The Battle for God
The Battle for God
Karen Armstrong, Ballantine Books, 442 pp., $23 paperback
Reviewed by Allan Gould
What a glorious pleasure it is to come across a scholarly, yet entertainingly-written study of a topic which should interest all of us—and probably DOES interest us all, after last September 11th: the rise of fundamentalism. What's good and just is, Karen Armstrong's magnificent The Battle for God covers not just Islamic fundamentalism, but also similar (if usually less violent) movements in Judaism and Christianity.
Karen Armstrong, for those of you who have not had the joy of reading her other dozen books (including A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths, and others just as good), is a former nun who now calls herself "a freelance monotheist" whose "main source of spirituality is study." If so, she is a very spiritual woman, because she is one heck of a quality popularizer: one senses that she has read and digested hundreds of books on the three sister faiths, and chosen only their sharpest insights. And then added countless ones of her own.
To give this superb book its due would almost demand a reprinting of hundreds of its pages. What makes The Battle for God so superb is the way Ms. Armstrong waxes poetic and profound where most scholars would merely give numbers and generalities. So, when she looks at the impact of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain on its victims, she declares, "Exile is a spiritual as well as a physical dislocation. The world of exile is wholly unfamiliar, and, therefore, without meaning. A violent uprooting, which takes away all normal props, breaks up our world, snatches us forever from places that are saturated in memories crucial to our identity, and plunges us permanently in an alien environment, can make us feel that our very existence has been jeopardized. When exile is also associated with human cruelty, it raises urgent questions about the problem of evil in a world supposedly created by a just and benevolent God." Bravo.
The author also shows her gifts when she jumps from the rise of Jewish fundamentalism between 1492 and 1700, to Muslim conservatism between 1492 to 1799, and then Christian concerns from 1492 to 1870, and then on to the present. With each religion, she shows how religious fanaticism, super-nationalism, and fear of The Other all rise from extreme situations. In the case of Islam, for example, Armstrong describes how modern institutions in the Middle East were "simply imposed. . .on old agrarian structures," leading to the kind of horrors which would eventually lead to the stagnation and rage we see across so much of the Muslim world today. Writing of the 1920s, she states that "as in Egypt, two nations were developing in Iran, who were, increasingly, unable to understand each other." Uh-oh.
Many Jewish readers who are rightfully obsessed with Christian Jew-hatred will find Armstrong's studies of various types of modern Christian fundamentalism to be satisfying, but they may be far less pleased to read her highly critical views of right-wing religious Israelis today: "But where the Hasidim found joy and a new lightness [in bringing "the whole of life…under the canopy of the sacred"). . .the ecstasy of the Gush was often imbused with rage and resentment. . . . Gush activists overcame their personal alienation in the secular State of Israel by attempting to wrest the land from the alien Arabs." Hard-hitting, and, to many religious friends of mine in the "liberated territories," almost racist.
It is clear that Ms. Armstrong has a deep respect for all three of the great monotheistic faiths, to the point where she is almost defensive of each, in the face of outrageous acts by their most fundamentalist followers. So, after describing the slaughter of 58 foreign tourists in Egypt in 1997, she writes, "Desperation and helplessness have continued to inspire a minority of Sunni Muslims in Egypt to turn Islam into an ideology that, in its justification of murder, is a total distortion of religion."
The Battle for God is a "must" read, and should be in every thoughtful Jewish—and Christian, and Muslim—library. By putting fundamentalist movements of the three major faiths into historical context, Karen Armstrong helps answer that question we have been hearing endlessly since those planes flew into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon: why do they hate us so much? And, as Jews who weep over the anger and alienation and violence across the Middle East, as well as the clearly antisemitic motives behind the ugly murder of journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, we have our own questions to be answered. This book will go far in answering many of them.
