Table Of ContentTHIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
AND ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA
Copyright © 2014 by Karen Armstrong
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Armstrong, Karen, [date]
Fields of blood : religion and the history of violence / Karen Armstrong.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-307-95704-7 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-38535310-6 (eBook)
I. Violence—Religious aspects. I. Title.
BL65.v55a76 2014
201′.72—dc23 2014011057
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Armstrong, Karen, [date], author
Fields of blood : religion and the history of violence / Karen Armstrong.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-0-307-40196-0
eBook ISBN 978-0-307-40198-4
1. Violence—Religious aspects—History. 2. Religion—Social aspects—
History. I. Title.
BL65.V55A76 2014 201′.76332 C2014-902471-1
Jacket design by Oliver Munday
First Edition
v3.1
For Jane Garrett
Now Hevel became a shepherd of flocks, and Kayin became a
worker of the soil …
But then it was, when they were out in the field that Kayin rose up
against Hevel his brother and he killed him.
Y said to Kayin: Where is Hevel your brother?
HWH
He said:
I do not know. Am I the watcher of my brother?
Now he said:
What have you done!
Hark—your brother’s blood cries out to me from the soil!
—GENESIS 4:2, 8–10, translated by Everett Fox
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Part One ♦ BEGINNINGS
1. Farmers and Herdsmen
2. India: The Noble Path
3. China: Warriors and Gentlemen
4. The Hebrew Dilemma
Part Two ♦ KEEPING THE PEACE
5. Jesus: Not of This World?
6. Byzantium: The Tragedy of Empire
7. The Muslim Dilemma
8. Crusade and Jihad
Part Three ♦ MODERNITY
9. The Arrival of “Religion”
10. The Triumph of the Secular
11. Religion Fights Back
12. Holy Terror
13. Global Jihad
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A Note about the Author
Other Books by This Author
Introduction
Every year in ancient Israel the high priest brought two goats into the
Jerusalem temple on the Day of Atonement. He sacrificed one to expiate
the sins of the community and then laid his hands on the other,
transferring all the people’s misdeeds onto its head, and sent the sin-
laden animal out of the city, literally placing the blame elsewhere. In
this way, Moses explained, “the goat will bear all their faults away with
it into a desert place.”1 In his classic study of religion and violence, René
Girard argued that the scapegoat ritual defused rivalries among groups
within the community.2 In a similar way, I believe, modern society has
made a scapegoat of faith.
In the West the idea that religion is inherently violent is now taken for
granted and seems self-evident. As one who speaks on religion, I
constantly hear how cruel and aggressive it has been, a view that, eerily,
is expressed in the same way almost every time: “Religion has been the
cause of all the major wars in history.” I have heard this sentence recited
like a mantra by American commentators and psychiatrists, London taxi
drivers and Oxford academics. It is an odd remark. Obviously the two
world wars were not fought on account of religion. When they discuss
the reasons people go to war, military historians acknowledge that many
interrelated social, material, and ideological factors are involved, one of
the chief being competition for scarce resources. Experts on political
violence or terrorism also insist that people commit atrocities for a
complex range of reasons.3 Yet so indelible is the aggressive image of
religious faith in our secular consciousness that we routinely load the
violent sins of the twentieth century onto the back of “religion” and
drive it out into the political wilderness.
Even those who admit that religion has not been responsible for all the
violence and warfare of the human race still take its essential
belligerence for granted. They claim that “monotheism” is especially
intolerant and that once people believe that “God” is on their side,
compromise becomes impossible. They cite the Crusades, the Inquisition,
and the Wars of Religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
They also point to the recent spate of terrorism committed in the name
of religion to prove that Islam is particularly aggressive. If I mention
Buddhist nonviolence, they retort that Buddhism is a secular philosophy,
not a religion. Here we come to the heart of the problem. Buddhism is
certainly not a religion as this word has been understood in the West
since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But our modern Western
conception of “religion” is idiosyncratic and eccentric. No other cultural
tradition has anything like it, and even premodern European Christians
would have found it reductive and alien. In fact, it complicates any
attempt to pronounce on religion’s propensity to violence.
To complicate things still further, for about fifty years now it has been
clear in the academy that there is no universal way to define religion.4
In the West we see “religion” as a coherent system of obligatory beliefs,
institutions, and rituals, centering on a supernatural God, whose practice
is essentially private and hermetically sealed off from all “secular”
activities. But words in other languages that we translate as “religion”
almost invariably refer to something larger, vaguer, and more
encompassing. The Arabic din signifies an entire way of life. The Sanskrit
dharma is also “a ‘total’ concept, untranslatable, which covers law,
justice, morals, and social life.”5 The Oxford Classical Dictionary firmly
states: “No word in either Greek or Latin corresponds to the English
‘religion’ or ‘religious.’ ”6 The idea of religion as an essentially personal
and systematic pursuit was entirely absent from classical Greece, Japan,
Egypt, Mesopotamia, Iran, China, and India.7 Nor does the Hebrew Bible
have any abstract concept of religion; and the Talmudic rabbis would
have found it impossible to express what they meant by faith in a single
word or even in a formula, since the Talmud was expressly designed to
bring the whole of human life into the ambit of the sacred.8
The origins of the Latin religio are obscure. It was not “a great
objective something” but had imprecise connotations of obligation and
taboo; to say that a cultic observance, a family propriety, or keeping an
oath was religio for you meant that it was incumbent on you to do it. The
