It’s a truth universally acknowledged amongst those inclined towards new atheism that Karen Armstrong… how shall I put this, has a tendency to sugar-coat the more problematic aspects of religious belief and practice.
Here’s a chunk of stuff I wrote, which didn’t make it into the final version of Chapter 2 of Does God Hate Women?, that shows this up in the way that Armstrong deals with Muhammad’s treatment of the Jewish Qurayzah tribe.
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The feeling that things are too good to be true is a frequent experience when reading Armstrong’s writing on Islam. Not least, she seems determined to explain away anything that might show Muhammad in a bad light. For example, about his conflict with the Jewish tribes of Medina, which culminated in the summary execution of 700 males of the Qurayzah tribe, she says variously:
Muhammad had been greatly excited by the prospect of working closely with the Jewish tribes…His disappointment, when the Jews of Medina refused to accept him as an authentic prophet, was one of the greatest of his life. [1]
In Medina, the chief casualties of this Muslim success were the three Jewish tribes of Qaynuqah, Nadir and Qurayzah, who were determined to destroy Muhammad…They had powerful armies, and obviously posed a threat to the Muslims. [2]
The massacre of Qurayzah was a horrible incident, but it would be a mistake to judge it by the standards of our own time. This was a very primitive society… an Arab chief was not expected to show mercy to traitors like Qurayzah. [3]
Muhammad’s intransigence towards Qurayzah had been designed to bring hostilities to an end as soon as possible… Arabia was a chronically violent society, and the ummah had to fight its way to peace. Major social change of the type that Muhammad was attempting in the peninsula is rarely achieved without bloodshed. [4]
The struggle did not indicate any hostility towards Jews in general, but only towards the three rebel tribes. The Quran continued to revere Jewish prophets and to urge Muslims to respect the People of the Book…. Anti-semitism is a Christian vice. Hatred of the Jews became marked in the Muslim world only after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948… [5]
In other words, Armstrong’s argument here is that Muhammad really wanted to be friendly with his Jewish neighbours, but they were out to get him, so he exiled and massacred them, but that was okay because these were primitive times, it was necessary, and anyway this kind of thing was not indicative of hostility towards Jews in general, since that was a Christian invention. This sounds like it must be a parody of Armstrong’s views, but actually it seems not to be. Consider, for example, how she describes the events that led Muhammad to banish the Nadir tribe from Medina:
Muhammad tried to reassure Nadir, and made a special treaty with them, but when he discovered that they had been plotting to assassinate him they too were sent into exile… [6]
Muhammad’s behaviour does not seem particularly objectionable here: indeed, he might have been expected to deal more harshly with the Nadir than simply expelling them; after all, they had been plotting to kill him. Except here is the real story of how he discovered the plot, as related by Martin Lings in his acclaimed biography of the Prophet:
While they were sitting there, in front of one of the fortresses, Gabriel came to the Prophet, unseen by any save him, and told him that the Jews were planning to kill him and that he must return to Medina at once. [7]
In other words, Muhammad did not discover a plot at all: it was ‘revealed’ to him by the Angel Gabriel in a vision that only he saw. As Armstrong must surely realize, this will hardly do as a justification for expelling an entire community from their homes. Certainly one recalls the scorn meted out to George W. Bush when he was reported as claiming that God had directed him to liberate Iraq. [8] But it seems that Muhammad is to be held to a different standard. [9]
References
[1] Karen Armstrong, Islam: A Short History, p. 14.
[2] Ibid, pp. 17-8.
[3] Ibid, p. 18.
[4] Ibid, p. 19.
[5] Ibid, p. 18.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Peter Lings, Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources, p. 209.
[8] See, for example, The Guardian, October 7, 2005, retrieved June 18, 2008 from http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/oct/07/iraq.usa.
[9] To be fair to Armstrong, in her first biography of Muhammad she does mention that the Angel Gabriel apparently played a role in these events. But she cannot resist adding the caveat that “a divine revelation would not have been strictly necessary… Muslim sources claim to know exactly who was about to drop a boulder on to Muhammad from a nearby roof-top.” (See Karen Armstrong, Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet, pp. 193-4).
Since today’s high standards do not hold for the old days, I suppose that Armstrong would not criticize, say, a Renaissance Pope for poisoning one of his rivals or the massacre of the Huguenots by the Catholics in France.
They were all playing the game by the rules.
How about burning Giordano Bruno at the stake? After all, standards were not so high back then.
Of course, I may be wrong and standards may have changed before the beginning of the Renaissance, perhaps in 1492, a good year from which to date things.
So what if a Roman emperor, say, a bad one like Nero had executed 700 suspected traitors, on suspicion of treason. It seems plausible.
Would that be acceptable under the older set of more lax standards?
Or were standards higher before the days of Muhammed, reaching their lowest point during the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammed (the Hegelian dialectic of history is tricky) and then spiraling upwards after the Prophet’s death?
I don’t understand the purpose of criticizing the decision of Muslims to kill their enemies and the decision of the Catholic Church to persecute Jewish people. They were God fearing people following their consciences.
The atrocities of the French Revolution, Nazi Germany, Communist Russia and China, on the other hand, were not perpetrated by God fearing people. These were the actions of people who were trying to improve life on earth for their fellow human beings.
Trouble is, Amos, the argument about different standards doesn’t really work in the case of Muhammad, because his actions are (still) considered exemplary.
Also, Armstrong isn’t just saying, “Look, everybody was terrible back then.” She constructs a narrative designed to show the actions of Muhammad in the best possible light, even when there is no textual justification for doing so.
And, of course, there is the other point here that if one really wants to argue that morality is relative to… I don’t know, culture or history or specific social standards, then one is going to get oneself in a great deal of difficulty if one wants to criticize any forms of behaviour that are sanctioned in terms of those sorts of things.
I suppose that on consequentialist grounds one could justify Muhammed.
The teachings of Muhammed benefit all humanity.
If the Jews had assassinated Muhammed, his teachings never would have been fully communicated to humanity.
The lives of 700 Jews (or Athenians or whoever) are less valuable than the teachings of the Prophet Muhammed, in terms of their benefit to humanity.
Therefore, Muhammed was justified in killing the 700 Jews, because (I imagine) he had no other way to protect his life (and wise teachings which have brought so many benefits to women and to gay people).
So people who kill for their ideology can’t be blamed if their ideology is particularly irrational?
Can we not blame them or holding those beliefs in the first place? Can we not blame the clerics who indoctrinated them? Can we not blame the people who conceieved of the religion in the first place?
Surely we can blame Mohammed for his crimes. You can’t seriously argue that he was scared of a God who he himself had invented!
Amos – Well, not really – killing *all* 700 surely couldn’t be justified on consequentialist grounds (even if one accepts the premise that the teachings of Muhammed benefit all humanity)…
Miso – Actually, I think the issue of *culpability* is very difficult here (albeit David’s view point is highly suspect).
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
Voltaire.
Armstrong seems to almost aggressively not understand the issue.
There are different ways to morally evaluate historical figures. You can historically contextualize them. Or you can evaluate them by modern standards.
Religions don’t historically contextualize their venerated historical figures. They evaluate them on my standards. Those are the terms of the debate. This isn’t hard to understand.
swallerstein- You’re being facetious, but that’s almost exactly the justification given by Christian apologists for that whole bad period where all their prophets were howling machete wielding rapists. You know the time, the one we don’t talk about back in Deuteronomy. The Unpleasantness.
Those were the rules of engagement of those days. It was their version of M.A.D. and it kept your enemies in check when you didn’t have Gitmos and Gulags to put them in and forget about them. Today we have moved to different rules of engagement where the Theologian in Chief can by consulting Augustine and Aquinas (that’s the Catholic vote wrapped up there) decide on a drone hit list. As well he also takes counsel from ‘Father’ Brennan. Civilian casualties have been greatly exaggerated. Yes, of course. Carry on.
Karen Armstrong… how shall I put this, has a tendency to sugar-coat the more problematic aspects of religious belief and practice.
Indeed. This year, for example, she told us that “ever since the Crusades…western people have often perceived Islam as a violent and intolerant faith”. I’m not, of course, going to construct a late justification for the Crusades but does she think they occurred for no other reason than Western meanness? When someone is so consistently mistaken, with their errors leading one towards the same conclusion, they might be many things but “historian” is not among them.