Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2006, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is an author. She writes books about the world's religions trying to explain

that their strength lies not in dogma and piety but profound and enduring truths.

Since 9-11 her books on Islam in particular have become best-sellers and she herself is much in

demand as a public speaker.

Brought up in Birmingham she left her family to become a nun but left her convent seven years later because she

found it repressive. She published her autobiography just over 20 years ago and

following that the books about faith that have made her famous. She lives alone, a life that she describes as

frugal and none-like. Whenever I've tried to join the mainstream she says I've

been rejected by it. She is Curran Armstrong. So you know what it is to be an

outsider then, Karen? Yes, I think that has been a constant motif in my life.

Every time I tried to join a popular mainstream activity, I've fallen off.

First of all being a nun in Britain, a very secular, and religious kind of country, then remaining single all my life in a society dictated by couple them,

being an epileptic too, in a society that finds that particular condition difficult to accept.

And finally writing about religion in Britain, which again is a rather marginal activity,

but it's by actually accepting this kind of outside status that I've found somehow

that I've come to the center of myself.

I was going to say, I wonder if you don't enjoy being an outside of it.

It gives you greater license, well You can say what you like about

anybody because you don't belong to any part of it.

It's a great freedom. It is a great freedom. It's sometimes a little lonely. Sometimes when I'm in the United States I can feel much more at home because people there are much more interested in religion that they are here.

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