuse to talk about the afterlife. He said we simply do not have the words and concepts to do it. And a lot of vulgarity is talked about concerning the afterlife. There are some Christian sects that even imagined a whole lot of pleasure parks with amusement arcades in the afterlife!

But basically to imagine too much of the afterlife can become I think unreligious. In my childhood, the whole of religion was about getting into heaven. All our good deeds were on whether I am going to get into heaven and escape hell; and there is nothing religious about this. It is no more religious than there is when we talked about paying annual instalments in your retirement annuity to get a comfortable life in the hereafter. Religiosity is about the loss of ego and not about its eternal survival in optimal conditions. We cannot tell what would happen. What we have now is the quest to let our minds be ﬁlled with God more and more, and with humanity in our hearts.

Q: If this [the way of compassion] is the essential core of all religions, why do you think so many followers have missed the point?

A: Because, as I had said, people do not want to be compassionate. There are, often, religious people who want religion to give them a little uplift once a week or so. And then they returned unscathed by the demands of the tradition to their ordinary lives of getting and spending et cetera. The Buddha, when he thought he might be asked to preach his message, said: “I do not want to do this because people do not want to lose their egotism. People want religion to make them more so, to enhance them.” Often, religion is used as an identity marker, rather than as a self-abandonment in quest of the Other. So, as I had said, religion is like an art. A lot of people can learn the piano, a lot of people can do a little sketching or something, but do they really want the pain and angst of going all the way with music or painting? Do we want the agony and the ecstasy of writing poetry, for example, instead of just writing a few little jingles or cheery verses? I think it is just that: that there is a sort of laziness within us and that we go for it in as little time. Then, selﬁshness gets in the way of laziness and we give it up. But when you meet somebody who is compassionate through and through, it changes your life. There are various people I’ve met who remained icons for me: of what a human being can be. The Confucians had a wonderful image of the compassionate man: ‘walking through the world and emitting benevolence around him’. They say that if a ruler could be truly benevolent, the whole world will ﬂock to that ruler. And if enough of us were compassionate, then I think we can change the world. But, compassion demands heroism. Think of Nelson Mandela, for example. On the day he came to the presidency, there was a banquet and he saw his jailor at the back of the room. He invited the jailor to sit with his family. To keep that mind open after years and years of imprisonment and hopelessness

The Role of Religion in the New Millennium

Karen Armstrong

has probably helped South Africa make her transition. If there were a few people of that calibre in the Middle East for example, then perhaps the situation can be slightly ameliorated.

Q: Today, in this society, we have a lot of calls for Islam to be moderated. So, the only way for Islam to survive in this day and age is for it to change in order to adapt to modern society. But you had said earlier that Islam need not be moderated. In fact it needs to go back to its roots of compassion in order to survive. My question to you is: Do you think that it is possible with compassion alone to succeed in the current political situation in the world?

A: I think it is the only thing that will succeed in this modern political context. If we continue with the way we are going at the moment – with pure self-interest and short term goals – we are going to get into a worse mess. We have got to start listening to the pain and the distress that lies at the root of so much alienation in this world. These religious sages are very pragmatic; they did not preach compassion because they thought it sounded nice and good, yet impractical. Religious people are pragmatic. They have found that if you were compassionate, as Confucius said, “all day and everyday”, it changed you. It is of no use to sit on the brink, saying, “Well, do you think the Golden Rule worked or not?” Religious teachings only prove their truth when they are put into practice. That is where the West has often lost the plot, thinking about “Do I believe in God or not?” before living a religious life. The traditional thing would be to commit yourself to a compassionate lifestyle, and then you know what is God even if you cannot ﬁnd God. We have seen the folly of not observing the Golden Rule globally, of not treating other people as though they were of equal importance to ourselves; as though their aspirations were not as important as our own short term economic goals. We have seen what can happen. As I had said, it has nothing to do with feelings; it has nothing to do with sudden good-hearted tenderness. It is, in fact, a fundamental respect for all human beings. And in our global world, where people have found very eﬀective ways of hitting back, do we not do this? The only hope is to cultivate a politics of respect.

Q: You have made a distinction between secularisation in Europe and the secularisation of a country that has gone through the process of colonisation - with the conclusion being, that the secularisation in a colonised country is premature and therefore often enforced. Most of the examples you had brought up are Muslim countries: Egypt and Turkey. Could it be that secularisation and Islam are not compatible? Malaysia, for instance, is constitutionally Muslim and modern in outlook but has some peculiar manifestations in implementing a religious state.

I think secularism has proved to be essential for us in Europe because it was an idea that

emerged during the European Enlightenment, after the 16th and 17th century where politics and religion had merged and been disastrous with wars, articulated by the killing of Protestants by Catholics and of Catholics by Protestants. So, the Enlightenment’s founding fathers said: “Let us separate religion and politics.” It was also found to be essential for the modern project because modernity depends, not on ideas, but on the economy; and in order to keep it productive, inventors, scientists and businessmen had to be free. They certainly do not need priests tapping them on their shoulders and putting them back into line. This proved to be essential. In other parts of the world, modernity will take a different course. It was not just about colonisation, actually, although colonisation has made the passage to modernity more difficult. Countries where modernisation was delayed for one reason or another had to introduce secularism too rapidly and according to somebody else’s program, not according to the dynamics of their own civilisation. This is not likely to put down much roots among the people, especially when they had experienced secularism as lethal. In Iraq, for example, people are not likely to want a secular state when their experience of secularism had been Saddam Hussein. We have to remember that secularism had its great failures with Hitler and Stalin. It can prove to be as bigoted as a religious state. It is just human nature that does this. So I think there is no need – and I think it is a mistake – on the Western part to insist prematurely that everybody has got to be secular on the Western model. I agree that we do not want bad religious states. But in my view, I think religion is a veteran opposition to the state – challenging the state. And indeed, I do not think this [separation of religion and politics] is not possible for Muslims. For centuries, Shiites separated religion and politics as a matter of sacred principle. And that was what was revolutionary about Khomeini’s claim that a cleric will be a head of state. Many Shiites found that claim shocking – as if the Pope should suddenly abolish the mass. So, this idea of separation of religion and politics has been rife in the Muslim world. Even in the high caliphate times, the court lived by a different ethos from the rank-and-file. It was known as the adab. It was more secular – with aristocratic ethos – than the egalitarian spirit of the Qur’an. Politics is a really dirty business. Religion, as I had said, is all about the loss of ego and politicians are not known for that. This is especially so in the democratic world, where they have to coax for votes and see themselves on television.

The Role of Religion in the New Millennium

Karen Armstrong

Plus, they are bound to be chauvinistic - jahiliyyah – about their own parties, their own nations, and self-interest, embroiled in material things. It is very difficult, as you may find in religious history, to bring to bear the ideals of religion in the grim world of political life. That is why I think religion is best in a kind of ‘prophetic’ role: When Prophet Nathan comes to David and tells him a story of great injustice, David says, “Who is the person that does this, and I will punish him.” And Nathan says, “You are the man; you have done that.” I think this is where religion can be most effective in speaking up for the poor, the oppressed, the suffering – wherever they may be, not just in your own nation. Instead of worrying whether we can have a secular state or religious state, this is something we can all do now.

Q: Theory is good, compassion is good but if someone keeps killing one of you, and doing injustices against you, is it not quite difficult to be compassionate? Another related question: In a society where you worship money, is it not difficult for you to be compassionate? And the last related question: With a focus on Islam, you rightly mentioned that one cannot confine compassion only to his own group because religion advocates compassion for all. However there is a perception amongst non-Muslims that Islam advocates enmity against non-Muslims. How do you think Muslims can resolve this problem?

A: It is easy for me to talk about compassion when I have lived an extremely privileged life. I have never feared a knock on the door; I have never been seriously hungry; I have been able to publish what I chose; and I have been educated free of charge in one of the best universities in the world – I have been enormously privileged and I am therefore a tiny, tiny percent of the population. But still, I am convinced that to respond to violence with violence will just breed more violence. And it destroys your soul as well. Even in my own life, I have experienced a certain amount of oppression and misunderstanding. We all have experienced it, one way or another. And I know at times, it had made me bitter and angry and that I have been diminished – my humanity has been diminished by it and you are given over to enmity. I can understand it. It is easy for me, in my privileged position, to say it. But someone has to break the cycle of violence. And somehow, if you look at Mandela, Tutu or Gandhi, those non-violent campaigns were effective in showing up the brutality of a regime. The trouble is when you go to war to make peace – as you had seen, not only with oppressed people but with the superpowers. When you go to war to make peace, you end up being as bad as the people that you are fighting and you end up betraying the kind of values that you were supposed to be fighting for. Think about Abu Ghraib. Think of Guantanamo Bay.

Compassion is hard, indeed. It is one of the hardest things in the world. Unless we let the sufferings of the world flood our hearts, let our hearts break with the pain of it, and try to help oppressed people wherever they are, we are leaving them to the prison of loneliness where it is all too easy for them to turn to hatred, despair and more violence. Look at September 11th: some of the worst casualties are Muslims – apart from the people who actually died at the World Trade Centre. When you are in Morocco, for example, the Moroccans will tell you: “We are really suffering from Sep 11th. Tourism has just plummeted. Our whole economy depends on that.” In America, there are Muslims who felt that they were really in tune with the Americans – they used to say to me frequently, “Before Sep 11th, America is the best place to be a Muslim. It is easier to be a good Muslim in the United States than it is in Iraq.” Now, they do not feel that anymore because of a wave of hatred and suspicion. You can make it worse for your people, sometimes, by resorting to violence. That is what I am saying. Compassion is one of the hardest things in the world, I know. About money worship: Christianity has a particular problem with money; I know we are not supposed to have any. Give it all to the poor, said Jesus. Do not build up treasure for yourselves on earth but build up treasure in heaven; do not bother to get a job; be like the birds in the air, the lilies in the field; you do not have to worry about tomorrow. And yet, it is this religion that gave birth to capitalism or that helped to endorse capitalism in the 16th century with Calvinism. So, it always seems to me to be a remarkable transition and believe me, it will be far easier for Muslims to accept democracy and secularism. Then, that will be an amazing transition. But in Judaism and Islam, it is not wrong to have money as long as you share it around a bit: You do not hog it for yourself. And you make a point that if you are privileged, you share it with those who are in need. That is something we could all do, however well-placed we are. On Muslims hating non-Muslims? Well some of them seem to. But they are misquoting the Qur’an. Non-Muslims always quote those verses of sort: “Slay the unbelievers wherever you find them.” This has nothing to do with belief. These are the jahiluns. It has nothing to do with believing things. These are the kafiruns. ‘Unbeliever’ or ‘infidel’ is an entirely wrong translation. These are the arrogant, aggressive, chauvinist people of Mecca and everybody knew exactly who they were. They were the people fighting Muhammad and Muhammad was telling the Muslims this verse on the eve of battle. No general is going into battle and say, “Turn the other cheek, guys.”

The Role of Religion in the New Millennium

Karen Armstrong

The point is: everybody knew who the jahiluns were. This is a very small society. You could name them; just like in Mrs. Thatcher’s days where some Tory politicians were known as the ‘wets’, and everybody knew to a man or a woman, who these ‘wets’ were. It had nothing to do whether these people were dripping with moisture or not. And similarly, in John Major’s time, there was a smaller group of conservative politicians known as the ‘Bastards’. They rang large and loud on every newspaper and someone coming from outside might thought that suddenly the press had gotten obsessed with people born out of wedlock. But in fact, everybody knew exactly who these people were. It is the same with the Qur’an. Afterwards, Muhammad made peace with these jahiluns formally, and some of them received high office in the Muslim state. This is not an undying hatred towards unbelievers or people who do not follow the Muslim faith. And indeed, Islam has a far, far better record of living side by side with other religious traditions than Western Christianity, for example. Spain, where Jews, Christians and Muslims co-existed peacefully, is one example. Jerusalem is another example. Jerusalem for the first five hundred or six hundred years of Muslim rule had a Jewish and Christian majority. When the Muslims conquered Jerusalem, they brought Jews back to Jerusalem and they invited them back to Jerusalem – under the Christian Byzantines, the Jews had been forbidden permanent residence in the Holy City. Caliph Umar invited them back. And seventy Jewish families from Tiberius took up residence alongside the Muslims and the Christians, and they remained the majority. So, I think we have got to remember that long tradition of coexistence, of appreciation of other traditions. It is tragic that the political vicissitudes and horrors in the 20th century have persuaded some of the Muslims to abandon this marvelous tradition of tolerance.

Q: You had made a reference to the effect that all of us, humans, should marginalise our religious differences and become one universal brotherhood. To me it sounds like a move towards homogeneity.

A: No, no. God forbid. We have seen enough conglomerates, mergers and that kind of thing. No! I am simply suggesting. I am a sort of rather freelance person, but I do not suggest that kind of path to other people because of my own rather peculiar religious past.

I think by far the best thing is to remain in the tradition into which you were born – if you can – because all the religions have everything you need, basically. Each one has its own particular genius and in each, its particular vulnerabilities and failings. But what we can do is to learn to appreciate each other, stop slugging each other oﬀ and learn to look at what we have in common and get tips from one another. I think Christians can learn a lot from the Buddhists, for example. Christians tend to be obsessed with dogma, doctrine, theology and belief; they can perhaps learn a lot from Buddhists, and also from Jews and Muslims, about the importance of practice rather than theology. That kind of pooling of insights, I think, can go on. I do not like the term ‘toleration’. I think it is too grudging a word, really – it suggests putting up with someone nobly. I think we need, instead, to go now for appreciation of other traditions. I spent my life studying world religions and there are plenty to appreciate.

Q: Two questions on issues of secularism and religion, side by side. You alluded to secularism as a phase in this century. Do you think secularism is still relevant and possible? Do you have any thoughts about how it can be ingrained in our social and cultural ethos? The second question relates to the other side that some authors such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have written about religion and ‘the end of faith’. Your comments, please.

A: Is secularism still possible? Yes. You have to see that secularism, like religion, has failed from time to time - but it also has its successes. Some of you may not be enthusiastic about the United States, but nevertheless it was the first secular republic and it is also the second most religious country in the world after India. And by no means is America entirely fundamentalist. We tend to stereotype the Americans. I spend a great deal of time in the United States and astonishingly, interesting religious developments are going on there. They have a great move to pluralism, to appreciation of other faiths, to asking really hard questions about the nature of God, about the nature of prayer et cetera. And so, secularism can certainly work – but like religion, it can be unskilful. No human system is perfect but I think the West has benefited from it [secularism]. But violent secularism – like the people in Europe who published those wretched cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad – is different. These people were secular fundamentalists. But on the other hand, you had Muslims who burn down the embassies. The whole dispute was thus fuelled by extremists on both sides.

The Role of Religion in the New Millennium

Karen Armstrong

Polls were taken that showed 97% of Muslim youth interviewed were offended by the cartoon, but highly disapproved of the violence of some of the protesters. Similarly, most of the Danish people who believed in free speech were really upset to have caused such offence. We must remember that extremes are always bad and though secularism has sometimes failed, the West has benefited from it and it has been good for us after our disastrous attempts to mix religion and politics. Now Dawkins is another secular fundamentalist, in my view. He is a typical Brit in many ways. There is a sort of disdain for religion among the chattering classes in London. Most of my friends think I am mad to spend my life working on discredited stuff. When I was writing A Short History of Islam, one of my best friends said to me, “Karen, when are you going to write something interesting for a change?” And Dawkins seemed fanatically obsessed on the crusade to discredit religion. I have been on panels with him and when you try to explain, for example, that until the 19th century, no Jew and no Christian ever imagined that the first chapter of Genesis was the literal historic account of the origin of life, he just looks at you and then goes on with his tirade about how Christians are always taught in this way. I can see why, after our disastrous experience in the 20th century in Europe with two world wars and the Nazi holocaust in which many of the churches were implicated and which raised huge questions about the nature of God, people became wary of religion in Europe. We are beginning to look endearingly old-fashioned in our secularism. Some forms of this kind of quest can be more religious in my view than a weary lazy theism that says, “Oh, God knew what He was doing when the six million Jews died.” There must be really serious questioning and sometimes I think that the kind of secularism Dawkins represents – that kind of retreat from religion – can be good. Maybe, in a restaurant when you have had a strong tasting first course, people will bring you a sorbet to clean your palate so that you can taste what comes next. I think many Europeans simply want to rinse their minds off a lot of bad, inadequate theology that they have been fed over the years. But some people like Dawkins are just fanatical about it. I do not like people with closed minds. It seems to me that his mind is closed. Secular fundamentalists can be just as bigoted about religion as religious fundamentalists can be about secularism.

Q: I agree with you on the need to increase compassion as the essence of religion but will like to contest the fact that you said people are lazy to think or that you said no one knows life in the Hereafter. We do know [about life in the Hereafter], primarily because by sticking to the tenets of your religion, you will have the best shot to the Hereafter. So, the underlying sentiment is salvation: you stick closely to your religion and you will be safe and therefore you reject others. Comments, please.

A: I do not want to interfere with anybody’s beliefs. If people want to believe, for example, that God created the world in six days, this is not a belief I can share but it does not matter to me. I do not care what people believe, as long as it makes them kind. If your belief makes you a kinder person, nice, good to others, willing to share your wealth, concern about the state of the world – then that is ﬁne, as far as I am concerned. But if they make you close-minded, unkind, belligerent of others, unjust to others, dismissive of others – then whether your beliefs is of a liberal secularist or a traditional religionist, I do not think they would work. Theology is a must but its teaching must lead to compassion. The Buddha says that after achieving Enlightenment, a man must come down from the mountain top, and practice compassion for all living beings. So, I think beliefs are ﬁne and I welcome them; I have no interest in dismantling beliefs in descriptions of heaven. If it serves you well and helps you in your quest to be compassionate and kind, then that is what religion is about. Thank you!

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