The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide
Created the Modern Islamist Crisis
By Robert R.
Reilly
(ISI Books, 240 pages, $26.95)
Robert R. Reilly has written a book that may offer the key to
both understanding and perhaps defeating the ongoing war of terror
against the West. The book is entitled The Closing of the
Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist
Crisis. As Angelo Codevilla’s jacket blurb puts it: “Reilly
shows what happens to a civilization when it fails to give reason
its due. This book teaches and warns. Read it.” Paul Eidelberg
describes it as “a book surpassing in depth even the best efforts
of Bernard Lewis. You will not only be enlightened, but you may
also see how the West might prevent a new Dark Ages.”
Reilly is a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council
and a well-published writer with substantial government service,
including a stint as director of the Voice of America and senior
adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Information in 2003. As a
sideline, he is also one of our finest classical music critics.
In this book Reilly explains “why the restoration of reason to
Islam is the only antidote to the spiritual pathology driving young
men to attempted terrorist acts.”
The Closing of the Muslim Mind comes as we ask
ourselves what in the world we are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan
nine years after the attacks of 9/11, spending billions of dollars
taken from the American taxpayers and sacrificing thousands of
American lives, not to mention the perhaps hundreds of thousands of
Iraqi and Afghan lives. Are we there to save the Arab and Persian
world by imposing democracy à la Woodrow Wilson and George
W. Bush and his advisers (with disastrous consequences so far)? Are
we simply acting as a republic intent on defending our own shores?
Or are we (as our enemies view us) perhaps an empire trying to
extend our power to protect our “interests,” whatever they are?
Are we merely trying to exterminate al Qaeda, the Taliban, and
all forms of jihadist Islam, or are we, in the tradition of an eye
for an eye, seeking payback for the almost 3,000 Americans who died
in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?
Although the answers to questions such as these do not lie in
Reilly’s work, he marshals convincing historical evidence of the
likelihood that the Christian West and the Muslim countries will
remain incompatible, because we believe in man’s power to reason —
and they don’t. And barring some sort of Islamic Reformation (which
theologians such as Michael Novak do not rule out as impossible),
jihadist Islam and the Christian West will remain in mortal
conflict, as we have intermittently in the past. The difference
now, however, is that Islamic nationalists may already be capable
of using nuclear weapons, or else are on the verge of that
capability, whether in war or as instruments of terror. Most
worrisome, they have the will and the irrational theology to use
them. In short, dialogue is not possible with those who are
incapable of religious tolerance.
At the heart of Reilly’s book is his argument that the
denigration of dialogue is due to the demotion of reason that
took place in the ninth-century struggle between the rationalist
theologians, the Mu’tazilites and their anti-rationalist
theologians, the Ash’arites. Unfortunately, for those who prefer
dialogue, the Ash’arites won.
The Ash’arites’ position was that reason is so infected by men’s
self-interest that it cannot be relied upon to know things
objectively. What is more, there is really nothing to be known
because all created things have no nature or order intrinsic to
themselves, but are only the momentary manifestations of God’s
direct will. Since God acts without reason, the products of his
will are not intelligible to men. Therefore, in this double
disparagement, reason cannot know, and there is nothing to be
known.
All of this may prompt memories of the Islamic world’s outrage
when the just-elected Pope Benedict XVI told his audience in
Regensburg, Germany, that not only is violence in the service of
evangelization unreasonable and therefore against God, but that a
conception of God without reason or above reason leads to that very
violence. The then-Cardinal Ratzinger in his 2005 Subiaco address
said:
From the beginning Christianity has understood itself as the
religion of the “Logos,” as the religion according to reason. In
the first place, it has not identified its precursors in other
religions but in the philosophical enlightenment which has cleared
the path of tradition to turn to search of the truth and toward the
good, toward the one God who is above all gods.
Reilly writes, “Ultimately this theological view developed into
the realist metaphysics of Aquinas which became the metaphysical
foundation of modern science, as Fr. Stanley Jaki, a Hungarian
theologian and physicist, explained in his voluminous writings on
the origins of modern science. Jaki laid out, as well, the reasons
modern science was stillborn in |the Muslim world after what seemed
to be its real start.” Fr. James Schall of Georgetown University
states that “Jaki saw much of the rage in Modern Islam as due to
its failure or inability to modernize itself by its own
powers.”
Reilly asks, “Are [the Islamists of today] something new or a
resurgence from the past? How much of this is Islam and how much is
Islamism? Is Islamism a deformation of Islam? If so, in what way
and from where has it come? And why is Islam susceptible to this
kind of deformation?” You will have to read his book to find the
answers.
THE CLOSING OF THE MUSLIM MIND also draws on British author
Hilaire Belloc, who is increasingly being rediscovered as a prophet
for our times in areas including economics, marriage, and family,
but most notably here in foreseeing the return of militant
Islam.
Belloc wrote in his 1938 book The Great Heresies,
“Since religion is the root of all political movements and changes
and since we have here a very great religion physically paralyzed
but morally intensively alive, we are in the presence of an
unstable equilibrium which cannot remain permanently unstable.”
Later in the book, Belloc writes that “[Islamic] culture happens to
have fallen back in material applications; there is no reason
whatever why it should not learn its lesson and become equal in all
those temporal things which now alone give us our superiority over
it — whereas in Faith we have fallen inferior to it.” Perhaps
Belloc intuited something like the control of a commodity like oil
and the financial power that comes with it, or the possession of
some fantastic weapon such as the atom bomb.
Reilly argues that “the denigration of reason and the primacy of
force that developed within Islamic thinking after the suppression
of the Mu’tazilites are what have produced the dismissal of
dialogue.” Bin Laden quoted his spiritual godfather Abdullah Azzam
in a November 2001 video released after 9/11: “Terrorism is an
obligation in Allah’s religion.” Reilly’s analysis is that “the
restoration of the status of reason is the only antidote to the
spiritual pathology behind this remark; it is also the only
foundation in which real dialogue can begin — dialogue within
Islam among its contending factions, and between Islam and the
West.”
However, Reilly doubts that this restoration is possible or at
least likely. Therefore, those who are considered as enemies by
jihadist Muslims must act accordingly using their God-given gift of
reason. Could it be however, that the question of Faith is even
more important than that of Reason? Unquestionably, there are
millions of adherents of worldwide Islam willing to die for their
faith. In what is left of the once Christian West, are there as
many? I have my doubts.
