A God for Reformers Summary and Analysis

In Chapter 8, Karen Armstrong describes how the momentous events of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries affected all three major monotheistic religions and how their ideas of God underwent change and new directions.

Armstrong relates how by 1492, the last Muslim stronghold in Spain had fallen to the Christian forces of Ferdinand and Isabella. In other parts of the Muslim Empire, the Mongol invasion led to a resurgence of conservatism as Muslim science declined and which, as some scholars have suggested, marked the beginning of decadence in Islam. Muslim influence, however, increased in scope as the Ottoman Turks gained hold in Asia Minor; the Safavids rose up in Iran, and the Moghul Empire emerged in India. Despite the conservatism occasioned by the rise of the Shariah laws and the suppression of independent reasoning in the Sunni madrasahs...