title: Islam : A Short History (Universal History)
author:  Karen Armstrong 
description: Karen Armstrong spent seven years as a Roman Catholic nun, an experience she recollected in her two volumes of best-selling autobiography, Through the Narrow Gate and Beginning the World. She is the author of the world-wide best-seller, A History of God (which has now appeared in more than thirty languages), the acclaimed History of Jerusalem and, most recently, The Battle foe God. She is a teacher at the Leo Baeck College for the Study of Judaism and, in 1999, she received the Muslim Public Affairs Council Media Award.
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  KAREN ARMSTRONG 
  IN 1981, KAR.EN ARMSTRONG published Through the Narrow Gate, a controver-
  sial account of her experience as a Sister of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, 
  a Roman Catholic order. Armstrong left the convent and the Church in 1972, 
  "wearied by religion" and "worn out by years of struggle," and then spent the 
  intervening years pursuing a doctorate in literature and teaching at an English 
  girls' school. Although her first book was a milestone, Armstrong has described 
  her life's real turning point as a series of trips she made to Jerusalem beginning 
  in 1982. Shocked by Israel's invasion of Lebanon and also by the Palestinians' 
  intifada, Armstrong found herself questioning just how accurately most 
  W estemers-herself included-understood the lives and beliefs of Muslims in 
  the Middle East. 
  Convinced that the West was "posing as a tolerant and compassionate 
  society and yet passing judgments from a position of extreme ignorance and irra-
  tionality," Armstrong s