{"id":2337,"date":"2005-06-10T15:10:20","date_gmt":"2005-06-10T19:10:20","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=2337"},"modified":"2005-06-10T15:10:20","modified_gmt":"2005-06-10T19:10:20","slug":"book-review-being-bugged-by-armstrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2005\/06\/book-review-being-bugged-by-armstrong\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: Being Bugged by Armstrong"},"content":{"rendered":"

I just finished Karen Armstrong’s Islam: A Short History<\/a><\/i> and I was bugged. Don’t get me wrong. Armstrong is a good writer, and Islam is a fascinating topic. What bothered me, however, was Armstrong’s consistent practice of passing theological judgment on various Islamic movements. She was always able to discern with unerring accuracy which movements were “perversions” or “aberrations” from “the true spirit of Islam.” Obviously, Armstrong is reacting strongly against Western stereotypes of Islam as a backward and violent religion, so she goes out of her way to emphasize the progressive, tolerant, and peaceable aspects of Islam. All well and good. I certainly agree with her that the West’s perceptions of Islam tend to be horribly distorted.<\/p>\n

Armstrong’s approach bugged me on two levels. First, on some points she was obviously stretching to make her point. For example, good English author that she is, she has a fairly detailed discussion of Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie, going to great lengths to argue that it was inconsistent with “true Islam.” Her evidence: the fatwa was widely condemned by Arab governments. I suspect that if you asked the man in the street of Cairo or Damascus they would blanche at the idea that Asad or Mubarek as arbiters of true Islam. Second, there is something a little gauche about a non-believer confidently opining on the true meaning of someone else’s faith and confidently declaring which movements represent its “true meaning” and which are apostate. Of course, Armstrong describes herself as “a freelance monotheist” so in her way, she would no doubt insist that she is<\/i> a believer. Still, one can’t help but feel that at times Islam had ceased to have a voice in her book, and had become a canvas on which she could play out her own attempt at post-secularist theology. It felt patronizing to both Islam and the reader.<\/p>\n

Of course, I have other beefs with Armstrong’s book. She has some vague notion of agrarian societies, their development and limits, which she thinks can explain Islam’s current condition. There are two ironies here. First, as economic and political history, it seems unlikely that agrarianism can do as much work as Armstrong wants it to do. More interestingly, she invokes the concept as a way of offering an oddly Marxist defense of religion. Here is her basic problem. Armstrong wants to argue that Islam is actually a wonderful religion that has been much maligned by the West. Fair enough. Her zeal in the pursuit of this goal, however, means that she cannot ascribe the social, political, and economic decline of the Islamic world to any ideological force that might somehow place blame for the decline on Islam. Colonialism is a potential villain here, but it is ultimately question begging. In 1500, there is absolutely no way that the West could have colonized the Islamic world. By 1920, the entire Middle East was being divided by middle-level civil servants in Paris and London. Colonialism occurred because of political, military, and economic weakness, so it is difficult to point to it as a causal factor. Which leads us back to Armstrong’s agrarianism thesis. It is all about the means of production. There was just something about the economic structure of Islam’s agrarian society that made it destine for decline. We don’t quite know what this is or where it came from, but she is pretty dang sure that Islam had nothing to do with it. Don’t get me wrong. I am not claiming that all of the woes of the Middle East must be placed at the feet of Islam. On the other hand, a historical narrative that is being so transparently driven by current political concerns must of necessity be suspect. Finally, I have my doubts that Armstrong has the economic competence to make her theory work. For example, it is worth noting at the outset that the Islamic world carried a massive amount of international trade in its heyday, occupied largely marginal agriculture land, and was commercially very active for centuries. Her vision of an Islamic economy tied inextricably to the soil doesn’t ring true to me.<\/p>\n

It is a nice, short, history of Islam, which is its ultimate goal, but it is not without problems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just finished Karen Armstrong’s Islam: A Short History and I was bugged.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2337"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2337\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}