Karen Armstrong (b. 1944) is a British author who specializes in studies of comparative religion. Born in Worcestershire and raised Catholic, Armstrong began the process of becoming a nun in the Society of the Holy Child Jesus (SHCJ) at the age of 17. The SHCJ is a teaching order that was founded in 1846 in England by Pennsylvania native Cornelia Connelly. Today, SHCJ runs schools in the United States, England, Ghana, and Nigeria. Armstrong alleges that she experienced extreme psychological and physical abuse while in the care of the SHJC. These experiences were recorded in her memoir Through the Narrow Gate (1981), which was the first book she ever published. Eventually, the SHCJ permitted her to pursue studies at Oxford, enabling her to escape the abuse.

Following her traumatic experiences as a nun, Armstrong left organized religious life at age 24 and has since practiced a more personal form of spirituality. In 2006, she told the Washington Post, “Nirvana is something within you. It is not an external reality. No god thunders down from the mountaintop. Just as the great mystics in the Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths all discovered, God is within the self. God is virtually inseparable from ourselves” (Quinn, Sally. “A Historian’s Faithful Account: Once Rejecting Religion, Karen Armstrong Now Sees It as a Guidepost,” Washington Post, March 28, 2006). In describing her own religiosity, Armstrong borrows words from various global religious traditions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, and Judaism.

Armstrong’s books share the central theme of interfaith tolerance and compassion. In 2008, she called for the composition of an international Charter for Compassion; after a year of public submissions and deliberation by an official council for the project, Armstrong presented the finished Charter in 2009 at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. Signatories of the Charter for Compassion include the Dalai Llama, the Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Queens Noor and Rania of Jordan, as well as Armstrong herself. The Charter for Compassion organization has since launched community compassion programs, as well as an educational institute dedicated to the promotion of cross-cultural understanding. Now in her 80s, Armstrong remains an ex-officio member of the organization’s board.

Besides Islam: A Short History, key works by Armstrong include her two memoirs, Through the Narrow Gate and The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness. Her most influential books about world religion are A History of God (1993) and The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (2006). Since publishing her first memoir in 1981, she has released a total of 30 books, of which Islam: A Short History was the fourteenth. Over the course of that prolific career, she has won several awards: Muslim Public Affairs Council’s Media Award (1999), the Roosevelt Institute’s Freedom of Worship Award (2008), the TED Prize (2008), Nationalencyklopedin’s International Knowledge Award (2011), the Jack P. Blaney Award for Dialogue (2011), the British Academy’s Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding (2013), and the Princess of Asturias Award (2017). She has also been bestowed with honorary doctorates from Aston University, Queen’s University Ontario, the University of St. Andrews, and McGill University.