Editing the word of God

Published on February 24, 2008

Up front I should say I was raised a Catholic and long ago abandoned organised religion, and this is the first book I've read on Islam. That last fact is all the more embarrassing since it's written by a non-Muslim, but then Karen Armstrong, who previously wrote "The History of God", is a widely admired interpreter of faith and has already done much to improve people's understanding of the Muslim worldview.

 "Muhammad: Prophet for Our Time" starts out promisingly indeed. Armstrong explains that her 1971 "Muhammad: Biography of the Prophet" was intended to answer those in the West who rushed to defend Salman Rushdie against the Islamic fatwah "by reviving a mediaeval prejudice". Here, in the wake of 9/11 and the yearnings for vengeance it sparked, she revisits the subject with a much more urgent agenda.

 There is no surprise, of course, in her reaffirmation that the Prophet was a man of peace, or that his followers have, for the most part, always adapted Islam to fit in among other faiths. I was surprised to learn, though, that jihad doesn't mean "holy war", as the news media keep telling us. It means "struggle" - and this in the context of the struggle to foment peace.

 Just as Muhammad struggled to give Arabs a new way of coping with changing times, Armstrong writes, "We entered another era of history on September 11, and must strive with equal intensity to develop a different outlook."

 To this end she emphasises Muhammad's daring leap from the pagan pluralism that once gripped commercial Mecca, across the summit of Heaven, where he conferred with Jesus and Moses and Abraham and Noah, to the new ground of monotheistic pluralism. Through the Prophet, Allah told us to vie among ourselves only "in doing good works! Unto God you must all return; and then He will make you truly understand all that on which you were wont to differ."

 What follows, alas, is a history of the birth of Islam that Christians would categorise as a season in Sunday School, replete with set-piece battles, Bible-style city sieges and divinely sanctified mass destruction that would be quite at home in the Old Testament. More dismaying still is the rank opportunism that guided many of Muhammad's political decisions, to the point of bending the ostensible word of God.

 Are all the old religions such? Woe to Man, with his feeble hearing aid. The message seems to always come through piecemeal and incomplete.

 Armstrong stresses that the verses of the Qu'ran that strike modern ears as spiteful and abhorrent must be understood in the context of the moment when they came to Muhammad as he swooned as though in trance. There was a justified rationale for polygamy and the veil, she points out, which had nothing to do with the oppression of women.

 And the Prophet had to give his male followers in Medina leeway to continue to beat their wives because he couldn't risk banning the custom and thus losing their support when the armies of Mecca continued to pose a threat to embryonic Islam.

 Permission to maim and murder, sir? "Permission [to fight] is given to those against whom war is being wrongfully waged," said Allah, having hitherto insisted on turning the other cheek.

 Now, as bad luck would have it, the very existence of Islam was at stake, and once again survival trumped pacifism, as it had when Muhammad got the holy green light to raid traders' caravans for supplies.

 The oft-heard defence of Islam as a religion of peace is certainly not the complete picture, given the centuries of proselytising-by-the-sword that followed the Prophet's death, when resistance was mowed down from the heartland of India to the French Pyrenees.

Armstrong does not acknowledge this, and only haphazardly touches on the internal strife that rendered the faith asunder. She doesn't once mention the Sunni-Shi'ite schism.

That, of course, came after Muhammad, and this is a biography of Muhammad-the-chosen. Even with that limited focus it is less than 250 pages in length, so readers know they're getting the simplified version. That's the chief problem in an otherwise helpful primer for the uninformed: It's too simplistic.