Author Urges Joint Rule for Jerusalem

Jerusalem, where followers of the world’s three great monotheistic faiths all “found their God,” properly belongs to no one nation and should be jointly administered, asserts best-selling author and religious historian Karen Armstrong.

“The point of a holy city is that no one owns it. It belongs to God and therefore to everybody,” Armstrong said, commenting on one of the stickiest unresolved issues in the Mideast peace process.

Armstrong was in Los Angeles recently to accept a media award from the Muslim Public Affairs Council Foundation, which praised the fairness of such works as her best-selling “A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam,” her study of Jerusalem and a biography of the prophet Muhammad.

The British author left a strict, cloistered life as a Roman Catholic nun in 1969 and now considers herself a “freelance monotheist.” She is currently working on an extensive study of fundamentalism among American Protestants, Iranian and Egyptian Muslims, and Israeli Jews. The book is scheduled for release next March.