“The external history of a religious tradition often seems divorced from the raison d’être of faith. The spiritual quest is an interior journey; it is a psychic rather than a political drama. It is preoccupied with liturgy, doctrine, contemplative disciplines and an exploration of the heart, not with the clash of current events.”

Armstrong opens the book with a reflection on what it means to write a history of religion in the first place. These reflections are drawn from her multi-decade career writing about religious traditions from all over the globe. This introduction sets up the history of Islam as distinct from that of other religions in that Islam views the political as inseparable from the sacred.

“Human beings are religious creatures because they are imaginative; they are so constituted that they are compelled to search for hidden meaning and to achieve an ecstasy that makes them feel fully alive. Each tradition encourages the faithful to focus their attention on an earthly symbol that is peculiarly its own, and to teach themselves to see the divine in it. In Islam, Muslims have looked for God in history. Their sacred scripture, the Quran, gave them a historical mission.”

From the beginning, Armstrong’s approach to the study of religion is pluralistic and comparative; she seeks to find the collective truths about religion beneath the surface of the specific religion she is writing about (in this case, Islam). By establishing this method so early on in the text, Armstrong sets a tolerant tone for the rest of the book.

“A Muslim would meditate upon the current events of his time and upon past history as a Christian would contemplate an icon, using the creative imagination to discover the hidden divine kernel.”

Throughout the book, Armstrong emphasizes The Importance of Debunking Common Misconceptions About Islam. Comparing Islam to Christianity is one strategy she uses to address these misconceptions. By finding common ground between Islamic and Christian practice, she encourages her readers to look beyond stereotypes of Islam as irreconcilably foreign or inherently hostile to the West.