Karen Armstrong?

My long silence on MOJ has been a function of my preoccupation the last few months with building a new law school building, raising money and the other part of my professional life -- that of a corporate/securities lawyer, which has had me involved in the Enron civil litigation and serving on the board of New York Stock Exchange Regulation, Inc. during a time of great transformation at the Exchange. So, I've been busy. But I have followed MOJ, and have been delighted with the quality and variety of discussion from my co-blogistas and the friends of MOJ. I haven't felt the need to jump in and add my mite to what everyone else is accomplishing. Reading Mike Perry's post re Karen Armstrong, however, compels me to intervene.

1. Karen Armstrong is not just a "former nun" but a very bitter former nun. I don't challenge her right to bitterness, just her claims to objectivity re matters Catholic.

2. I don't know whether she is the "most popular" historian of religion -- there may be other claimants, and I am not sure "most popular" is a compliment in this context. More important. the book Mike links is a hopeless mish-mosh, and has been thoroughly slammed by real historians of religion.

3. Her facile conflation of medieval antisemitism and medieval hostility to Islam is simply incorrect. The great difference is that the Jews never threatened Christians, which made antisemitism even more pathological and twisted. From the 7th thru 16th centuries Islam and Christianity were at war. Armstrong is terribly upset about the Crusades. What about the Islamic invasion and forced conversion of the Near East, North Africa and Spain? Did the Byzantine emperors not have a reason for hostility to the Turks? Ditto for the Christian inhabitants of the Balkans, not to mention Austria and Hungary? What about those who lived along the coasts of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic vulnerable to Muslim piracy and slave trading into the 19th century? I am not suggesting that our European forebears were charming multiculturalists and liberals, or that the Crusades and exclusion of Islam from Christian lands were justifiable. I am suggesting that they had a reason to fear and resent Islam which had nothing to do with the reasons for antisemitism. Aggressive, totalizing and imperialistic, militant Islam left an indelible mark on the west. The west, however, eventually evolved into a free, tolerant and religiously open culture.

4. I don't justify Benedict's use of a quote from a Byzantine emperor,terrified of an Islam that was indeed committed to the destruction of Christianity within its reach, as a way to describe Islam today. Indeed, is multifarous and ultimately a religion of peace. Needless to say, however, there is a strand of Islam committed to destruction of the west and Christianity, and to forced conversion. Note today's comments from the Baghdad branch of al-Quaeda, which predicted that the Pope and his followers would be subject to the "head tax or the sword," the ancient Muslim policy for Christians in their lands: pay a heavy tax, convert to Islam, or be decapitated. I think they meant it. I assume Benedict really wanted to talk about that, but somehow failed.

Benedict's failure, however, is not an excuse for turning the complex history of Islamic-Christian relations, in which there is enough blame to go around on both sides, into a simple-minded morality tale and a historically inaccurate comparison to antisemitism that compels ritualistic breast beating.