Politics & Power Quote by Karen Armstrong

Armstrong’s line is a deliberate corrective to a long Western habit: treating Muhammad as either a problem to be explained away or a spiritual figure whose worldly achievements must be minimized to keep “religion” pure. Calling him “not an apparent failure” is pointed understatement, aimed at a readership primed by medieval polemic, colonial-era scholarship, or post-9/11 caricature to assume Islam’s origins were marginal, improvised, or violent. She flips the premise. The blunt pairing of “politically as well as spiritually” insists that the founding of Islam can’t be shoehorned into a modern liberal separation of church and state; in 7th-century Arabia, legitimacy was communal, legal, military, and sacred at once.

The subtext is historiographical: Armstrong is fighting the idea that a prophet must be either a mystic detached from power or a power-broker tainted by it. “Dazzling success” reframes statecraft not as hypocrisy but as part of the religious project: building a viable community (ummah), stabilizing alliances, codifying norms, and outlasting rivals. The triple cadence - “strength to strength to strength” - is sermon-like on purpose, mimicking the momentum of a movement that rapidly scaled beyond its birthplace.

Context matters: Armstrong writes as a popular historian of religion, often addressing non-specialist audiences hungry for a coherent narrative that isn’t just fear or apology. The sentence is persuasion by recalibration: if you start by granting competence and consequence, Islam’s early expansion reads less like an aberration and more like the birth of a durable civilization.