The Battle for God

Academic Karen Armstrong has written a serious and enthralling account of the development of fundamentalism as it has been manifested in three particular world religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. What is fundamentalism? Armstrong argues that it is a response to the pain caused as the mythos - the intuitive, aesthetic aspect of religion - gave way to the rational logos. 'In the premodern world, both mythos and logos were regarded as indispensable. Each would be impoverished without the other. By the 18th century, however, the people of Europe and America had achieved such astonishing success in science and technology that they began to think that logos was the only means to truth and began to discount mythos as false and superstitious.' Because of this emphasis the fundamentalists, argues Armstrong, have tried to rebrand myth as literal truth. Armstrong begins her excavations in the late 15th century, looking at the shifts in the history of the Jews in Spain, of Muslims in the Ottoman empire and of the Christian reformers across Europe. She traces the process of modernisation before turning to look at how the battle lines were drawn up, how the counterculture gained strength in the early years of the 20th century, how its forces began to mobilise in the 1960s and how it peaked in the 1970s, manifested in the way the Iranian ayatollah brought down the regime of Shah Muhammead Reza Pahlavi in the Middle East, as young Egyptians turned to religion and took over university campuses with their fierce message, and as the Moral Majority gained ground in the United States under Jerry Falwell. 'Those Americans and Europeans who had imagined that religion had had its day were now forced to see that not only could the old faiths still inspire a passionate allegiance, but that millions of committed Jews, Christians and Muslims loathed the secular, liberal culture of which they were so proud,' she writes. Armstrong packs her book with crisp detail, keeping firm tabs on various threads of arguments and weaving them together tightly to produce a coherent, well-argued history of a fascinating subject. (Kirkus UK)