Editor’s comments: Karen Armstrong presents these twelve steps in a secular tone, while drawing from her extensive knowledge of all religions. This becomes an easy read for one who is secularly inclined and not particularly religious. A religious person can read it with the cognition that genuine religiosity and spirituality guides a believer towards true and universal compassion. The loving God of Islam and Christianity, who loves us, the Homo sapiens, more than a mother and a father, cannot stand for prejudice and hatred in the human family.
She has drawn her theme from the twelve steps of Alcohol Anonymous. The twelve steps of Alcohol Anonymous, yield to the concept of Transcendent God, but, do not allow any specific understanding of it.
By Courtney Cable, BLOGCRITICS.ORG
Published 08:29 p.m., Thursday, May 3, 2012
Karen Armstrong
All religions have some version of the Golden Rule – “Do unto others as you would have done unto you” – as part of the key to their practice. And yet, when we look around the world and see the atrocities that we enact upon one another, it’s hard to believe that anyone is taking this message of compassion to heart. Too much harm has been done in the name of religion. In Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2011, Anchor Books), religion scholar and prolific writer Karen Armstrong invites members of all faiths to reclaim their spirituality and to embrace its true purpose and goal: compassion.
Awarded the 2008 TED Prize, Armstrong set out to draft a Charter for Compassion. This she did collaboratively with the online community and launched the resulting document in 2009. Through the Compassionate Action Network, she seeks to create an international fraternity of cities who practically implement compassionate ideals and encourage their citizens to demonstrate them in daily life. The book serves as a source of individual inspiration and as a handbook for compassionate community building and discussion.
The 12-step format intentionally mirrors the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous to drive home the point that our future survival requires us to abandon our addiction to greed, envy, and over-ambition. Armstrong’s 12 steps lead us through education, empathy, mindfulness, humility, and finally loving our enemies. She draws from her wealth of knowledge of the major religions and of history to explain how and why we find ourselves at this point. While aggression and fear of the other served to help our distant ancestors survive attack, it does the opposite for our modern, global civilization. It is through interdependence that great advancements have been made and through compassion that we will thrive.
Armstrong’s opening chapter on her wish for a better world is incredibly inspiring and led me to the instant conclusion that this was an important and a worthwhile project. The steps really are best read in a discussion group atmosphere to encourage real reflection on the topics and creative brainstorming on how to practically live these words in our daily lives. Without the benefit of peers with whom to read this, it is far too easy to breeze through the steps without allowing the message to really sink in or doing the internal work necessary to see change in our own lives and how we interact with the world. But, if taken seriously and incorporated into our lives, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life and its ideals really do have the potential to change the world.
View the original article on blogcritics.org
Categories: Ahmadiyyat: True Islam, Religion
Is Prophet Muhammad under represented in this book?
I just finished reading the first and the last chapter of Karen Armstrong’s book and for a moment thought that the Holy Prophet Muhammad, may peace be on him, is under represented in this book. But, then I recalled that she has two separate biographies of the Prophet.
Here, let me quote from the concluding chapter of the first of her biographies of the Prophet, Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet, which I like better:
One of the chief ways in which Muslims have built this deep sense of brotherhood and solidarity has been through devotion to the Prophet Muhammad. Muslims have continued to emphasise that Muhammad is merely an ordinary man like themselves, but over the centuries they have added a qualification. Yes, Muhammad is a man like other men, but he is ‘like a precious gem among stones’. Where ordinary stones are opaque and heavy, a jewel is translucent, shot through with the transfiguring element of light. Muhammad’s life has become a ‘sign’ like the other signs that the Qu’ran urges Muslims to see in the natural world. His prophetic career was a symbol, a theophany, which not only shows God’s activity in the world, but illustrates the perfect human surrender to God. The development of the ideal of Muhammadan sanctity has been an imaginative attempt to penetrate the meaning of his life and apply it to the circumstances of daily life. Christians also developed an image of Jesus the man, who is also the Logos, the blueprint of God’s plan for creation. Unlike the devotion to Jesus, however, the Muslim devotion to Muhammad is not to the personal, historical character but to a symbol or sacrament which, like the symbolism of great art, illuminates life and gives it a new meaning by pointing to another dimension of reality beyond itself.
Muhammad is therefore seen symbolically as the Perfect Man, the human archetype and the image of a perfect receptivity to God. Hence the imaginative importance of the belief in Muhammad’s illiteracy, because it displays his total openness to the Divine Word: this, like his Night Journey, is seen as a perfect example of that fana or annihilation in God of which the Sufis speak. Just as Christians have developed the practice of the imitation of Christ, Muslims seek to imitate Muhammad in their daily lives in order to approximate as closely as possible to this perfection and so to come as close as they can to God Himself. As one might expect, this process of imitation has been more practical and concrete than the imitation of Christ. During the eighth and ninth centuries, Muslim scholars began a process of research to compile the great collections of Muhammad’s sayings (hadith: traditions) and customary practice (sun¬nah). They travelled throughout the Islamic empire to discover as many authentic accounts of things that Muhammad had said or done on certain occasions, and these, with the Qu’ran, formed the basis of the Islamic Holy Law (shari’a}. They also became the basis of each Muslim’s daily life and spirituality. The sunnah taught Muslims to imitate the way Muhammad spoke, ate, loved, washed and worshipped so that in the smallest details of their lives they are reproducing his life on earth and in a real but symbolic sense bringing him to life once more.
Christians do not have anything equivalent to either the Torah or the shari’a and tend to think that this minute observance must be burdensome and prohibitive. It is a type of spirituality that has been given a very bad press in the New Testament, where Paul inveighs against the Torah as part of his polemic against the Jewish Christians who wanted to keep the religion of Jesus a strict sect of Judaism. But neither Muslims nor Jews regard the Law as a burden. Muslims see the sunnah as a type of sacrament: they help them to develop that God-consciousness prescribed by the Qu’ran in the interstices of their daily lives. By modelling themselves as closely as possible on the Prophet, they are not only internalising him at a very deep level but they are also trying to cultivate the inner attitude of Muhammad and draw close to the God that they find in the depths of their beings. Some of the hadith are actually sayings of God Himself which have been put on to the lips of the Prophet. These hadith qudsi, sacred traditions, emphasise that God is not a metaphysical Being ‘out there’ but is in some sense mysteriously identified with the ground of their being. This famous tradition lists the stages whereby one apprehends this inner presence: you must begin by observing the commandments and then progress to voluntary acts of piety:
The external actions, like the physical elements of the Christian sacraments, are the outward signs of this inward grace and must be observed and guarded with reverence. This concern means that Muslims all over the world share a particular lifestyle and whatever their other differences have acquired a very clear Muslim identity which instantly draws them together. The way they pray or wash, their table manners or personal hygiene follow a common, distinctive pattern. Muslims from China, Indonesia and the various parts of the Middle East will for example perform the prostrations of salat in exactly the same way, taking precisely the same number of seconds.
Let me, here, quote a verse from the Quran, which should guide the Muslim behavior:
“And We have sent thee (Muhammad) not but as a mercy for all peoples.” (Al Quran 21:108)
While aggression and fear of the other served to help our distant ancestors survive attack, it does the opposite for our modern, global civilization. It is through interdependence that great advancements have been made and through compassion that we will thrive.
The above comment by Karen is a danger in any society. We cannot open up and take our guards down. There are too many people, movements and nations that have malicious intents and would love to rule over others and enslave them. Let’s don’t quibble, just learn from history. Human nature hasn’t changed.