Karen Armstrong

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and six, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:29

My Castaway this week is an author. She writes books about the world's religions, trying to explain that their strength lies not in dogma and piety, but profound and enduring truths. Since nine eleven her books on Islam in particular have become bestsellers, and she herself is much in demand as a public speaker.

Presenter0:48

Brought up in Birmingham, she left her family to become a nun, but left her convent seven years later because she found it repressive.

Presenter0:56

She published her autobiography just over twenty years ago, and following that the books about faith that have made her famous. She lives alone, a life that she describes as frugal and nunlike.

Presenter1:07

Whenever I've tried to join the mainstream, she says, I've been rejected by it. She is Karin Armstrong. So you know what it is to be an outsider, then,

Karen Armstrong1:17

Yes, I think that has been a constant motif in my life. Every time I tried to join a popular mainstream activity, I've fallen off. First of all, being a nun in Britain, a very secular, unreligious kind of country, then remaining single all my life in a society dictated by coupledom, being an epileptic, too, in a society that finds that particular condition difficult to accept, and finally writing about religion in Britain, which again is a rather marginal activity. But it's by actually accepting this kind of outside status that I've found somehow that I've come to the centre of myself.

Presenter1:58

I was going to say, I wonder if you don't enjoy being an outsider, but it gives you greater license, where you can say what you like about anybody, because you don't belong to any part of it.

Karen Armstrong2:06

It's a great freedom.

Karen Armstrong2:10

lonely. Sometimes I when I'm in the United States I can feel much more at home because people there are much more interested in religion than they are here. But it does give you a freedom. I'm not tied down by any party line or I don't have to impress my colleagues in academia. But your success

Presenter2:26

as a writer, in the end has surely

Presenter2:29

Changed all that. I mean, you can't feel outside or rejected any more. You've been brought into the mainstream and but you've found position and respect and money indeed.

Speaker 12:33

Uh

Karen Armstrong2:33

Into the main

Karen Armstrong2:37

Yes, indeed. But it was by going off and doing something that all my publishing mentors at that time told me not to do, which was write about religion, they said it's complete dead end, that that actually took me into the mainstream. And I think that you have sometimes to just go with your heart, do what the late Joseph Campbell said, is follow your bliss, even if it takes you into an unpopular, unfashionable direction. Then you find your own centre. And you have indeed.

Presenter3:05

Because then, as it happens and it's extraordinary rarely, by chance you are at the centre, because now people want to know and want to have explained to them this phenomenon of terrorism and the terrible atrocities that that are performed. They want to have them explained, and you find yourself attempting to do that.

Karen Armstrong3:23

Constantly, and and it's been an extraordinary thing since September the eleventh, and it's as though having been an outsider, you now come to the centre of a major concern. And it's it's a great privilege in a way, but it's also a huge responsibility, and uh it also saddens me, of course, given the horror that we're now facing.

Karen Armstrong3:45

Tell me about your first record. Well, my first piece of music is the fifth movement of Bach's cello suite, number two in D minor. And I love it because it suggests difficulty, going round and round. A lot of my life has been circling, following the same pattern, until finally you get to the centre. And this does precisely that. You have a sense of difficulty, but serenity moving forward, and even a certain playfulness.

Speaker 14:42

Ah

Presenter5:11

Part of the fifth movement of Bach's cello suite, number two in D minor, played by Pierre Fournier. And it reminds you, you say, Karin Armstrong, of striving to come up in that circular way, from the bottom.

Presenter5:23

Let's go back to where you felt at the bottom, which is in Birmingham.

Presenter5:28

Thinking about going into a nunnery, why? Uh

Karen Armstrong5:32

Well, all these kind of decisions are very complex. But I wanted to lose myself. I wanted to lose all the confusions of adolescence in this being that we call God. I wanted to be enlightened and inspired and inspiring, even a saint. And I was also, I didn't like life in Birmingham. The concentration was so much on money and material possessions. And also that I felt the position of women looked so deadly. All women ever seemed to be doing, we're talking about the 1950s, was cooking and cleaning and scrubbing, chores I absolutely hate to this very day. And I wanted I thought there must be something more than this.

Presenter6:16

Uh

Karen Armstrong6:16

Joe

Presenter6:16

Yeah.

Karen Armstrong6:16

Yeah.

Presenter6:16

I get the impression you were also turning away from your family, weren't you? Your father had been a scrap metal merchant, is that right? Yes.

Karen Armstrong6:22

Yes, my father was a scrap metal merchant. I wasn't turning away from my family. No, not at all. I had a sort of a happy family life. I think childhood is a difficult time. I found being a child rather difficult. But your father had gone bankrupt, hadn't he? Which must have been a traumatic experience for you? Well, it was and it wasn't. We didn't know much about it. But what distressed me far more than my father's bankruptcy was the behaviour of some of his friends. That overnight some of our family friends seemed to melt away. And that made me think, what are true values? Do I want to be here? So, and you thought that the convent would have the answer for you? I thought I would find sort of enlightenment there, that I would become enlarged and profound. I was very addicted to the metaphysical poets, to John Donne, to T. S. Eliot, and that religious experience of contemplation. And of course, when I got into the convent, I found I absolutely couldn't pray.

Presenter6:53

Uh

Presenter6:55

Yeah.

Speaker 16:56

Hmm.

Presenter7:05

And that

Karen Armstrong7:23

I was absolutely hopeless at meditation. And that was a source of huge disappointment and corrosive shame. So, the promise that you had hoped would be fulfilled simply wasn't? Well, it was a struggle, and we were told that it was going to be a hard struggle. We had to put ourselves to death, we were told, in order that the new life would come out of us. It must be said that I went through this training at probably the worst moment I could possibly have chosen. I entered in 1962, and this was before the reforms of the Second Vatican Council had come into effect. And so, I went through the old system, one of the last people to do that, and had it almost at its very worst, at its dying gasp. I want to hear about the details of that, but let's pause for record number two. What's that? This is a Gregorian chant, the beautiful, extraordinary chant, Christus Natus S. Christ was made obedient for us even unto death. And I'm very grateful for the opportunity in the convent, even though I couldn't sing. My novice mistress said I had a voice like a broken knife grinder. I learnt about the chant, and that was a great privilege.

Speaker 28:36

They silent love in their love.

Speaker 18:37

Peace.

Speaker 18:38

Uh

Speaker 29:07

Oh never give me

Presenter9:16

Gregorian chant Christus Factus est, sung by the Benedictine monks of Santo Domingo de Silos. So tell me, Karen, about life on the inside. Your holy order in Sussex, wasn't it? The the Society of the Holy Child Jesus. Your parents took you, dropped you off, and that was that. You weren't how long before you were to see them again?

Karen Armstrong9:34

Um, a few months. I could see my parents once every six months, but it was rather stilted. And they were wondering what on earth had happened to their family. I mean, I'm sorry for it now, because if I had a daughter aged 17, making this kind of decision, I would be wild with worry. I was far too young. But, nevertheless, we did maintain contact. I couldn't eat with them, however. And you couldn't tell them about what was going on in your life, no? No, we were never allowed to tell anybody about what went on behind the enclosure door, and as we rarely left the enclosure.

Presenter9:58

And you could

Karen Armstrong10:08

We had the

Presenter10:08

And to

Karen Armstrong10:11

the countryside on our daily walk. We could talk about what went on in church, but none of that was really very interesting to my parents or to my younger sister, who found these visits absolutely excruciating and regularly fainted during a church service, during Mass or Benediction, because she was so appalled by the tension in the air.

Presenter10:30

And did she talk to you about life on the outside, as it were? Did did she make you feel you were missing anything, or were you

Karen Armstrong10:34

Did she make you feel

Karen Armstrong10:37

Above all of that? No, I thought I was on a higher plane altogether. And we never heard news of the outside world. I mean, shortly after I entered came the Cuba missile crisis, and they did break their rule and tell us that we were on the brink of World War III and told us to pray for peace. But then they forgot to tell us that the blockade was over and the crisis was finished. And we had three weeks. I remember going down and scanning the horizon for mushroom clouds until one of us eventually plucked up the courage to ask what had happened in Cuba. And they thought it was frightfully funny. But it was a mark of how isolated we were.

Presenter11:16

And you couldn't really talk to each other very much, could you?

Karen Armstrong11:19

Conversation wasn't encouraged. We were in silence most of the day. And that was to encourage a spirit of prayer, but also friendship was frowned upon. This was one of the worst things of it for me. It was very cold and chilly in there.

Presenter11:19

Yeah, it's a little bit.

Presenter11:20

Courage

Karen Armstrong11:32

So we were never allowed to confide in one another. If we had a problem we went to our superior. We were never supposed, for example, to talk in a two, always wait till a third person came along.

Presenter11:40

Always

Presenter11:42

So you had no one to talk to, and from what you said, you couldn't talk to God either.

Karen Armstrong11:47

I was hopeless at praying. I would go in to make my meditation at six o'clock every morning. And as soon as I knelt down, my mind went skittering off down a whole alleyway maze of distractions, anxieties, fantasies. And I'd say to my superiors, I just can't do this. But also, perhaps more than that.

Presenter12:06

Than that, because, you know, you'd invested so much in this, you perhaps expected to see

Karen Armstrong12:11

Be a great light. No. We were told that great lights were not for us, but we were supposed to get moments, glimmers of consolation, or at least be able to keep our mind on our prayer. But you had none. I couldn't do it. It was the wrong kind of prayer for me, that was all.

Karen Armstrong12:26

Record number three.

Karen Armstrong12:28

This is the slow movement of the Emperor Concerto by Beethoven. It was the first piece of classical music I really responded to. The serenity and expansion of this music immediately spoke to me.

Presenter13:41

That was part of a live recording of Beethoven's Emperor Concerto, played by Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, with the Prague Symphony Orchestra conducted by Vaclav Smetachek, and that was part of the second movement. Do you think that if the reforms had been in place by the time you went in and and life as a nun had been less repressive, you might have stopped

Karen Armstrong14:00

Day the course. No, I was not a good nun. I'm not castigating myself there. I think very few people can live that kind of life successfully. It's very difficult to live a life of total chastity, total obedience, where you give up your own will and judgment to somebody else and have no material responsibilities whatsoever and remain and become mature and whole. And I was becoming constricted, bitter, and picking up the unkindness. I had developed quite a sharp tongue, and this wasn't the sort of person that I wanted to be.

Presenter14:36

And of course what happened to you was you went to Oxford to study English because you were in a you were supposed to become a teacher, weren't you? And go into a convent and so on. So you needed a degree. Yes, and therefore you saw the outside world.

Karen Armstrong14:46

And then

Karen Armstrong14:48

Well, it wasn't that so much that did it. Um we didn't see much of the outside world. Oxford was is hardly a Piccadilly Circus. But what really got it for me was that we were expected in college to think and to criticise people, even uh Shakespeare or Milton. But in the convent we still had to continue with this uncritical acceptance of everything, never questioning anything at all.

Presenter15:13

It's like leading a double life.

Karen Armstrong15:14

It's like eating a

Karen Armstrong15:15

And at the end of that year, of my first year there at St Anne's, I had a breakdown, a small breakdown, and I just split apart. And it was the beginning of the end. At that time, we knew then that I was going to have to leave. But nevertheless, it must have been a huge decision to ask for dispensation from your vows. Oh, I was just brokenhearted about it. I was not leaving with any great joy or thinking, wonderful, now I can travel and make a lot of money and fall in love. I left with a sense of absolutely sickening dread and terror, because the religious life and the training I'd received was meant to change you and condition you at a profound level. And once I got outside the context where this training made sense, I found I simply didn't know how to live. And I became anorexic and suicidal, not because I wanted to die, but because I'd lost the art of living.

Karen Armstrong16:09

Record number four. Well, the first of my contemporaries that I related to was Bob Dylan, and here is Visions of Johanna. And I think it expresses very much that sense of alienation from your surroundings, a sense of nothing making sense, which was what the outside world seemed to me, and the absence of the beloved, whether that's a person or some reality that makes sense of all your disparate surroundings. It's very eloquently expressed in this song, I think.

Speaker 216:41

Just Louis.

Speaker 216:44

And her love is so entwined.

Speaker 216:52

And it's vision.

Speaker 216:54

of Johanna

Speaker 216:57

That conquer my mind.

Presenter17:08

Bob Dylan and visions of Johanna, very dislocating to have lost, what, seven years of your generation, as it were, just to have been somewhere else and such an important seven years.

Karen Armstrong17:18

Yes, because the world changed at that point. I was walking like a nun with my eyes down and my hands neatly clasped in front of me, not letting go as people were doing at that time, throwing off the restraints of the fifties. And that was just how it felt.

Presenter17:30

That time throat.

Presenter17:33

And that was just how it felt.

Karen Armstrong17:37

Yeah, that sour kind of uh alienated voice wi with very much and and and these strange, disparate images, nothing joining together or making sense, wi I could relate to, yes.

Presenter17:49

We've been busy listing your failures. It has to be said that you did have a great success. You got a congratulatory first. That must have been quite a moment.

Karen Armstrong17:56

It was wonderful. It it really was wonderful. I went into that viva terrified because I was g I could write things down, but I was no good at speaking extempore at that time. And then I just was congratulated by the chairman.

Presenter18:10

But they all stood up and applauded.

Karen Armstrong18:11

applauded. That it was a wonderful bravo. And I thought at that moment, wow, now I can go forward. Yes, and you did go forward and you did a thesis on Tennyson, which took you three years.

Presenter18:13

No questions.

Presenter18:19

I

Presenter18:25

And you fail.

Karen Armstrong18:25

And I failed. And it was a great scandal in the university because they said that the

Presenter18:25

Yeah.

Karen Armstrong18:31

Uh it hadn't been properly examined, but the

Karen Armstrong18:34

Then it was decided that the sanctity of the Oxford Doctorate meant that it couldn't be re examined, even though they said an injustice had been done. That was the end of my academic career.

Presenter18:44

You couldn't become an academic, so you then began

Karen Armstrong18:47

To teach, didn't you? Yes, I became a school teacher for six years teaching English in South London.

Karen Armstrong18:54

But then I was asked to leave there too because of my health. I'm epileptic. It had just been diagnosed then, but it took a long time for them to find the right drugs to help me.

Presenter19:04

But in a sense, the diagnosing of your epilepsy was a bit of a turning point in all of this saga of.

Karen Armstrong19:12

Awful occurrences. Well, it was I think the diagnosis of epilepsy was one of the happiest days of my life because for years I had been having fainting fits. I'd go somewhere, set out to go somewhere, and end up somewhere completely different without realizing where I or how I'd got there. Now I thought I was going mad and I was sent to the- Genuinely, you learned to a not of sound mind. I thought I'd probably broken myself in the convent and that I would end my days in a locked ward, and I was sent to psychiatrists, it wasn't diagnosed.

Presenter19:34

Yes, I don't have

Presenter19:37

And that

Karen Armstrong19:43

And eventually, when I was thirty one years old, I had a grandmale attack on Baker Street station, was taken to the Middlesex Hospital, and there I saw a neurologist who said all these symptoms were due to a birth injury, and that causes th th these moments of paralyzing terror.

Karen Armstrong20:02

Yeah.

Presenter20:02

By which time you were in your late thirties, I think, by the time this started to get sorted out. But help was at hand, as it turned out, in the unlikely guise of television presentation. But we shall hear about that in a minute. Let's have some music.

Karen Armstrong20:14

My next piece is the third movement of Beethoven's string quartet in A minor. I played these late quartets of Beethoven over and over and over again to myself in these dark years. And they they express so much the sort of pain and yet the ability somehow to soar above it.

Presenter21:33

Part of the third movement of Beethoven's String Quartet in A minor Op. one three two, played by the Borodin string quartet. So Cowenew broke into television in the nineteen eighties with a documentary for Channel four on the life of St. Paul.

Presenter21:46

Why and how do you think it was possible for you to find such a fluent and confident voice when you'd been, from everything you've described, really so cowed by life?

Karen Armstrong21:57

I think it was school teaching. When you're in front of a class, a reluctant audience, you've got to keep their attention. You've got to explain to them that that if they don't understand about the semicolon their lives are going to be wrecked and make it entertaining.

Presenter22:14

But there must have been an articulate being inside you all along.

Karen Armstrong22:16

I think there was. I had been quite articulate when I was a young girl. And of course, it was wonderful fun because I was doing this in Israel with some very macho Israelis who egged me on and would put me in front of some ruin and say, talk as long as you can, because we haven't got much footage. And hurtling round from one site to another was just that again was a loosening up experience. This was a low-budget production. Extremely low-budget.

Presenter22:43

But this was a list of

Karen Armstrong22:46

Uh

Presenter22:46

So you made more television programmes and you'd written your autobiography by this stage, and then you began to write books about religion, and not least, the biography of the Prophet Mohammed. This inspired, I think, by the fatwa that was put on Salman Rushdie following the publication of his satanic verses. Why did you think that you could explain

Presenter23:06

what went on, you know, the thinking behind the Ayatollah's action.

Karen Armstrong23:09

I had started to study about Islam in the course of my television programmes and while I abhorred the fatwa, I abhorred the book burning, but I was also disturbed by the fact that some of Rushdie's supporters segued from a denunciation of those things to an out-and-out denunciation of Islam itself.

Presenter23:34

At a home.

Karen Armstrong23:35

As a whole, as a bloodthirsty and tolerant religion, I knew this was not true, but also I was filled with a sense of dread again. I thought we cannot afford, after the 1930s, to allow ourselves to cultivate a distorted image of a whole people. We've seen where this kind of thinking can lead. And it's also damaging to our own souls. It goes against our whole ethos, which is supposed to be compassionate, tolerant, liberal and understanding and understanding. And it's grist for the terrorist mill, of course. It just plays wonderfully into the hands of Osama bin Laden and the extremists. We need to know who our enemies are.

Speaker 224:03

Uh

Presenter24:03

Yeah.

Speaker 124:04

Understanding.

Karen Armstrong24:15

But it's very important that we know who our enemies are not.

Presenter24:19

Yeah.

Karen Armstrong24:19

Totally.

Presenter24:19

I want to talk some more about this, but let's pause there for some more music. Well, not music. Your next re

Karen Armstrong24:25

Well, this is a woman, Quran reciter, chanting the Destiny Surah. I chose it because it reflects the meditative side of Islam. It describes the moment when the Quran came from heaven to earth and enters the night almost as Jesus is conceived in the Virgin Mary. The Quran makes that comparison. And it ends in Salaam, in peace. And that is Orthodox Islam, not Osama bin Laden.

Speaker 224:55

Although we lay him in a shape one iron.

Speaker 225:06

Bismilda Rahmanir Rachim.

Speaker 225:16

In la onse la file.

Presenter25:19

Uh

Presenter25:25

That was the Destiny Surah recited by Seami Bushe Khazi. Karen Armstrong, I suppose in all you say in our reaction to the terrorist threat and the fact that we can, or many of us can, tend to blame Islam as a whole, there there's obviously an implicit criticism that we are somehow not thinking through our responses. Do you think

Presenter25:46

That has to do with the fact that we're predominantly secular in our approach, that we just don't understand the power that religion can have over people.

Karen Armstrong25:54

I think that's true in Britain. It's not true in the United States. They're the people who want to understand the horror of 9-11 in a religious manner. You know, all over the United States, interfaith groups sprang up, mushroomed independently of one another, people wanting to learn about other religions. But we are not as capable of that. We are extremely secular. So I often hear when I'm speaking about religion, people think it's frightfully interesting, but I might be talking about the mores of some ancient Polynesian tribe. Whereas in America, it's something that absolutely touches the heart that they can understand.

Presenter26:34

But your argument is unless we pause and attempt to understand exactly what goes on in the minds of these people, we can never

Presenter26:42

come to terms with we can never there can never be any kind of reconciliation.

Karen Armstrong26:46

Well, no. I think that that a lot of this terrorism is purely political, in a religious covering. We never called the IRA bombing a Catholic terrorism. I was never asked if I was a moderate Catholic. This is a different kind of nationalism. But unless we begin to understand it. You've got to understand that it's not Islam, and you've got to understand the sense of political outrage which I think comes from our foreign policies. These people are not aghast at our liberal secular society. As Bin Laden himself said, if we were just attacking a liberal secular or freedom, we'd attack Sweden or Amsterdam, not New York or London particularly. They object really to Western behaviour in their own countries. This violence has erupted in countries where warfare and conflict have become endemic. The conflicts were originally secular, but over time it's festered and become on both sides sacralised, made religious. And once you've got that happening, then positions become hardened and absolute, and it's very difficult then to find the compromise which is always necessary when we're talking about peace.

Karen Armstrong28:01

Now here we have some serenity after this this war and terror. It's the slow movement of Mozart's clarinet quintet. And I love it because it's breath. Breath is vital to our lives. And here Mozart, a tormented man, is able from the depths of his being to breathe out this serene, peaceful, expansive sound.

Presenter29:18

It was the opening of the second movement, the largetto of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet, played by Edouard Brunner with the Hagen Quartet.

Presenter29:26

What about you, Karen, and your religion to day? I mean, do you practise it? Do you get down on your knees and pray?

Karen Armstrong29:31

No, I certainly don't. After my dismal failure in the convent, that gives me a sense of

Karen Armstrong29:37

Horror. Do you go to church? No, I do when I'm in America. But I wouldn't even call myself Christian any more because I cannot s I can't think that Christianity is the only way. My study of religions ha shows that every single one of them

Karen Armstrong29:53

Is valid. They're all teaching the same thing. They all teach compassion. None of them are interested in.

Karen Armstrong30:01

Doctrines or metaphysics, not at base. This is a peculiarly Western Christian preoccupation. They are about dethroning ourselves from the centre of our world and putting another there, in the course of which we achieve an ecstasy and going out of the self and recognizing the divine in the other. And I've found that in my own.

Presenter30:23

Have you? You find you're able to do that.

Karen Armstrong30:25

Oh, no, I'm still struggling because I'm I'm w because egotism pervades everything that we do and I still have my sharp tongue.

Presenter30:25

Yeah.

Karen Armstrong30:34

And but my study has helped me. I have to take myself out of my mindset of clever Karin in Oxford-educated post-Enlightenment rationalism and enter the minds of other people who have lived in a very, very different time and understand that spirituality, not look at it with superior contempt.

Presenter30:59

And what happens? Can does anything happen or is it a purely intellectual?

Karen Armstrong31:01

Is it purely intellectual? No, there'll be moments when I, sitting at my desk, will have moments when I'm touched deeply within and lifted momentarily beyond myself, just for mini seconds. Study has become my prayer. So I've stumbled on a kind of spirituality that suits me. And in many ways. So it may have been what the nuns intended you should do all those years ago. And it may well have been. You see, I still think of myself as a kind of nun. I've never married. I live alone, and when I'm not racing around the world talking to people, I'm in silence, thinking constantly about God and spirituality and religion.

Karen Armstrong31:45

And um it seems I've come full circle. This may be what the sort of thing I was looking for when I set off to find God at the age of seventeen.

Karen Armstrong31:56

Last record. Well, finally, I'm going to p uh the second movement of Schubert's string quartet in D minor, Death and the Maiden. I love the combination here of sweetness and pain. We mustn't ignore the pain of life. And together here, I think they become extremely poignant and inspiring.

Presenter33:16

That was part of the second movement of Schubert's String Quartet in D minor Death and the Maiden, played by the Vienna Philharmonic String Quartet. Karen, if you could only take one of those eight records, which one would you take?

Karen Armstrong33:28

Probably uh the Beethoven qu quartet. Uh that is so it's so complex that you could listen to it over and over again and still find something new.

Presenter33:40

And we give you the complete works of Shakespeare. We also give you the Bible, or you might prefer the Koran or the Bible.

Karen Armstrong33:45

Only

Karen Armstrong33:47

And you can have one other book of your choice. The complete works of Milton, please. I think I could start learning some of these extraordinary poems off by heart. Again, it would be something to do. And I love those massive, massive architectural sentences. So that would be my choice. And your luxury. A continuous supply of very, very dry, very, very cold white wine.

Presenter34:16

Current Armstrong, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island is. Thank you very much.

Speaker 134:27

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.