16 LISTENER SEPTEMBER 7 2019
nothing she insists, to do with the original
intent of the world’s sacred texts.
“There is a lot of crazy religion around,”
she says, “so it is important we understand
the complexity of the scriptural genre
because people are reading it with a kind of
simplicity that distorts it.”
That simplification could be a 101 class
in extremism. Christian premillennialism,
for example – the belief in Jesus’ return to
Earth – anticipates an “end time” when born-
again Christians “will relish the torments of
their enemies from the safe vantage point of
heaven”. And there is no shortage of those
who believe in that as literal fact.
The Christian Reconstructionist move-
ment is one of a number of American
evangelical organisations trying to trans-
pose Bronze Age Hebrew law into the 21st
century. Founded in the 1980s, it is seeking
a return to ancient biblical laws, including
the reintroduction of slavery, the execution
of homosexuals and the stoning of disobedi-
ent children.
US President Donald Trump has recently
sought to dial back his statement that he was
the “chosen one” in relation to trade with
China, insisting it was a joke, an instance of
sarcasm. But the comment was an uncom-
fortable echo of the new Netflix mini-series
The Family, based on US journalist Jeff
Sharlet’s investigation of the evangelical,
right-wing Christian organisation called The
Fellowship, which has been secretly influenc-
ing US politics since the 1930s. It reveals a
disturbingly totalitarian ideal of a world run
by “key men” chosen to rule over the rest
of us, and identifies Trump as perhaps the
ultimate Fellowship president.
In Islam, the 19th-century teachings of
reformer Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab
encouraged all Muslims, men and women,
to study scripture and the customary practice
(Sunnah) of the Prophet and his compan-
ions. Like Martin Luther, Armstrong explains,
al-Wahhab wanted to return to the earliest
teachings of his faith and eject all later medi-
eval accretions. He therefore opposed Shia
and Sufism, until then the most popular form
of Islam, as heretical innovations. Since then,
however, his teachings have been co-opted
into a more militant version of Wahhabi ide-
ology and a more intransigent interpretation
of the Quran, “which has not only revived
seventh-century Islamic punishments but
has also condoned the persecution of Shia
and Sufi Muslims [because their branch of
Islam] developed after the Prophet’s lifetime”.
When the US supported Israel during the
1973 Yom Kippur War, she explains, the
Saudi-led Opec imposed an oil embargo on
the West, sending the price of oil skyrocketing
and giving the kingdom all the petrodollars it
needed to impose anti-Shiite Wahhabism on
the entire Muslim world. Armstrong likens
it to a tiny sect in the US Bible Belt suddenly
given vast sums of money and international
approval to export their form of Christianity
around the world.
A whole generation of Muslims, she writes,
“has grown up with a maverick form of Islam
that has given them a negative view of other
faiths and an intolerantly sectarian under-
standing of their own”.Quranic scholar Sayyid Qutb, one of more
than 1000 members of the Egyptian Muslim
Brotherhood imprisoned by the country’s
president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, in 1954, was
radicalised by the brutality of the Egyptian
jail where he wrote Milestones, regarded as
a foundational work of Islamic extremism.
Milestones is based on the Sunnah, the body
of traditional social and legal custom and
practice of the Islamic community, rather
than the Quran. The final “milestone” is
jihad, a military campaign ending in the
conquest of Mecca. “But Qutb had distorted
the Sunnah,” Armstrong argues. By making
violent jihad the climax of Muhammad’s
prophetic career, he ignored Muhammad’s
non-violent peace initiative, which was “the
true turning point for Islam”.DEFENDING ISLAM
In a number of her books, Armstrong has
seen it as her civic duty to defend Islam,
blaming the extremism and intolerance that
have surfaced in the Muslim world in our
times on intractable political problems: oil,
Palestine, the occupation of Muslim lands,
authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, and
the West’s perceived “double standards”.
The Islamic notion of jihad, which had
been all but dead, was resurrected, says Arm-
strong, in response to the second Crusade of
the 12th century and the invasion of Mongolarmies, which conquered vast swathes of
Muslim territory in Mesopotamia and the
Volga region. It was not an outgrowth of
the inherent violence of the Quran, but the
response to a sustained assault from the West.
“But the Quran is not about jihad. After
the first four centuries [after Muhammad’s
death in 632], the so-called jihad verses that
are quoted so much today were declared to be
no longer viable or important; they referred
only to events in the Prophet’s life and the
world had moved on.”
The treatment of women? Entreaties in
the Quran for women to “make their outer
garments hang low” were designed, she says,
to protect Muslim women in Medina from
Muhammad’s enemies. Tolerance of other
religions? Seventh-century Arabs had no idea
of an exclusive religion. “Muslims saw all reli-
gions as basically compatible – there is more
about Mary in the Quran than there is in the
New Testament, but they have worked very
hard misreading their scripture to endorse
their particularism.”
Even the shahadah – the famous profes-
sion of faith that states “there is no god but
Allah and Muhammad is his messenger”,
which is recognised as the first pillar of Islam- Armstrong translates not as the denuncia-
tion of other gods but as an insistence that
a Muslim should be devoted to Allah rather
than the false gods of wealth, power and
status.
Christian belief has gone through similar
waves of radicalism. As Puritans in early Mas-
sachusetts riffled through the pages of the
Old Testament looking for life’s instructions,
their counterparts in England were smashing
religious statues in cathedrals.
In the Reformation, Catholics and Protes-
tants were so much at each other’s throats
they founded the Church of England – “a
nice compromise”, says Armstrong. The Ref-
ormation now stands as a crucial moment in
Christianity’s estrangement from its premod-
ern roots, bringing with it a more “reductive”
view of God, based on belief rather than
ritual and practice, reflecting our own prej-
udices and bringing with it some “awful”
modern hymns.
Centuries-old habits of misreading the
scriptures have less to do with spirituality
than with fear, ignorance, politics and, in
more recent times, nationalism.
“Nationalism is a form of religion,” says
Armstrong. “It gives us a sense of purpose; it
makes us feel we belong to something greater
than ourselves, something we are ready to
lay down our lives for. When you hear the
RELIGION
A whole generation of
Muslims “has grown
up with a maverickform of Islam that has
given them a negative
view of other faiths”.