Several e-mails on the lady, mostly negative. Sample:

Dear Mr. Derbyshire—I don’t know if you are aware of this [I wasn’t–JD] but Karen Armstrong has praised Palestinian suicide bombers. She said, ‘Palestinians don’t have F16s, and they don’t have tanks. They don’t have anything to match Israel’s arsenal. They only have their own bodies.’ I mention it in an article I wrote last September shortly after former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami visited the U.S. Khatami and Armstrong are both members of the UN’s
Alliance for Civilizations. .

Hugh Fitzgerald takes on Armstrong in the current New English Review, here. Jihadwatch also has at least two anti-Armstrong pieces.

And as Kathryn noted, there is Raymond Ibrahim in NRO. (Though having just put down Ms. Armstrong’s book, I have some quibbles with Ibrahim.

For example, he says: “Armstrong and others try as a routine to tie European sentiments toward Islam to the Crusades, but in fact, ‘people in the west’ had something of a ‘dim’ view of Mohammed half a millenium before the Crusades.” Well, of course they did, and I am sure Karen Armstrong has heard of, for e.g., Charles Martel. In fact, in the first chapter of her book, Muhammad the Enemy, she takes four and a half pages to get to the Crusades. Most of those pages are given over to goings-on in 9th-century Cordova. So far as Christendom itself was concerned, she argues that the main point about Christian thoughts on Islam pre-Crusades was dumb ignorance. “Before 1100 there was practically no interest in Muhammad in Europe, but by 1120 everyone knew who he was.”

Well, I guess I must now read Robert Spencer’s biography of the prophet for balance.

Having read two of her books, now, I have the following vague & part-baked thought about Karen Armstrong: She is very strongly attracted to the idea of mystical experience & spiritual revelation, and inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to people who exhibit it. That’s what I meant by there being too much of the author in the Mohammed book.

(In her History of God, if memory serves, she laments never having had a religious experience herself, in spite of having actively sought one for many years.)