18 LISTENER SEPTEMBER 7 2019
RELIGION MISUSED
Again and again, Armstrong hammers home
the belief that it is not religion at fault, but
the misuse of religion. After 9/11, she high-
lighted the perpetrators’ ignorance of Islam.
“Only 20% of them had a regular Muslim
upbringing,” she said in an interview. The
rest were new converts, non-observant or
self-taught.
The Taliban, she says, were originally war
orphans from Afghanistan. “About three
million were brought into Pakistan and put
into these very hard-line madrasas [schools] –
traumatised war orphans being instructed in
Islam by very right-wing retrograde exclusive
mullahs. This has produced the mess of the
Taliban. It is as much Afghan tribalism as it
is Islam.”
Two young men who left Birmingham in
2014 to join the jihad in Syria prepared for
their mission by reading Islam for Dummies,
which they had ordered from Amazon. The
two Kouachi brothers who took the lives of
12 people in the offices of French satirical
magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris the following
year weren’t devout Muslims, Armstrong
says. “They met in prison for petty crimes and
were living in those dreadful slums outside
Paris. One of them couldn’t even tell the
difference between Islam and Catholicism.
He got radicalised when he saw the pictures
from Abu Ghraib, then became rabidly anti-
Christian and anti-West.”
How did the apple fall so far from the
scriptural tree? Armstrong argues that it is
only recently that more authority has been
ascribed to the written text than to the oral
tradition. Traditionally, very few people read
their scripture: many were illiterate in any
case and few could get their hands on the
original texts, so the teachings “were mem-
orised and performed with music, which
evokes the more intuitive and inclusive and
empathic activity of the right hemisphere
of the brain”.
“It made it easier for you to be inventive
and you were told to be inventive about it
so you get the essential dynamic of what
the religions are trying to do: to transcend
ourselves, our selfishness and bigotry – all
of these incredible insights into how we
can live together creatively and justly and
kindly.”
All the scriptures, she insists, should be
read as myths, as “works of the imagination
intended to achieve the moral and spiritual
transformation of the individual in a spirit-
ual, allegorical and moral sense as demanded
by the times”. Instead, we treat them ashistorical documents, recording facts that
are immutable and inviolable. We extract
isolated passages, or “proof texts”, to be read
as literal endorsements of uncertainty and
intolerance. We read them cold on the page,
she writes, “like studying an opera libretto
without the music”.SEARCH FOR TRANSCENDENCE
In The Lost Art of Scripture, Armstrong ranges
across the ages to help us hear that “music”,
unravelling the sacred texts of India, China
and the three Abrahamic traditions: Judaism,
Christianity and Islam. Common to all of
these, she argues, again veering down a side
path of left brain-right brain theory, is the
idea of transcendence, the sense of some-
thing bigger than ourselves.
“That is part of our human condition.
We have all had moments when we were
touched deeply within and lifted momen-tarily beyond ourselves – in dance, poetry
or music. Our brains are constructed in this
way and that is part of our lives.”
But the major religions also have in
common a focus on empathy and justice.
“All the scriptural traditions, from the
biblical to the Chinese, insist on that fun-
damental duty of compassion and empathy,
of not building my own little nest in heaven- that is no more religious than paying into
your retirement annuity for a comfortable
life in the hereafter. We are supposed to go
back into society and work for a better and
more just world.
“In China, for example, very early in the
11th century BC, they developed the Man-
date of Heaven, which said heaven would
take away the mandate to rule from a ruler
who abused the peasantry. All states misused
the peasantry; that is the great injustice of
the agrarian society. And that is the story of
Buddhism: we often see images of Buddha
locked in contemplation, but he insisted,
after enlightenment, that the monks go back
into the world and try to heal the suffering.
“The message is political – it is about
equality and justice – but we are living in a
world that is utterly inequitable, where there
is massive disparity of wealth. Britain is a
relatively rich country, yet this year record
numbers of people have been sleeping on
the streets in London. I don’t hear the Arch-
bishop of Canterbury or the Archbishop of
Westminster or the Chief Rabbi coming out
to say this is not right, that something must
be done.”
If we forget that religion is about the
imagination and moral striving, rather than
the strict observance of unvarying doctrinal
truths, she says, “we are going to hell in a
handbasket”.
True to her urban-hermit reputation, Arm-
strong’s study is her religion. When not on
tour – she visits Pakistan regularly to give
talks on Islam – she is working from 9am
until 6pm.
“I am studying intensively all the religious
traditions – it is a spiritual quest for me. I
was enthralled by the Chinese in writing this
book and I felt I learnt so much from them,
but I can’t see any of them as superior to
any other. Each has its own particular insight
and each has its particular flaws or failings.”
Should we be teaching our children about
these similarities – and differences – between
the main religions?
“Yes, I do think so, because the way we
read religious texts today borders on the
idiotic.”
She quotes the UK’s former chief rabbi,
Jonathan Sacks: “Every scriptural canon
has within it texts which, read literally, can
be taken to endorse narrow particularism,
suspicion of strangers, and intolerance
towards those who believe differently
than we do. Each also has within it sources
that emphasise kinship with the stranger,
empathy with the outsider, the courage
that leads people to extend a hand across
boundaries of estrangement or hostility.”
And now, more than ever before, she
says, we need that courage. “We are now
one world. Our economies are profoundly
intertwined, we all share the same possibility
of environmental catastrophe, we are drawn
together more closely now than we ever were
before. So, we need to go on studying them- not just saying what they say, but saying,
‘How can we bring some of these important
insights to bear on some of the problems we
are struggling with today?’
“Religion is a part of us. We are tribal
peoples, but we can’t afford to be tribal
peoples now.” l
RELIGION
“All the scriptural
traditions, from the
biblical to the Chinese,insist on that fundamental
duty of compassionand empathy.”