A Historian's Faithful Account

For years she suffered from undiagnosed epilepsy. When she had seizures, she thought they were religious hallucinations. After leaving the convent, "when I should have been mating," she says, "I had all those years of undiagnosed epilepsy. I was locked in a demon-infested world without tablets."

After so much suffering, does she believe in God?

"It's a mistake to define God," she says. "I gave it up a long time ago. . . . 'To define' literally means to set limits. That is a travesty to try to define a reality that must go beyond our human thinking. The idea of a God overseeing all of this death and despair is untenable. That's the antithesis of God," she says. "If you looked at the history of the 20th century, who is overseeing this? Elie Wiesel says that God died at Auschwitz. That's just one human idea of God as overseer, and it's a childish idea of God."

In her own life, she refers often to the Indian word dukkha, or suffering. "Buddha would say that life is suffering. There is no why to it. Suffering and unsatisfactoriness. Indians say, 'Start with the pain of life and let it crack you open.' " In the story, Buddha was shielded from suffering until three gods came in disguised as old age, sickness and death. "Then his heart was broken. He realized that life was dukkha. That's what I felt when I was looking at my mother. That life was dukkha."

What works for her, she says, is to "allow the pain to break you open. Then you can begin your quest. Because that's when you can learn compassion. If you shield yourself from suffering as a lot of our society is set up to, then it's hard to relate to suffering in others. Once you discover what it is that gives you pain, then you must refuse under any circumstances to inflict that pain on others. It's quite easy to numb yourself instead of looking at it as a spiritual opportunity."

Dangerous Stereotypes

Because she had written a book about Islam, Armstrong found herself in great demand after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, flying all over the United States to give lectures and interviews explaining Islam to Americans.

"I always knew that Islam was not a violent religion," she says. "For 1,500 years Islam had a far better record of living peacefully than Christians. The point is to separate out the extremists we have in all of our monotheistic religions from the mainstream."

Stereotypes of Islam are dangerous, she said. The Holocaust, the slaughter in Bosnia -- "all that killing is about deeply entrenched stereotypes."

Because of the parallels with the Axial Age, Armstrong believes, it's highly possible that the world is at another religious turning point. "In every single case, the catalyst of major religious change was revulsion from warfare and aggression."

Her idea is to start a new "theology of power," based on the Golden Rule. "To understand that other people and other nations, however remote and alien, are in real terms as important as Washington."

The United States is unique in the world, she says, the only superpower. "So what do you do? Do you start wars nobody can win? Al-Qaeda can't bring down the U.S., but the U.S. can't bring down al-Qaeda, either."

"Believing in God is neither here nor there," Armstrong says. "You have to make that belief work for the world. Christianity is about looking at other people's point of view. It's 'kenosis,' or emptying of the self. It means you have to dethrone yourself from the center of your world and put others there.

"Religion is hard. But then you begin to lose the hard edges of yourself and start to glimpse the other. All of the Axial Agers practiced what the Chinese called jian ai or concern for everybody. Not just for your own group, but for everybody. And if we don't do that, I don't see how we can save our planet."