On Friday, Bill Moyers Journal featured a nearly hour long interview with Karen Armstrong, religious scholar, former nun and author of books such as Muhammad: A Biography Of The Prophet, The Bible: A Biography, and The Battle for God. A major focus of the interview was her focus on compassion.
In his introduction, Moyers, "Karen Armstrong is now on a mission to bring compassion, the heart of religion, as she sees it, back into modern life."
BILL MOYERS: Last year, at an annual gathering of the leaders in technology, entertainment and design, she received their highly prestigious TED Prize, a $100,000 cash award that, like the genie in the lamp, also grants the recipient a wish.
Clip:
KAREN ARMSTRONG: I wish that you would help with the creation, launch and propagation of a Charter for Compassion -- crafted by a group of inspirational thinkers from the three Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and based on the fundamental principle of the Golden Rule.
BILL MOYERS: The Golden Rule: "Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you." That universal principle of empathy and respect is at the core of all major religions.
Karen Armstrong's Charter for Compassion was launched last year with an interactive website, charterforcompassion.org. There, people of all faiths can submit their ideas about what the Charter should say.
Recently, she traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, and gathered with a group of international religious leaders to draft the guiding principles of her charter for compassion. Karen Armstrong, it's good to see you again.
KAREN ARMSTRONG: It's great to be back. Thank you.
While this was not the only topic of their discussion, it was a central element. Woven together with it were a number of other important ideas, or perspectives, which are not new for those familiar with her earlier work. These include an insight into fundamentalism that is sorely needed in our world today, which was the subject of her book, The Battle for God. Some of this she clearly restated, some remained implicit, and a small part, I think, was a bit mis-stated. But it is all important, because it provides a radically different way of understanding the clashing belief systems behind what Bush had branded the "war on terrorism."
If I could summarize these points-a bit too briefly, perhaps-in my own words, they would be:
(1) Fundamentalism is a response to wounding and alienation.
(2) Violent fundamentalism is a political movement.
(3) Violent fundamentalists are at war with their moderate co-religionists.
(4) Moderates in all religious traditions must restore compassion to its central place in their religious practice, both for themselves and the world, and to draw fundamentalists back into fruitful dialogue.
Although Armstrong did not discuss it, there is an important, though implicit distinction between violent fundamentalist extremists and fundamentalists who may support violent extremists, but can also turn against them. This distinction is extremely important in trying to think clearly about how to deal with the mess we've inherited from the Bush regime, particularly in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
irst, let's do more to establish the central thrust, by quoting a bit more from the beginning of the interview, which also sets the groundwork for addressing point #4:
BILL MOYERS: So tell us what you're up to with this movement.
KAREN ARMSTRONG: Well, my work has continually brought me back to the notion of compassion. Whichever religious tradition I study, I find that the heart of it is the idea of feeling with the other, experiencing with the other, compassion. And every single one of the major world religions has developed its own version of the Golden Rule. Don't do to others what you would not like them to do to you.
You see, the Greeks too, they may have been not religious in our sense, but they understood about compassion. The institution of tragedy put suffering on stage. And the leader of the chorus would ask the audience to weep for people, even like Heracles, who had been driven mad by a goddess and slew his own wife and children.
And the Greeks did weep. They didn't just, like modern western men, wipe a tear from the corner of their eye and gulp hard. They cried aloud because they felt that weeping together created a bond between human beings. And that the idea is you were learning to put yourself in the position of another and reach out, not only to acceptable people, people in your own group, but to your enemies, to people that you wouldn't normally have any deep truck with at all.
BILL MOYERS: So this is not just another call for another round of interfaith dialogue?
KAREN ARMSTRONG: No, it's nothing to do with interfaith dialogue. Look, I'm not expecting the whole world to fall into a daze of compassion.
BILL MOYERS: Oh, I don't think you have to worry about that.
KAREN ARMSTRONG: But this is the beginning of something. We're writing a charter which we hope will be sort of like the charter of human rights, two pages only. Saying that compassion is far more important than belief. That it is the essence of religion. All the traditions teach that it is the practice of compassion and honoring the sacred in the other that brings us into the presence of what we call God, Nirvana, Raman, or Tao. And people are remarkably uneducated about compassion these days. So we want to bring it back to the center of attention. But then, it's got to be incarnated into practical action.
On the subject of #1 above, "Fundamentalism is a response to wounding and alienation.", she said:
KAREN ARMSTRONG: .... But instead of seeing the other world as them, or instead of seeing our own fundamentalists as them and enemies, somehow learn to see, perhaps, the pain that lies at the root of a lot of this because they feel attacked by us. I was once in a - recently some years back -- in a conference in Portland where a man got up and started shrieking at us, saying that the Jews and the Christians and the Muslims on the stage who were agreed with each other were all going to hell.
And I could hear the pain in that man's voice. That, at some level, we had assaulted him. At some profound level. There was pain there.
I would not necessarily agree that "we had assaulted him," though that is clearly what he felt. In fact, I would argue, this was someone who already felt badly assaulted in life, and probably only spoke out as he did because, paradoxically, he felt it was safe to do so. And why did he come to such a conference in the first place? I would argue that at some level, he was seeking healing. And this is a source of hope.
This does not negate the underlying reality-that he does feel assaulted by someone, and he did blame those on stage, but it is important to realize what is going on with such people, without be drawn into their psychology. To have compassion for them, to put oneself in their place as "feeling with them" would have us do, is actually not facilitated by buying into their drama as being the persecutors they take us to be.
At the same time, while we personally may not be responsible, larger forcers or institutions with which we may be associated-rightly or wrongly-have played roles that we need to be aware of. It's particularly significant that secularization, which developed organically in Europe as a response to and resolution of religious violence bordering on genocide, had an almost opposite significance in the Islamic world, because of how it was forced upon them:
KAREN ARMSTRONG: Basically they have experienced secularism as a profound assault. We had 300 years to develop our secular institutions. Modernization in Europe, and later the United States took a long time. And the new ideas had a chance to trickle down naturally to all different levels of society. They didn't have that chance. Modernization had to take place very quickly. So that, for example, when Ataturk modernized Turkey, he closed down all the Madrassas. He-
BILL MOYERS: The religious schools.
KAREN ARMSTRONG: The religious schools. He forced the Sufi orders, mystics, underground and forced all men and women to wear western clothes. In Iran, the Shahs used to make their soldiers go out with their bayonets, taking off the women's veils in the streets, and ripping them to pieces in front of them. In 1935, the Shah gave his soldiers orders to shoot at hundreds of unarmed demonstrators in one of the holiest shrines in Iran who were peacefully protesting against western dress.
And hundred of Iranians were killed that day. Now, in such a context, secularism doesn't seem the benign ideology that it has been for privileged people, like you and me. It feels like a dead, lethal assault. The most virulent forms of Sunni fundamentalism in Islam developed in the concentration camps, and to which President Nasser had interred thousands of members of the Muslim Brotherhood without trial.
Submitted them to mental and physical torture and execution. Some of them had done nothing more incriminating than handing out leaflets. And in these camps, they became radicalized. One of them was a man called Sayyid Qutb, who entered the camp as a moderate, a student of French and European literature. When he heard Nasser vowing to secularize Egypt and confine Islam to the private sphere on the western model, he looked around this prison. And secularism did not seem benign. It seemed lethal.
And there's something else. There's been a Gallup poll that asked Muslims what they liked most about the West. And what the biggest thing that they all liked was our freedom. They'd like to see more of it themselves. What do they fear most about the West? What do they dislike most about the West?
What worries them most? Their disrespect for our religion. And when they hear ill considered, uneducated remarks about their religion, this is a gift to the extremists who can use it to show that the West is making a crusade against Islam. And it's also endangering our own security.
On the subject of #s 2 and 3 above, "Violent fundamentalism is a political movement" and "Violent fundamentalists are at war with their moderate co-religionists," these points were made quite vividly here:
KAREN ARMSTRONG: .... And you know, they've just had their own sort of 9/11, with the bombing of the Marriott hotel in Islamabad. Not an anti-American thing. This was directed solely against Pakistani Muslims who were breaking their Ramadan fast there.
The Marriott Hotel in Islamabad is right next to the government buildings. It's a great icon in Islamabad. This was a massive attack on their own people. I went to see President Musharraf, and he said that of course, Muslims themselves are under attack from these militants because all fundamentalists movements, whether they're Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Sikh or Buddhist, begin with an assault on their own co-religionists. They see that people are always saying, "What can't these mainstream Muslims keep the militants down?"
Well, the militants regard the mainstream Muslims with absolute disdain and see them as part of the problem. They're not interested in people studying the Koran or praying in the mosque in the usual way. These are political activists.
Finally, one more point that's also extremely important. Continuing the passage quoted above, dealing with the imposition of secularism:
BILL MOYERS: But the burden is not wholly on the West, is it?
KAREN ARMSTRONG: We have to do our part. And not exaggerate things. This survey also asked--in 35 Muslim countries, it asked them whether they thought the 9/11 attacks were justified. Only seven percent said they were justified. And the reasons they gave were entirely political. Palestine. You know, the Iraq--sanctions in Iraq, et cetera. The occupation of Muslim lands.
These 93, or 92, percent who said they were not justifiable may not have liked western foreign policy. But what they said was their rational for condemning these attacks was religious. They quoted those parts of their scripture which says that to take one life is to take an entire world. That to kill is not justified. We've got to see that. And we've got to see that reflected more in our own press and in our own dealings with this. Otherwise, we're going to build up a bogey, as we did with the Soviets.
So much for "they hate our freedoms," much less for seeing the problem as radical Islam. The problem is political Islam, which is, at bottom, not Islam at all. It is politics using religion.
In line with this point, toward the very end of the program, in a postscript after interview, Moyers said:
BILL MOYERS: My old friend Martin Marty, one of the country's leading historians of religion, contrasted Obama's message with that of the Reverend Rick Warren, who delivered the invocation at the President's inauguration. Warren had said there are five issues that cannot be negotiated: abortion, stem-cell harvesting, homosexual marriage, human cloning and euthanasia. "To me," Warren said, "they're not even debatable because God's Word is clear on these issues." Actually, according to Martin Marty himself, no stranger to the Scriptures, there are only a few inches of Biblical text that can even be inferred to support Warren's big five, much less treat them as non-negotiable.
What Pastor Warren and millions in his camp advocate, says Martin Marty, is no different from Muslims who base social and political policy on the Koran, or ruling parties in India who dictate law from their holy books. Such rigid literalism works only in a theocracy, where the whole population accepts or is forced to accept one faith's notion of "God's Word."
The challenge we face is the need to oppose such people in an organized fashion, even to be at war with their ideology, without reflecting their same narrow-minded hatred and intolerance. And this most definitely requires the creation of a positive practice that stands in direct contradiction to the negative practice they promote.
