The Spiral Staircase: A Review - Part 2

The Spiral Staircase by Karen Armstrong: A Review - Part 2

Karen Armstrong, like many people, had "assumed that Islam was an inherently violent religion", and she began her book "Muhammad" very much as a polemic, intending to answer the controversy and "inbuilt cultural suspicion of Islam". She found that Muhammad emerges as a far more human figure than Jesus or the Buddha: "We see him laughing, carrying his grandchildren on his shoulders, and weeping over the death of friends. We see his doubts, his griefs, his moments of despair and terror." The Pakistani scholar Akbar Ahmed told her that "your book is a love story".

Her book on the prophet was written shortly after the furore occasioned by Salman Rushdie and his Satanic Verses, and she realised that her study must be sensitive, and avoid levity, or witty, biting remarks. She had to subdue her own ego, keep herself "in the background", which was for editorial reasons, but as she saw, also was one of the most universal religious principles, keeping out the ego, which is seen as "a prerequisite for religious experience". She also found her study was in many ways "a constant concentration of mind and heart that was in fact a type of meditation"; this was because she had to "make a daily effort to enter into the ghastly conditions of seventh century Arabia", leaving "twentieth century assumptions and predilections behind. to develop a wholly different way of looking at the world." Yet while this was undertaken for study, and writing a book, she came to reflect on it and see it as a spiritual discipline, that of transcendence, or "standing outside": "All the traditions tell us, one way or another, that we have to leave behind our inbuilt selfishness, with its greedy fears and cravings. We are most fully ourselves when we give ourselves away, and it is egotism that holds us back from that transcendent experience that had been called God, Nirvana, Brahman or the Tao".

Islam, as she came to see, is like Judaism, not so much concerned with imposing official doctrine: "it propagates no creed, and is rather dismissive of theological speculation". The word "kafir", often translated as "unbeliever" really means one who is ungrateful to God. "Instead of accepting a complex creed, Muslims are required to perform certain ritual actions, such as the hajj pilgrimage and the fast of Ramadan, which are designed to change them. The physical discipline was meant to affect their
inner posture."

As time went on, and she began teaching again, she also came to understand that most religious discourse is like poetry: "read quickly or encountered in a hubbub of noise, makes no sense. You have to open yourself to a poem with a quiet receptive mind, in the same way as you might listen to a beautiful piece of music. You have to give it your full attention, wait patiently on it, and make an empty space for it in your mind. And finally, the work declares itself to you, steals deeply into the interstices of your being, line by line, note by note, phrase by phrase, until it becomes part of you. Like the words of a poem, a religious idea, myth or doctrine points beyond itself to truths that are elusive, that resist words and conceptualisation."