>> up next, "after words" with guest host, sally gwynn. this week, claimed religious author, karen arm strong, and her book hi pi fields of blood. " she argues the formation of religion involves bloodshed. this program is about an hour. >> karen, hi. i'm so glad that you could join us this morning. i have to say i'm stunned that you managed to put out one of these books.

seems like every two years. this is one of the most extraordinary scholarshiply things i have seen. i don't know how you do this bus that not story. i want to talk to you about your book because it is -- it's so definitive about violence and religion. but secondly, your thesis is really interesting. which is that religion may not necessarily be the cause of all violence, and i wondered what prompted you to do this book in the first place. >> guest: just abuse i'm a writer about religion, i keep getting told by taxi drivers, psychiatrists, and teachers, that religion has been the cause of all the major wars in history, and it really jars because it's clear the not true. the first world and second world wars were not caused by religion.

they were fought for secular nationalism, and i think that if we could keep on just casting religion in the role of the absolute villain, we are not looking at some of the other factors that military historians tell us are always involved in both violence and terrorism. we never go to war, they tell us, for a single reason or for a single ideology. there are always other factors involved. one of the chief being, competition for scarce resources with the economic role as always been major. and these things blend together with ideology. >> host: one of the things that -- sorry. one thing that you talk about, you lay out a number of reasons why people go to war. obviously politics is one of the major reasons, economic resources. but what fascinated me was when

you talk about search for meaning, that people were looking for search for meaning, and part of that is excitement, almost the ecstasy of going to war, youthful exuberance, and the necessity. you talk about how, without wars there would probably be no civilization. and so all of those, but the one that got me most was the search for meaning. >> guest: yes. because we are a meaning-seeking creatures. part of our human condition. dogs as far as we know don't spend a great deal of time ago nicing about the canine condition or the plights of dogs in the world, but we do, and we fall easily into despair if we can't find ultimate significance in our lives, and warfare actually has been, for men particularly, one of the triggers for a certain ecstasy.

that chris hedges, "new york times" correspondent, has written a very good book called "war is a force that gives us meaning." everything that is crystal clear for men on the battlefield. us and them. black and white, and also he says that when you're in the midst of conflict, you see how very, very trivial and pointless most of civilian life is. i was talking to a military historian in britain just this last month, and he was telling me that one of the chief causes that drives young people to got. a sense of user boredom and futility in their lives, and they get it in the ways that i don't think women do in the same way in warfare. >> host: you just brought up a subject that you didn't really touch very much on in your book,

which is what about women? there's so much about the alpha male and there's rape and pillage and taking away the women and bringing them back and -- women were slaves, women were chatle, man search for meaning, the ecstasy. useful ex-rubens but nothing about women. where do women fit into this violence? >> guest: well, not so mach -- not so much because war is a mass -- -- the longest period in human history was our period of hunter gathererrers where the men, in order to survive before the invention of agriculture, had to kill animals and became professional killers, using their big brains to invent a technology that enabled them to

kill creatures far bigger than themselves and the women stayed at home. now, women are beginning to come on to the scene now politically more than they ever did before. people have often said to me as women don't have this urge for violence in the same way, perhaps they can bring something new to the scene. but you know, whenever people say that me, the shade of mrs. thatcher rises up before me, and who is -- you can hardly -- she fought pointless war in the falklandss, and i think if women now have a contribution to make, it is the -- what we should do is that we all, all of, however privileged we are -- and i've had a sir privileged life as a woman -- we have all had experience of being ostracized and pattronnized and marginalized, pushed out of the way, and if we want to bring something new we should bring

that experience on to the table, and stand up, give voice to the plight of people all around the world who are also marginalized and depressed in some way. so many of the problems that we're having today comes from the vast disparity in wealth and pour in the world that is causing huge alienation, stress, anger and rage that explodes in the way we see every day on the news. >> host: what i -- what fascinates me from the beginning of time -- you start out very early, even prereligion in your book, pipe are on the sidelines and yet they're the ones who suffer the most in war. if men are going out because they are looking for heroic deeds and battle, because they're young and -- or because they're bored or because they get a sense of ecstasy, women don't get anything except they get killed and their children gift killed, and their lives get

disrupted. why haven't women put a stop to it over the years? why have women sat on the sidelines? one thing about margaret thatcher is that she did order the war but she wasn't out there on the battlefield. >> guest: no. indeed; sally. i think, too it's not only women who have been the casualties of war. i think we have to remember that the warrior class, until the modern period, the warrior class was only an athis tocratic class, the vast mass of the population were peasants who continually -- as aristocrats fought one another, were killed, their livestock destroyed, buildings burned, starved to death, died of disease, women and the poor, and i think it's the powerless people of this

world, the vast majority of the pop -- population who have been sufferers from war. that is still pretty true today. >> host: when you start in your book and you write about the beginning of violence, you're talking about the fact that prereligion there wasn't anything called religion, and that what took the place of what we now call religion, was community, and community rituals, and that when people were battling, they weren't battling for religious reasons at all because there was no religion. >> guest: well, our word religion is new. before the 18th century, nobody thought of religion in a separate category because it pervaded everything in life, because it was what -- the

rituals, the gods, goddesses, to gave significance and meaning to everything we did but blended with all other activities. it's was in the early modern period, the 18th century, we in europe and you here in what would become the united states, separated religion off from politics, and saw it as an essentially private search, something that was personal to the individual, that had nothing to do with public life. now, this was an entirely new development. no other culture has anything like this concept of religious. the oxford digser in says there's no word in greek or latin that corresponds to the world religious or religion in english. word wes translate as religion in other languages, like

invariably refer to something much larger and more encompassing so that before the 18th century it was impossible to say where religion ended and politics began. there was no conceptual means of separating the two. it was like, to take religion as it were out of politics or warfare or state building -- would be like trying to take the begin -- gin out of the cocktail. and you're absolutely right, that community -- people didn't experience god much by themselves from the very beginning of human society. they experienced it together, and that is -- the notion of community is -- has been crucial in the whole history of religion, and it's by living with one another in a kindly and compassionate way, that puts the

ego to the back burner. we get intimations of transcendence, and the buddha, in his order of monks, and community lies with an essential way to get to nirvana. the important thing about these communities is they were always pretty political. they were always a kind of speaking alternative to the violence of life in the courts with concern about warfare and egoism and gaining wealth and plundering other people's fields and all of that, a lot of aggression in civilized life therefore, whereas in the buddhist, in the early christian

communities, certainly in the jewish communities and the muslim, in mecca, the community in mecca, set up by the prophet, was meant to be both an alternative and a rebuke to the way the aristocratic court was conducting itself. >> host: one thing that fascinates mow you talk about how -- that warfare and violence was really necessary for civilization, and that without that, there would not have been any civilization. can you talk about that a little bit? >> guest: absolutely. this is what made me want to write this book, actually. i came across this extraordinary fact that in every single civilization, before the modern period, before we invented industrialized society, every single civilization depended on agriculture. and that meant that a small -- in every single civilization,

whether it's in china, india, europe, middle east, developed a system whereby a small aristocracy comprising at most five percent of the population, took away the surplus of produce grown by the peasants and kept them at subsistence level in poverty and degradation and used this wealth they'd taken to fund their civilization or project. this could only have been done by force. they had this peasant somehow had to be subdued. so 90% of the population throughout -- for five thousand years were kept in distress and anger. now, as historians tell us, without this terrible system we would probably not have developed beyond a primitive level as a species, because this

system supported a privilegedcast with the people who had the less sure to explore the arts and sciences on which civilization depended. plus, whether your economy is biased oning a actual tour, the only way you can, if you like, crease your gross national product is by acquiring more land and more peasants to farm it. consequencely, warfare was the only way for the economy to grow, and plunder was essential to supporting the acristocratic lifestyle. the economic stake was always there, but because we're meaning-seeking creatures, this effort, this struggle, to achieve civilization was mythologized in various systems to give it meaning, to give it

significance, but at the same time, there were always prophets and sages, i'm thinking of the prophets of israel, for example, jesus, mohammad, confucius, who spoke out against this system of oppression and castigated people, ruleres, for oprocessing the poor, had harsh words for those miami said their prayers or worshiped in the temple but neglected the plight of the poor and opressed, so -- >> host: so, are you saying that violence was a good thing or is a good thing or can be a good thing? or more? because without it we wouldn't have civilization. it's kind of a conundrum. >> guest: absolutely. the civilization is a dilema for us all. of course i don't think violence and warfare is a good thing. it's appalling just that the

system of agrean oppression was appalling but it's a dilemma, and the american monk says that all those of us who benefit from a simple of oppression are implicated in the suffering it has been caused and all of us alive today owe our civilizational achievements and our privilegedded lifestyles to all those millions of men and women who were oprocessed four or five -- opressed four or five thousandees, the mass of society. i wanted to call my book originally -- but i knew my publishers would not allow know have that but it was the third center emperor in india, the first emperor to rule the whole of india, and he was a cruel man. he had come through through

throne after killing two of his brothers, as was quite common in india at that time. but eight years into this reign he accompanied the army on a campaign to put down a rebellion in a city, and he was horrified at the bloodshed, the massive dead. horrified to see the 140,000 prisoners of war torn from families and taken off for forced agricultural labor in other parts of the empire, and he put up throughout india these extraordinary endescriptions written on vast rock faces and huge cylindrical pillars, throughout india, uncovered and translated in the 19th under, in which he says how distressed he was at the violence, how he himself is going to give up violence, and no more warfare no more hunting, even. he was going to go on

pilgrimages to buddhist shrine, saying we must listen calmly to all teachers. if we have to go to war, we must keep punishment to the lowest level possible. that -- but for all this -- he is calling for more comp passionate society, and finally he would become a lay buddhist, but for all this, he could never disband his army because he knew that had he done so, all the or one of the emperors would start fighting one another to succeed him and the people who would suffer most would be the mass of the poor about whom oh way concerned nor could he repatriate prisoners because they were essential to the economy. without this kind of forced labor, the economy goes down the

chute. so this is -- and his dilemma is the dilemma of civilization itself. that it depends on great inequity, and you can say, much to the same is pretty well true today, because you and i, sally, and our countries, live lives of incredible privilege, but there's a huge inequity of resources, wealth, and power, in the world. and it's time -- i think we have to make ourselves aware of this because if we don't now learn to implement the golden rule globally, the golden rule which has been articulated in every single major tradition, never treat others as you would not like to be treated yourself unless we do this globally now and make sure that all people, whoever they are, are treated with the kind of respect we wish

for ourselves, we're not going have a viable world. if the british had applied the golden rule in their colonists, their subject peoples in their empires, i don't think we would be having so men political problems today. >> host: you mentioned ashoka, and confucius who was the one who first wrote about the golden rule. and the buddha, and jesus. where did their sense of morality, if that's what it is -- where did that come from sniff it was in fact convenient and if it was economic which i -- economically prosperous to continue on with war, how did they come upon this view that hurting other people was not a good thing? >> guest: you know, i think we have inherited this stubborn sense that life -- people should live in equality with one

another from the hunter gatherers, from the time before civilization, the longest part of our history, 20,000 years or more. and this has -- because hunter gathererrer societies, they are -- we can tell from modern hunter gatherer societies are essentially egalitarian. they have to be, because there isn't enough -- there's no surplus of wealth. wealth has to be shared or the tribe doesn't survive. and everybody has the same fighting skills so it's almost impossible for one leader to emerge and suppress the others, and they're small communities. but is ingrained in all of us that -- one of the earliest things most children say, it's not fair, a sense of outrage.

so i think people like con few shoes and jesus and the buddha and the prophets and the rabbis and the prophet mohammed, were all articulating this ingrained sense that even though none of us have ever had an experience of an entirely just society, that things ought to be like that. and they have kept that voice alive even at a time when there was no hope of articulating it politically in the dilemma of civilization. >> host: you write about the crusades and the inquisition, and i think what most people, when they talk about religion being the cause of violence, would bring up the crusades and the inquisition, as two totally religious inspired actions. and yet you say that's not necessarily true. can you explain that? >> guest: no. -- yes, sure.

because as i say, we go to war for many, many interrelated reasons. we never do anything purely for god. believe me, know because i tried as a nun for seven years to do -- to do every action entirely for god and it's impossible because our motivation is always so entirely mixed. now, the crusades were certainly imbued like all human activities were, with religious passion, but the pope was also very politically motivated. he wanted to use the dikes of europe to extend his power into the east, especially as he was responding to a plea for help from the eastern emperor of the -- the greek orthodox world, who did not accept the supremacy of the open and the crusade would be a answer to that help

was also engaged in a long struggle fought in europe between the pope, the church, and the kings of europe, as to who was going to be top dog, who was going to be the real leader. and he was asserting his -- he was asserting his right as opposed to the king to mobilize the whole of europe for warfare. it was a very astute political motion. by the end of the crew said, actually, it was more important -- less what happened in the middle east or how the fighting was going on there, than what happened -- what impact the crusades had politically at home and how it enkansassed a crusader's amibition. religion and politics were infused in a sort of cocktail. and the appallingly short

solution to a problem that federal unanimous and isabella, the catholic monarchs of spain had, when they came to the throne after the whole country had been torn apart in a bitter civil war, as they were facing the huge danger, imminent danger, of an attack by the otto mans and they had in spain a muslim principlity in grenada. they were on the front line of what europe felt was a war against the islamic world. and very often when people are -- a people is threatened by an outside enemy, we seive this again and again in the book in my story -- they turn on an enemy within. as sort of -- they have terrified fantasies of a sort of fifth column of people, and the people they picked on, the common people were picking on as the sort of fifth column, were

the jews who had converted to christianity. a lot of them had converted to christianity, called the converseo. they were -- became extremely successful in the christian world and they were resent for it. they weren't against jews practicing jews at this time but, rather, the converters and started the inquisition against them. it was a tragedy because for centuries, the muss lime rule, jews, christians and muslims lived together in relative harmony, in the iberian peninsula. but the -- they introduced the hatred and suspicion of the enemy into spain for the first time. fewer people died in the inquisition than is commonly thought. and it was -- the inquisition

was quite rightly hated and also resented in the rest of europe because spain was definitely the most powerful kingdom in europe at that time, and so this is a story of the inquisition have been overblown, especially in the protestant world, it was appalling but an infusion of both politics and religious fashion in that kind of cocktail. >> host: you mention in your book in the crusades, that a lot of these young men who went off to the crusades had no idea what they were doing or where they were going and that they would stop at jewish communities and say, but, wait a minute, why are we going off to the middle east to kill muslims when the jews killed christ? why don't would just do it here and not have to travel all that distance. i thought that was -- never occurred to me. i didn't know that was part of the crusades. >> guest: it was -- people were

genuinely bewildered. now when a ruler want to go to war he goes on tv and explain knows what is happening. young people were ash aristocrats war signing occupy for crusades because it was app adventure and imbued with'ing because we're going to lib rat the tomb of christ, but a lot of them were really confused. they had this false idea that the jews killed jesus. in fact of course we know it was the romans who put jesus to death rather than the jew wish people and jesus was himself jew jewish, but they were puzzled, both in the german crusaders and the french crusaders. we have it all backward. at this point, europeans knew next to nothing about islam. muslims were a shadowy presence on the horizon.

why were they slogging 3,000 miles to the mideast, through incredible dangers, who when the jews were alive and well on their very doorsteps. here again, too there were economic reasons for this sudden hatred of jews. who had been well-integrated into european society, because europe was beginning its slow progress to creating a commercial empire, a commercial economy, that would eventually in the 19th century, replace the empire. ...

to kill muslims in the east, those who didn't go on a crusade it made anti-semitism a chronic disease in europe and jewish and muslim became somehow linked in the european mind as phobics in some way. >> host: you talk about religion earlier and the meaning of religion, how the word really didn't exist until i guess martin luther is the first person who was a proponent of the separation of church and state but also that religion

became something that was an internal instead of external and until that time religion had been about the community, about the state and now it suddenly became something that was within us. how did that happen and what did that mean in terms of religion and violence? >> guest: well he is the first european to advocate the separation of church and state. he also showed that this would not necessarily be a peaceful alternative because his idea was that the road -- the world was so corrupt that religion had nothing to do with it. it should really literally let the world and its problems go to hell while you visit -- the religious retreated into the

kingdom of god within them. but also during the peasants were when the peasants revolt in germany at this time another modernization process that was going on he told the princess to go and and kill the peasants, burn them, put them down as you put down a matt dodge he said because they have permitted cardinal sin of mixing religion and politics. they said look this huge inequity was against the teachings of christ that all people are equal and should love one another and the rich and the poor should sit at the same table. even though this is quite right that the gospel and martin luther was king -- keen on going back to the scripture saying peasant should be slaughtered and killed.

protestant christianity is the only form of religion that suits our modern conception of religion as an essentially private quest. but luther's aggression shows shows that there's also been an aggression and secularism too. and we see that particularly in revolutionary france for examp example. when the french during their revolution wanted to get rid of the catholic church which was so intimately entwined with the old aristocratic order that they would bring down, one of the first acts of the new national assembly was to confiscate all church property and put it over to the state and abolish the religious orders.

we follow that up a year later with the september massacres when the mobs were let loose in the prisons were a lot of priests were incarcerated and slaughtered them all in a couple of nights. thousands of people were killed and then later that year the revolutionary armies killed probably about a quarter of a thousand people in western france who were protesting against the anti-catholic measures of the regime. so secularism has often been imposed violently and that is particularly true in the middle east. many of the problems we are having today had sprung from a too violent, too hasty secularization of the country which has been done cruelly with blood and slaughter and has pushed islam into a more

aggressive mode. >> you have a chapter called holy terror and i would like to talk about terrorism now. you quote richard dawkins, the famous atheist is saying the only religious faith could motivate such madness as terrorism but i would like to hear your definition of terrorism because i think it's different from what most people think. >> terrorism like religion is a word that is notoriously difficult to define, so much so that those scholars who specialize in the study of terrorism say is that is hopelessly lost in semantic confusion. you could say it involves the killing of innocent people by a group but just ordinary warfare.

the state has been by far the biggest killer of civilians, far more than any individual group of terrorists. that has been exponentially increasing in the last century. in world war i only 5% of the people who died were civilians. in the second world war those figures shot up to 66.5% of the casualties of world war ii were civilians. they were deliberately targeted by allied scientist who created special bombs that would have an effect, a disastrous effects that were dropped on german and japanese cities precisely to terrorize the population and

dropped on residential areas of civilians. now it's 90% of people who are dying in our current wars have been civilians. so you can't say it's just -- terrorism is just about the killing of civilians therefore. they also insist that whatever reasons people give for terrorist action weather is all done for allah or. it is always and inescapably political. that's the one thing you can say about terrorism, it always has a political focus. it's about power, about grabbing power for getting rid of a certain power structure or tearing down a certain element in society. it's about par. that was certainly true.

certainly there's all this talk about god but there's also in bin laden's speeches a strong political anger with saudi arabia and western, strong anger about western policy in the middle east. so again you have this mingling of motivation. >> host: so everyone who is anti-islam or anti-muslim says islam is a violent religion and yet most muslims will say that it is not a violent religion and in fact terrorism is against the koran and against everything that islam stands for. tell me what you think about islam and about the muslim religion and whether you believe it's a peaceful religion and why

is it that they are always associated in people's minds with terrorism? >> well first of all islam has been for centuries until the modern period a far more tolerant religion than say christianity. the word jihad which has now entered the english lexicon is often thought to be central to the koran. in fact it isn't. the word jihad and its derivatives appear only 41 times in the koran and in only 10 of those instances does it refer unambiguously to warfare where jihad means struggle and it's a struggle sometimes that you have to fight when the little muslim

community that threatened with extermination the establishment. also it's a jihad, a struggle to share your food with somebody who is worse off than yourself when you have hardly got any resources yourself. that's also jihad. there's a very famous haditha, as saying attributed to the pro-pot -- profit mom made when he is returning from battle. he says to his companions, we are returning from the lesser jihad, that is the battle and going back to the greater jihad. that is far more difficult yet a much more important struggle of performing your own society in your home hard. and that has been muslim policy throughout the ages.

the muslim law was devised at a time when muslims ran the biggest empire the world had ever seen and it is about speaking only about defensive warfare are not aggressive warfare. by this time the expansion had stopped the abbasid and knew that they could not expand the empire any further. it had reached its limits but they had to defend their frontier so it's very much a defensive warfare -- warfare not an aggressive warfare is being advocated. and yes there are some passages in the koran that speak of warfare and killing. these are passages that came to the prophet at a time when they were fighting battles. and i discuss them all in the book in detail.

various strategies to balance all those few passages with a much larger number of koranic passages that speak to the importance of reconciliation and even these extremely aggressive passages nearly always, in fact always segue to but it's better for your souls to sit down and discuss this be fully -- peacefully and reconciliation is better and god is always forgiving. that balance is always there. until recently nobody read the koran on its own just as jews don't read the jewish hebrew scriptures without do tell to bake. you see the jewish scriptures through the lens of the

rabbinical exegesis developed over centuries which was very much concerned to mitigate extremely violent passages in the hebrew bible. we have all got violent passengers in our scriptures because we are violent people and the scriptures reflect us but in the muslim world too bill but he just picked up the koran and picked out a few passages from jihad. they ignored the rest. this caution of reading the scripture in the light of all this traditional exegesis actually held extremist opinions. now why is there so much terrorism in the muslim world now? i said earlier muslims have had a much more difficult passage to modernity than we have. number one they were a great world power and when the british and the french came in and subdued them in their empires

they were reduced overnight to a dependent block and that humiliation goes very deep. humiliation is a huge course of violence not just in islam but other parts of the world, a sense of corrosive shame and humiliation. that's a very dangerous thing to have loose in society. secondly as i said earlier secularism has been imposed so violently that it's a nimbus of evil and every fundamentalist movement that i have studied is rooted in fear of annihilation. in the muslim world you can see why that fear of annihilation is a cute. the shaws used to make their soldiers go out with their bayonets ripping off the women's veils and tearing them to pieces in front of them. in 1935 the shot gave his

soldiers orders to shoot hundreds of unarmed demonstrators in one of the holiest tribes of iran and hundreds of iranians were killed that day day. soon he found a length of them fund alyssum developed ghastly concentration camps in which muslim brotherhood members were incarcerated for 15 years without trial and often doing nothing more incriminating than handing out a few leaflets. and so in this embattled sense you have a more extreme form of islam developing and that tragically has a vested as we have seen in terrorist action. but it's not just purely islam and let's look at suicide which seems the quintessential terrorist activity.

suicide bombing was not invented by muslims. it was invented by the tamil tigers who were utterly aggressive and two until the iraq war helped the undisputed record of suicide bombing. robert pape of the university of chicago has done a survey -- excuse me. of every single suicide bombing that has occurred between 1980 and 2004 and it concludes that it has nothing to do with either islamic fundamentalism or and i quote any kind of religion for that matter. in lebanon in the 1980s there were something like 30 odd

suicide attacks. seven were committed by muslims. by christians and the rest by secularists and socialists coming in from syria. the main motive for robert pate says for suicide action is when your homeland, the country you perceive as your homeland, has been invaded or occupied by a superior military power or empire. in lebanon it was the united states and israel too. that also inspired a suicide bombing for a while and hamas great again if you look at the hamas videos the young martyrs to be segued in the cocktail that we have seen throughout, form a prayer to say they are going to meet a lord of the worlds into a pierce secularist

nationalist idea for liberation, the liberation of palestine and then into into the third world ideologies claiming they are going to be a beacon of hope for all the oppressed people suffering under western imperialism and then back to the liberation of palestine back to islam. again that cocktail. >> host: i was going to ask you about isis. let's talk about isis. what do you think motivates them? they talk about this being a religious jihad and the methods they use seem to go back to 2000 or 3000 years ago in terms of violence. what are they about? >> guest: well isis is again a pretty motley group. you have got some die-hard jihadis and they come -- their

roots are in a particularly violent form of saudi arabia and weapon is him. it qualms, the brothers who were bed when tribes who were sort of civilized and to leave nomadic life and taught the very narrow form of islam in saudi arabia and known as wabi-ism. wahhabi-ism. they had to be suppressed eventually but that kind of feeling and love of warfare was apparent. that was the core as isis. but then these hideous wards that are over running iraq and syria at the moment are not entirely composed of die-hard jihadis. a whole lot of thugs have also joined in the fray. they just love violence in the excitement of it plus and

significantly a lot is left over from the saddam regime. members of saddam's expanded army for example which the americans unwisely in my view disbanded when they arrived in iraq. also the socialist party also who hate the status quo setup of the iraq war and are happy to join in this frenzy. plus many of the young people who are joining up are joining up for that same age-old desire for glory and for many of them islamic commitment is minimal. two would be jihadis who left britain in me to go to syria

ordered two books from amazon. one was islam for dummies. the other was the koran for dummies which shows the level of knowledge of the koran etc. that they had. now we have seen that terroris terrorists, forensic psychiatrist have made extensive studies of terror suit took part in the 9/11 atrocities and also those who were picked up after the shoe bomber richard reid or the boston verifone bombers. i found in 20% of these people had a conventional muslim upbringing. the vast majority were either converts like the canadian gun or a week or two ago or they were nonobservant like that austin marathon bombers or they

were self-taught with a smattering view of islam derived from such tokens as islam for dummies. no way they come from? in some ways i know exactly how they give the impression of going back as you said two or 3000 years with their hideous beheadings but these are all very strategically focused. this is essentially also a modern movement. it expresses the dark side of modernity in which mass killing has been sadly a feature for sense the french revolution. they joined the french revolution in one year 17,000 men, women and children were humiliated publicly by the revolutionary regime. the young turks in turkey during world war i defiantly secularist

atheistic movement massacred 1 million armenians and created a turkic society. i given detailed the mass killings that followed this throughout the 20th century in many ways. furthermore they are also expressing in a very eccentric and bizarre way and unease with the nation-state which served us well during industrialization period and mobilizing the country from warfare but also it's not so good now that our society is becoming more global whether we like it or not. we are inextricably combined with one another. economically when one market goes down the other markets

throughout the world plummet that day. what happens in the middle east will have a blowback in canada or in the west. we cannot live without one another and yet our nationalistic ideology is focused too narrowly on the nation and that is particularly true in the middle east where the nation-state set up by the british and the french 100 years ago where an arbitrary bizarre and put together a whole lot of incompatible peoples and told them to create a nation. very very difficult to do. you are set up to fail. also in their very successful economic handling of all the oil that they had been acquiring.

they will work a very successful corporation in the modern sense. so going back to the dark ages is unfortunately not quite true. they are a bizarre and terrible group that they express a darker side of modernity that we don't often consider. >> host: we only have a few minutes left but i wanted to ask you because i was talking about going back to the darker side. so where does all this lead us? you know we are in this violent world. you talk about the fact that we are in fact the violent people. violence is in our human nature. are we going back to pre-religious days where it's really about the community or are we going forward with more religious involvement? where does this all and? >> i wish i knew. i got into this kind of study

not because i'm filled with peace and love and joy and religious exultation. i am through -- i am filled with dread as i look at where we go. even in our so-called tolerant western world there's a lot of bigotry that reminds me forcibly of the bigotry that has existed in europe in the 1930s and 1940s that ended in the concentration camps and in the last decade of the last century we saw more concentration camps on the boundaries of europe this time with muslims on them. i fear terribly that we are not going back to community. we are locked into our cell phones in our computers and our personal facebook. we are almost retreating from community into a virtual age.

and i think if we don't want to do religion anymore what we need is to cultivate perhaps in secular ways what the religions did as well to -- to love our enemies, to love the stranger. if they stranger lives within your lan says leviticus did not molest him. you must treat him as her own people and love him as yourself because you were strangers in egypt. we have got to learn to reach out to the foreigner. in britain we are not dealing with bad at all. we have started to demonize the european union. our whole political converse now is about immigration and keeping them out. we don't want strangers living in our land but we are living side-by-side with strangers and somehow unless we manage to create a more inclusive ideology

that we reach out as religions to include all creatures not just our own congenial group i doubt we'll have a viable world to hand over to the next generation. >> host: karen armstrong thank you so much. your book "fields of blood" is an absolutely riveting book. i honestly couldn't put it down. it's got so much history and also it's just a great story so thank you for coming on. >> guest: thank you sally, thank you very much. >> that was "after words" booktv's signature program in which others of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed by journalists, public policymakers and others familiar with their material. "after words" airs every weekend on booktv at 10:00 p.m. on

saturday, 12 and 9:00 p.m. on sunday and 12:00 a.m. on monday. and you can also watch "after words" on line. go to booktv.org go to booktv.org and click on "after words" in the booktv series and topics listed on the upper right side of the page. >> next on booktv person george w. bush discusses a biography of his father with andy card who served as white house chief of staff for bush 43 and secretary of transportation for president bush 41. this is about 50 minutes. [applause] >> today is a very special day in the life of the george bush presidential library foundation and is special because we gather for the book launch of "41" a portrait of my father fittingly on veterans day. today we have both the author and subject