08.05.09
Archive: Armstrong’s PR Muhammad
archive: September 27, 2006
Armstrong’s new hagiography of Muhammed seems likely to backfire. The days of covering up the facts are passing, gone.
Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time (Eminent Lives) (Hardcover)
by Karen Armstrong (Author)
Depicting jihad as an inner quest for personal self-improvement, rather than the “holy war” claimed by countless Muslim dynasties and leaders throughout history, they dismissed the worldwide wave of Islamic terrorism as an excessive reaction by misguided fringe groups to America’s arrogant and self-serving foreign policy. “Muslims have never nurtured dreams of world conquest,” wrote Karen Armstrong, a prominent representative of this view, shortly after Sept. 11. “They had no designs on Europe, for example, even though Europeans imagined that they did. Once Muslim rule had been established in Spain, it was recognized that the empire could not expand indefinitely.”
This assertion couldn’t be further from the truth. Not only was the conquest of Spain, some 2,000 miles from the Arabian homeland, a straightforward act of imperial expansion, it hardly satisfied Islam’s territorial ambitions. No sooner had the Muslims established themselves in that country than they invaded France in strength. Had they not been contained in A.D. 732 at the famous Battle of Poitiers in west central France, they might well have swept deep into northern Europe.
Unperturbed by this historical record, Armstrong is making a fresh attempt to validate the “Islam equals peace” thesis. Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time (HarperCollins, 235 pages, $21.95), is a thinly veiled hagiography, depicting the prophet as a quintessential man of peace, “whose aim was peace and practical compassion” and who “literally sweated with the effort to bring peace to war-torn Arabia”; an altruistic social reformer of modest political ambitions, whose life was “a tireless campaign against greed, injustice, and arrogance” and who founded “a religion and cultural tradition that was not based on the sword but whose name – ‘Islam’ – signified peace and reconciliation.”
In truth, Islam’s actual meaning is submission and not peace, or to use Armstrong’s own words, “the perfect surrender (in Arabic the word for ‘surrender’ is “islam”) that every human being should make to the divine.” And it is to achieve this goal and subordinate the Arabian peninsula to his rule that Muhammad fought almost incessantly for the last 10 years of his life, having fled from his hometown of Mecca to Medina in 622 to become a political and military leader rather than a private preacher: not to bring peace to a war-torn country, let alone to eliminate “greed, injustice, and arrogance.”
In contrast to Armstrong’s depiction of jihad as a benign struggle for self-improvement, the Quranic revelations during Muhammad’s Medina years abound with verses extolling the virtues of fighting “in the path of Allah,” as do the countless sayings and traditions (hadith) attributed to the prophet. As he told his followers in his farewell address: “I was ordered to fight all men until they say ‘There is no god but Allah.’” Had it not been for his sudden death, Muhammad probably would have expanded his control well beyond the peninsula.