Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of

Violence by Karen Armstrong review

What causes wars? How have we ended up with the idea that religious doctrine above all
is to blame for human conflict?

A detail of the Islamic State flag. Photograph: Alamy

David Shariatmadari

Islamic State is like a bad dream. Its horror flashes up on our screens, so out
of place in the waking world of cities and shopping and work. Its adherents
wave what looks like a pirate flag. They are crazy, incomprehensible,
intoxicated.

Some kind of spell must have been cast over them to rob them of reason and
compassion. But what exactly? There are those who feel confident of the
answer. "A hatred of infidels is arguably the central message of the Qur'an,"
writes Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith. "The reality of martyrdom and
the sanctity of armed jihad are about as controversial under Islam as the
resurrection of Jesus is under Christianity." He goes on: "horrific footage of
infidels and apostates being decapitated has become a popular form of
pornography throughout the Muslim world. But there is now a large industry
of obfuscation designed to protect Muslims from having to grapple with these
truths."

Harris would regard Karen Armstrong as a captain of that industry. In her

new book, the former nun stubbornly refuses to accept that responsibility
for beheadings, suicide bombings and the persecution of minorities can be laid
at the door of Islam. Is she a head-in-the-sand apologist? One of those whose
interpretation of events wishes, in Tony Blair's words, "to eliminate the
obvious common factor in a way that is almost wilful"?

That depends, of course, on what you regard as the obvious common factor. If
violent Islamism is a religious, rather than a political phenomenon, how can
we explain Barsauma, who terrorised the Levant in the fifth century,
destroying synagogues and murdering pilgrims? He resembles no one so much
as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. But Barsauma was a Christian monk. And then there
is the Muslim reconquest of Jerusalem by jihadist warrior Salah ad-Din,
during which not a single Christian was killed, and many were given safe
passage to the coastal enclave of Tyre.
In her sprawling survey Armstrong shows that doctrine alone cannot give rise
to intercommunal strife. Instead, it is usually a reaction to social upheaval and
the new forms of structural oppression gross inequality or overt persecution
that come with it. In the absence of these conditions, religion tends to
encourage peaceful coexistence. To blame one or other faith, when the
evidence shows so clearly that all types of violence have been committed in the
name of all religions and none, is to supply an extraordinarily you might say
wilfully superficial reading of history.

The fact that her critics seem impervious to the evidence may be what drives
Armstrong to produce ever more ambitious books. Fields of Blood follows A
Short History of Myth, The Bible: A Biography and The Case for God. Its field
of reference is mind-boggling. We start nearly 3,000 years before the birth of
Christ, in Uruk, the world's first civilisation. There we learn how the
Sumerians' vision of heaven was an attempt to justify the brutality of a new
system, one in which peasants worked the land, and the agricultural surplus
supported an aristocracy. The Sumerian pantheon was a mirror of the state.
Like their human counterparts, the gods were "preoccupied with town
planning, irrigation and government". Hurrying along, we read of an India
where "yoga" meant ritual preparation for plunder and pillage. Then China,
then the Israelites. There is a cursoriness to the narrative here which makes it
difficult to believe the learning is really Armstrong's. She does a fine precis of
these "beginnings", but it is only once she turns in earnest to the Abrahamic
religions that we feel we are in the hands of an expert.

Amid the kaleidoscope of examples, the argument solidifies: religious

awakening is a symptom of too-quick transition from one kind of society to
another. From the nomadic to the settled, from the agrarian to the mercantile,
from the mercantile to the industrial. Violence often erupts at these moments.
But the link with religion is one of correlation, not causation.

What is more, religion was, for most of history, a shared, public phenomenon.
Sacred ceremony lent meaning and legitimacy to the business of daily life and
underpinned all kinds of authority. Early modern Europe, with its burgeoning
population and economy, was unable to maintain consensus on matters of
ritual, and a new notion of religion as private opinion emerged. This cleaving
was significant. It paved the way for secular violence unrestrained by the best
of religion. It also meant that doctrine, untethered from society, could be co-
opted to serve an array of projects, some of them psychopathically at odds
with the mainstream. In this sense it begins to resemble a virus that survives
in isolated reservoirs, with occasional outbreaks of extremist mayhem.
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We know that the slaughter of the French revolution, the Napoleonic wars, the
American civil war, the opium wars, the first world war, the Armenian
genocide, Stalin's great purge, the second world war and the Holocaust had
little to do with religion. Indeed, much of it was explicitly antireligious. So how
on earth have we ended up with the idea still in evidence in, for example, the
comments readers leave on news websites that religion above all is to blame
for human violence?

Armstrong begins and ends her book with reflections on the scapegoat the
animal burdened with the sins of the community and sent out into the desert.
She argues that we, in the secular, rational west, have become incapable of
properly acknowledging our own ferocious violence. The madmen are the ones
who believe in a man in the sky, who strap on suicide belts imagining that they
will be rewarded with virgins in heaven not we, who debate and legislate and
only then slam hellfire missiles into wedding parties.

But what of Islamic State? Theology motivates its actions; that theology
derives from the Qur'an. Surely this is religious violence. In a narrow sense,
yes. However, it represents a grossly mutated version of a doctrine that
survives in much of the world in its original form as a stabilising,
communitarian practice. To extend the analogy of the virus: we know that
environmental stress accelerates mutation in the natural world. The faith
communities subjected to the most stress over the past two centuries are those
of Middle Eastern and subcontinental Islam; as Armstrong sets out in grim
detail, its members have endured colonisation, the expropriation of land,
authoritarian rule and military occupation. Could these stressors come to be
seen as the greater cause?

None of which is to excuse the revolting acts of Islamic State fanatics. In this
arena, the tendency for attempts to explain and understand to be taken as acts
of apology is deeply frustrating. But we must not turn our backs on history,
which is the only way the arguments set out by the likes of Sam Harris and
Tony Blair make sense. The urge to blame others is strong, and old, as the
ritual of the scapegoat shows. The first step towards extirpating it is to
acknowledge it. In her efforts to bring this about, Armstrong is doing us a
great service.