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HISTORY: The labours of Karen Armstrong —Suroosh Irfani

For a girl who became a nun as a teenager, God now signifies the urge for transcendence and transformation, as indeed the desire to live a life more intensely rooted in compassion. A living engagement with such compassion has transmuted her struggle with the darkness within, into a struggle against the darkness of religious hatred and intolerance outside

If there is no miracle more cruel than birth, as the American poet Sylvia Plath famously noted after her first child was born, then spiritual rebirth may well be a miracle no less cruel. Rather than the body, here it is the mind that cracks and the heart that’s broken open. An example of such rebirth is to be found in Karen Armstrong’s autobiography, The Spiral Stairway: My Climb out of Darkness (Knopf, 2004). Her book is a tale of a hunger for God that made her join a convent and become a nun when she was 17 years old, the disillusionment and loss of faith that led to her breakdown seven years later, and her struggle to forge a new identity in the secular world, even as she confronted “moments of dread, when my brain cracked open and the world became suffused with dread”.

However, Armstrong survived it all, and learned “to ... turn again” and find fulfilment in ways she had never expected: She was reborn to life through her own labours, years after leaving the Convent.

As an icon of intellectual activism and religious pluralism bridging the gap between the Muslims and the West, Armstrong has come a long way from the struggling woman who was driven by her successive failures and inner terrors to the brink of despair and suicide. In fact, her Spiral Stairway is a living testament of a divine paradox aptly summed up by the 13th century sufi poet Rumi: The seeker after Truth will never surrender for a trifle; [refusing to settle] until belief turns unbelief and unbelief becomes belief.

(Ta iman kufr, va kufr iman na’shavad
banday e Haq bayhaq Musalman na’shavad)
from Diwan e Shams e Tabrizi

However, rather than Rumi, it is TS Eliot’s Ash Wednesday that thematically structures Armstrong’s memoirs as a spiral staircase, winding up through darkness and despair towards awakening and enlightenment. In this sense, Armstrong’s inner and outer struggles were by no means easy. Having done away with God, the former nun found herself questioning the basic assumptions of institutional religion, even as she moved towards a secular mysticism where an ‘unbeliever’ could experience “the same kind of ecstasy as a Christian mystic”, because “ transcendence was something that human beings experienced” without the need for religious props. Indeed, when the post-convent Armstrong became a student of English literature at Oxford University to work for a PhD, she was hoping to “find in literature what had eluded me in the convent chapel”. Incredibly, though, she failed to get a PhD for a thesis that her supervisor believed was brilliant. A few years later, she even lost her modest job as a teacher of literature at a girl’s high school in London — mainly because her inexplicable seizures (later diagnosed as a form of epilepsy) prevented her from taking some of her classes.

A failed nun and a failed academic who believes herself to be “a failed heterosexual” as well, Armstrong has had her brighter moments too. Her first book, written at the behest of a loving atheist friend, is a critical memoir of her seven years in the convent. Entitled Through the Narrow Gate (1982). it helped launch her as a TV personality with Channel 4 and BBC television, where she made several documentaries on religious themes. However, Armstrong experienced another radical change when she began working on a Channel 4 series on the Crusades:

“The sheer horror of what I was now forced to study day after day, and as it turned out, year after year, broke my heart. This material was so distressing that I could not approach it in the slick cerebral spirit that had characterised my television work hitherto. I began to be emotionally involved. I read of massacres in which the blood had flowed up to the knees of the crusaders’ horses, of Jews herded into their synagogues and burnt alive, and of women and children raped and slaughtered ... Auschwitz showed where such calculated hatred could lead”.

To be sure, if Armstrong’s identification with the victims of the Crusades — namely Jews and Muslims — opened her to new intensities of pain, it also enabled her to experience moments of transcendence that had eluded her as a nun. In the convent, she recalls, her devotion to God required shutting out human emotions, and this had frozen her feelings; whereas now, “this insufferable pain (of the Crusades) had thawed my heart and I was able to feel the pain of other human beings”. The upshot of it all was her startling realisation that she was ready to begin her spiritual journey only now, “because the ability to experience pain and sorrow is the sine qua non of enlightenment”: Enlightenment and spirituality, then, were two sides of the same coin.

At the same time, Armstrong’s western stereotype of Islam as an “inherently violent and fanatical faith” changed completely as her readings of Islam showed her that “Islam was more tolerant of other faiths than Christianity”. However, the Salman Rushdie controversy made her realise that there was hardly any book in the market that could counter the inflamed western prejudice against the Prophet of Islam in an idiom the western reader could relate to. This prompted her to write a biography of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) that endeared her to many Muslims, and made her one of the compelling voices in interfaith understanding. Interestingly, however, Armstrong also makes a passing reference to an interfaith seminar in London, where a fellow panellist who called himself a Sufi Sheikh refused to speak to her, or even acknowledge her presence there.

Writing the Prophet’s biography, too, had its secret surprises. Armstrong notes that her immersion in the lived experiences of the Prophet’s time as she did the book virtually transformed her writing into an act of surrender- or Islam in the literal sense of Surrender. Some of her most notable works, including A History of God followed after she did the Prophet’s biography.

For a woman who became a nun as a teenager because she wanted to encounter God and be filled by divine presence, God now signifies the urge for transcendence and transformation, as indeed the desire to live a life more intensely rooted in compassion. It is a living engagement with such compassion that has transmuted Armstrong’s struggle with the darkness within, into a struggle against the darkness of religious hatred and intolerance in the world outside.

An Urdu translation of Armstrong’s autobiography and its circulation in Pakistan’s schools and seminaries could help enlarge the spiritual horizons of the young; and inspire them to acknowledge, and perhaps engage with the reality of the spiritual quest in societies and people other than their own.

Suroosh Irfani is co-director of the Graduate Programme in Communication and Cultural Studies at National College of Arts, Lahore

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