Author Q&A, Part 2

The Battle for God; A History of Fundamentalism
by Karen Armstrong

(Page 5 of 6)

JH: Do you still regard yourself as a Catholic?

KA: No, I would call myself a freelance monotheist. My main source of spiri-tuality is study. When I immerse myself in the sacred texts, whatever they happen to be, I live moments of awe and wonder and transcen-dence.

This is one of the common experiences of the twentieth century. Peo-ple don't want to leave their own traditions, but they are reaching out instinctively to other faiths. Our society is becoming more and more global, and religious pluralism is one aspect of it.

JH: And yet the fundamentalists you write about in The Battle for God would be aghast at the idea of religious pluralism, wouldn't they?

KA: Some people feel very threatened by pluralism, and they want to assert their identity more strongly than ever before, out of fear, by erecting new barriers. Fear is at the heart of fundamentalism - the fear of losing yourself.

But you can't escape modernity. Ironically, the very stance of choos-ing to be a fundamentalist is a modern stance, and most of the funda-mentalist ideologies could not have taken root in a time other than our own. A Christian who reads the Bible from a fundamentalist point of view, for example, is reading it in a way that would have been impossi-ble prior to the invention of printing and widespread literacy.

The Ayatollah Khomeini, too, was a man of the twentieth century, innovative and revolutionary, and his politics were typical Third World politics - anti-imperialist and antiAmerican. Like any modern politi-cian, he appealed directly to the people, and he overturned centuries of Shiite tradition.

JH: The final chapter of The Battle for God is titled "Defeat?" What do you intend to say about the future of fundamentalism with that provocative question mark?

KA: Fundamentalism cannot be defeated, and, in a sense, fundamentalists have won a great victory. By the middle of the twentieth century, it was generally assumed that religion would never again play a role in great events. Today, however, no government can ignore it. Israel began as a defiantly secular state, for example, but now the Prime Minister of Israel must go hat in hand to the religious parties to make a government. In Egypt, Islamic fundamentalism is as popular today as Nasserism was in the 1960s. Even in the United States, politicians have to flaunt their born-again credentials. At the height of the Lewinsky scandal, we saw President Clinton attending a prayer breakfast and weeping and saying he had sinned.

But, on another level, fundamentalism represents a defeat for the religious traditions that fundamentalists are fighting to preserve, because they tend to downplay compassion, which all the world faiths insist is the primary religious virtue, and overstress the more belligerent and intolerant aspects of the tradition. At the root of fundamentalism are nihilism, hopelessness, and despair.

We have to try to make the huge imaginative effort to put ourselves in the shoes of the fundamentalists because they threaten our values just as we threaten theirs. If we understand a bit more clearly what the fun-damentalists really mean, if we learn to read the imagery of fundamen-talism, we take the first step in learning about and understanding each other. You can make war in a minute, but peace takes a long time.

I called my book The Battle for God not just because it was a snappy title but because I saw a society that is so polarized that the two sides are not yet ready to come to the table. Both sides are cowering in their corners and looking out at the same world but they don't see the same thing. We've got to learn to listen. One of the things I am trying to do in my book is to decode some of the fundamentalist imagery so that we can see what lies at the root of what they're trying to say - the myths and dreams, the fears and anxieties. Instead of dismissing fundamentalists as a bunch of loons and crazies, we must listen to what they have to say.

Excerpted from The Battle for God by Karen Armstrong. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Karen Armstrong's first book, the bestselling Through the Narrow Gate, described her seven years as a nun in a Roman Catholic order. She has since published numerous bestselling books, including A History of God, Islam: A Short History, Buddha, The Spiral Staircase and most recently The Great Transformation. She is a freelance writer and she lives in London.