Read a special RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY interview with scholar and author Karen Armstrong. She has written many books on religion, including THE BATTLE FOR GOD and ISLAM: A SHORT HISTORY:On America's response to 9/11:
That's complicated, of course, because America's a huge place, and it will vary in different parts of the country, different neighborhoods and different cities. But there has been a commendable desire on the part of American people to understand Islam.
An extraordinary thing happened after 9/11. The American people descended on the bookstores and swept everything on Islam off the shelves. That is very positive. It didn't happen in the United Kingdom. British people weren't remotely interested in finding out more about Islam, but Americans are curious in that way, and when I went round lecturing, people impressed me with their tough-minded desire to try to come to terms with all this.
That said, though, there's still a lot of hostility, and for a lot of people, you don't even have to scratch the surface. The hostility is still there, and a lot of it is deeply traumatic. America has been shocked; this is post-traumatic stress syndrome, and this will be with us for some time, and people are speaking out of pain, dislocation, and bewilderment. Americans have found for the first time in their history, really, that they, too, like the rest of the world, are on the front line.
On improving interfaith relations:
We've got to carry on trying to understand. It's no good falling back on old patterns of bigotry, because we have enough to be worried about, goodness knows, without creating extra bogies to concern ourselves. It's very important that people see what Islam is, and what it is not, and Š see these acts of violence, especially the September 11 acts of violence, as totally unrepresentative of the Islamic tradition, and so the more education that goes on, the better -- education on all sides.
Muslims, too, have got to change some of their textbooks to give their children a better, more balanced view of Jews and Christians. Christians have got to change their textbooks. I'm still shocked by the way the Pharisees are presented in some school textbooks, giving children a very distorted notion of Judaism.
All of us have got a struggle on our hands. This has been a terrible wake-up call. We can't afford bigotry. We live in one world, whether we like it or not, and we cannot afford to live in ignorance of one another any longer.
On Islam and America:
We often think of Islam as a rather exotic, eccentric, bizarre, slightly barbarous creed that has really nothing whatever to do with us. But, in fact, it's profoundly in tune with the whole American and western ethos.
The heart of Islam beats with the heart of the American people. The passion that Islam has for equality -- Islam is one of the most egalitarian religions I know and has always lived out its egalitarianism. It's at its best historically when it has had egalitarian forms of government, and [it is] unhappy with authoritarian forms of government, as it has now. That's one of the reasons Islam is unhappy, because it has a lot of despots and bad government and tyrannical government, some of which are supported by the United States and the West generally.
Similarly [there is] its passion for justice. The bedrock message of the Qur'an is not a doctrine but a simple command that it's right to share your wealth equally, bad to build up a private fortune selfishly, and good to try to create a just and decent society where poor and vulnerable people are treated with respect. That is the bedrock message of the Qur'an, and this is surely what we mean when we talk about decent society and our aspirations in the West.
And Islam is a religion of peace. Like all the great world traditions, it recoils in horror from the violence of the world and struggles through to a position of peace. You can see that in the life of the Prophet Muhammad. The word "Islam" is related etymologically to the word "Salaam " -- peace.
On the challenges facing American Muslims:
The whole experience of building an Islamic community in a country where Muslims are a minority is a new experience for Muslims. The whole of Islamic law is structured around a place where society is Islamic. There are leading clerics nobody hears about in the West; the only person we hear about is Osama bin Laden, but there are many, many clerics more important than he, some of whom are trying to work out ways to enable Muslims to develop this rich religious life, [ways Muslim law] can be adapted to conditions where you're living in a minority. Muslims are keen to do it, but it's difficult.
There are Iranian Muslims, Turkish Muslims, Arab Muslims, Southeast Asian Muslims, Chinese Muslims, Afro-American Muslims -- and all these bring different things to Islam. It's quite difficult to form a united community out of all this, especially in a time of tension, in a time when people naturally feel defensive about their faith, when some of them are being attacked, when some of them fear for their lives. Many of them are refugees from oppressive regimes such as Iraq. Then, when they experience hostility -- graffiti saying "Muslims go home" -- they naturally feel deeply insecure.
It's very difficult to be creative when you feel under threat. We all tend to be belligerent in that case, or to resist things, rather than open ourselves out to new experiences. So that will be their challenge.
There's also the difficulty of being an American and yet not really feeling very happy about American foreign policy in their own former countries, and that is a problem. There are Americans who also share this perspective, so Muslims are not alone in that.
On what federal agencies need to understand about American Muslims:
They should not imagine that just because somebody has a Qur'an in their luggage they are necessarily suspect. The FBI should not imagine that any Muslim is likely to be a terrorist, that they belong to a religion that will inspire or incite them toward some form of terror, violence, or disaffection from the United States. They should educate themselves about Islam and realize that the people who committed these evil atrocities on September 11 were very peculiar Muslims indeed -- Muslims who were drinking vodka before they got on the doomed aircraft at 7:00 in the morning. They weren't trying to "blend in"; they were sticking out like sore thumbs; Muslims who went to nightclubs, who consorted with women in Las Vegas.
