Karen Armstrong – författare

A life of the prophet Muhammad by bestselling religious writer Karen Armstrong.'Armstrong has a dazzling ability: she can take a long and complex subject and reduce it to its fundamentals, without over-simplifying' SUNDAY TIMES'One of our best living writers on religion' FINANCIAL TIMES'Not just a sympathetic book that would dispel the misconceptions and misgivings of its western readers, but also a book that is of considerable importance to Muslims' MUSLIM NEWSMost people in the West know very little about the prophet Muhammad. The acclaimed religious writer Karen Armstrong has written a biography which will give us a more accurate and profound understanding of Islam and the people who adhere to it so strongly. Muhammad also offers challenging comparisons with the two religions most closely related to it - Judaism and Christianity.

The idea of a single devine being - God, Yahweh, Allah - has existed for over 4,000 years. But the history of God is also the history of human struggle. While Judaism, Islam and Christianity proclaim the goodness of God, organised religion has too often been the catalyst for violence and ineradicable prejudice. In this fascinating, extensive and original account of the evolution of belief, Karen Armstrong examines Western society's unerring fidelity to this idea of One God and the many conflicting convictions it engenders. A controversial, extraordinary story of worship and war, A History of God confronts the most fundamental fact - or fiction - of our lives.

'A rich and subtle exploration of the sacredness of nature, filled with a timeless wisdom and deep humanity' Guardian In this hugely powerful book, Karen Armstrong argues that it isn't enough to change our behaviour to avert environmental catastrophe - we must rekindle our spiritual bond with the natural world. From gratitude and compassion to sacrifice and non-violence, Armstrong draws themes from the world's religious traditions to offer practical steps to reconnect you with nature.Speaking to anyone interested in our relationship with nature, worried about environmental destruction, or searching for new actions to save our planet, Sacred Nature will uncover the most profound connections between humans and the natural world.'A lamentation in the key of Greta Thunberg, with undertones of Carl Jung' Wall Street Journal'Warm and witty... a challenge to think differently in the face of climate change' Tablet'Karen Armstrong is one of the handful of wise and supremely commentators on religion' Alain de Botton

From the bestselling writer of ‘The History of God’ and the widely acclaimed ‘Islam – A Short History’ comes Karen Armstrong's ‘Muhammad’.Karen Armstrong has become one of our most important and relevant commentators on religious world affairs today, consistently providing a scholarly but accessible approach to humanity's relationships with God and religion.To date, there have been very few books written on the Islamic prophet of the religion that is followed by over the 1.2 billion Muslims who make up a fifth of the world's population.Muhammad's staggering achievements as a human being quite simply altered the course of history as we know it and continue to this day to inspire humanity.Muslims claim that in 650 AD, at the age of forty, Muhammad had a visitation from the Angel Gabriel telling him that he had been chosen to learn, recite and spread the words of God to man in verses that would later make up the Qu'ran. He slowly developed into a prophet, preaching monotheism to the masses.He was initially mocked and rejected by many and risked numerous assassination attempts throughout his life. At a critical time, he also made the revolutionary decision to break all ties with his Muslim tribe thereby proclaiming that the bonds of Islam took precedence over anything else. The Islamic empire thus expanded into Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, Egypt, North Africa and Spain.Karen Armstrong has written a fascinating account of this figure whose life and influence has determined the course of the spiritual life of human kind.

‘A History of Jerusalem should be read, not only by travellers and potential travellers in Jerusalem, but by all of us.’ Stephen Tummin, Daily TelegraphJerusalem has probably cast more of a spell over the human imagination than any other city in the world.Held by believers to contain the site where Abraham offered up Isaac, the place of the crucifixion of Christ and the rock from which the prophet Muhammed ascended to heaven, Jerusalem has been celebrated and revered for centuries by Jews, Christians and Muslims. Such is the symbolic power of this ancient city that its future status poses a major obstacle to a comprehensive regional peace in the Middle East.In this comprehensive and elegantly written work, Karen Armstrong traces the turbulent history of the city from the prehistoric era to the present day.

Britain’s greatest religious historian chronicles the rise and rise of fundamentalism.One of the most potent forces bedevilling the modern world is religious extremism, and the need to understand it has never been greater.Focusing in detail on Protestant fundamentalism in the United States, Jewish fundamentalism from sixteenth century Spain onwards and Muslim fundamentalism over the last four hundred years, Armstrong examines the patterns that underlie fundamentalism. These evolve from the clash between the conservative pre-modern mind that is governed by a love of myth, and the progressive rational society that relishes change. Fundamentalists view the contemporary world with horror, rejecting its claims to truth, and a state of war now exists over the future of our culture. They are not terrorists, rather, they are innovative, existing in a symbiotic relationship with an aggressive modernity, each urging the other on to greater excess.The Battle for God is original in its thesis and in its understanding; as a history of religious ideas it is fascinating, and as an explanation of one of the most destabilizing forces at large in the world today it is extraordinary.

Through the Narrow Gate is Karen Armstrong’s memoir of life inside a Catholic convent in the 1960’s.With gentleness and honesty, Armstrong takes her readers on a revelatory journey that begins with her decision, at the age of seventeen, to devote her life to God as a nun. yet once she embarked upon her spiritual training, she encountered a frightening and oppressive world, fossilized by tradition, which moulded, isolated and pushed her to the limit of what she could endure.

A raw, intensely personal memoir of spiritual exploration from one of the world’s great commentators on religion.After seven years in a convent, which she left, dismayed by its restrictions, an experience recounted in ‘Through the Narrow Gate’, Karen Armstrong struggled to establish herself in a new way of life, and became entrapped in a downward spiral, haunted by despair, anorexia and suicidal feelings.Despite her departure from the convent she remained within the Catholic Church until the God she believed in 'died on me', and she entered a ‘wild and Godless period of crazy parties and numerous lovers’. Her attempts to reach happiness and carve out a career failed repeatedly, in spectacular fashion. She began writing her bestseller ‘A History of God’ in a spirit of scepticism, but through studying other religious traditions she found a very different kind of faith which drew from Christianity, Judaism and Islam and, eventually, spiritual and personal calm.In her own words, her ‘story is a graphic illustration – almost an allegory – of a widespread dilemma. It is emblematic of a more general flight from institutional religion and a groping towards a form of faith that has not yet been fully articulated but which is nevertheless in the process of declaring itself’. Her lifelong inability to pray and to conform to traditional structures of worship is shared by the many who are leaving the established churches but who desire intensely a spiritual aspect to their lives.‘The Spiral Staircase’ grapples with the issue of how we can be religious in the contemporary world, and the place and possibility of belief in the 21st-century.

There is widespread confusion about the nature of religious truth. For the first time in history, a significantly large number of people want nothing to do with God. Militant atheists preach a gospel of godlessness with the zeal of missionaries and find an eager audience. Tracing the history of faith from the Palaeolithic Age to the present, Karen Armstrong shows that meaning of words such as 'belief', 'faith', and 'mystery' has been entirely altered, so that atheists and theists alike now think and speak about God - and, indeed, reason itself - in a way that our ancestors would have found astonishing.Does God have a future? Karen Armstrong examines how we can build a faith that speaks to the needs of our troubled and dangerously polarised world.

The foundation stone of Jewish and Christian scriptures, the power of the Book of Genesis lies in its stories - Creation, the Fall, Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham, Jacob and Joseph. These ancient tales illuminate some of our most enduring and profound problems: cowardice, the struggle with evil, the difficulty of facing past mistakes, achieving a true understanding of our innermost selves. Karen Armstrong traces the themes and meanings of these stories, examining what they can still tell us about the human quest for meaning.

It is the most persistent myth of our time: religion is the cause of all violence. But history suggests otherwise. Karen Armstrong, former Roman Catholic nun and one of our foremost scholars of religion, speaks out to disprove the link between religion and bloodshed.* Religion is as old as humanity: Fields of Blood goes back to the Stone Age hunter-gatherers and traces religion through the centuries, from medieval crusaders to modern-day jihadists.* The West today has a warped concept of religion: we regard faith as a personal and private matter, but for most of history faith has informed people’s entire outlook on life, and often been inseparable from politics.* Humans undoubtedly have a natural propensity for aggression: the founders of the largest religions – Jesus, Buddha, the rabbis of early Judaism, the prophet Muhammad – aimed to curb violence and build a more peaceful and just society, but with our growing greed for money and wealth came collective violence and warfare.* With the arrival of the modern all-powerful, secular state humanity’s destructive potential has begun to spiral out of control. Is humanity on the brink of destroying itself?Fields of Blood is a celebration of the ancient religious ideas and movements that have promoted peace and reconciliation across millennia of civilization.

'Karen Armstrong has been one of the most persistent and powerful voices in the eminently respectable task of popularising religious scholarship in the anglophone world' GUARDIAN'Her work has a broad sweep and that is extremely important' TLSBuddhism is a faith that commands over 100 million followers throughout the world. Buddha stands with Christ, Confucius and Mohammed as someone who revolutionised the religious ideas of his time to advocate a new way of living. Since Buddhism promotes no personal god, Buddhism, writes Armstrong, 'is essentially a psychological faith'. In our own age of secular anxiety, she shows that it has profound lessons to teach about selflessness and the simple life.All that is known about Buddha comes from a collection of ancient writings that fuse history, biography and myth. Karen Armstrong distils from these the key events of Buddha's life: his birth as Siddhartha Gotama in the fifth century BC and his abandonment of his wife and son; his attainment of enlightenment under the Banyan tree (the moment he became a buddha, or enlightened one; his political influence; the divisions among his followers; and his serene death. Armstrong also introduces the key tenets of Buddhism: she explains the doctrine of anatta (no-soul) and the concepts of kamma (actions), samsara (keeping going), dhamma (a law or teaching that reflects the fundamental principles of existence) and the idealised state of nibbana (literally the 'cooling of the ego'). Karen Armstrong's short book is a magnificent introduction to the life and thought of this most influential of spiritual thinkers.

In June 1944, after two wars with the Soviet Union, the Finnish region of Karelia was ceded to the Soviet Union. As a result, the Finnish population of Karelia, nearly 11% of the Finnish population, was moved across the new border. The war years, the loss of territory, the resettlement of the Karelian population, and the reparations that had to be paid to the Allied Forces, were experiences shared by most people living in Finland between 1939 and the late 1950s. Using a family's memoirs, the author shows how these traumatic events affected people in all spheres of their lives and also how they coped physically and emotionally.

As long as we have been human, we have been mythmakers. In A Short History of Myth, Karen Armstrong holds up the mirror of mythology to show us the history of ourselves, and embarks on a journey that begins at a Neanderthal graveside and ends buried in the heart of the modern novel. Surprising, powerful and profound, A Short History of Myth examines the world's most ancient art form - the making and telling of stories - and why we still need it.The Myths series brings together some of the world's finest writers, each of whom has retold a myth in a contemporary and memorable way. Authors in the series include Karen Armstrong, Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, David Grossman, Natsuo Kirino, Alexander McCall Smith, Philip Pullman, Ali Smith and Jeanette Winterson.