Posted on 06/21/2010 7:36:10 PM PDT by grand wazoo
Robert R. Reilly’s The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist (ISI Books, May 2010) will, I am sure, fascinate other readers as it did me. I could hardly put it down until I’d read it twice.
Reilly (a dear friend of mine, by the way) contends that Islam suffers from a flawed metaphysic that deforms its theology. It rejects reason and exalts will. It has no room for natural law: Murder is not wrong by definition but only because Allah chooses to forbid it. If he’d decided to enjoin it, it would have become our duty.
Islam understands his omnipotence to mean that he is superior to reason itself (thus, if he said that two and two make five, so it would be). Allah’s will is the direct cause of everything; no need to look for secondary causes. No wonder, given this primitive conception of nature, Islam rejects Western science. Allah’s will accounts for everything that happens. The world continues to exist because he recreates it continuously from moment to moment. He could decide to annihilate it at any time.
One noted atheist, the Marxist Christopher Hitchens, ridicules the very conception of God as that of a “celestial dictator” — a Stalin in the sky, as it were. But Christians address God as “Our Father.” Far from being a cruel deity who inflicts suffering on his creatures, he is a God who chooses to suffer himself. This is why G.K. Chesterton remarked that Christianity is unique among religions in ascribing courage to God. The Creator became a creature. Why would the omnipotent, impassive Allah need courage? Nobody could nail HIM to a cross. To Muslims, the Christian concept of a triune, incarnate God, insulted, tortured, and murdered by his own creatures seems blasphemous.
The primal Muslim error about God’s nature has led, Reilly argues, to a deep stultification of Arab culture for roughly the last millennium. He cites Hilaire Belloc’s 1938 prediction that the Muslim world would once more surpass Christendom, if only it adopted Western technology. But Reilly’s own argument makes this hard to believe: Islam’s long hostility to reason has turned it into a virtual superstition, impenetrable to the practical and theoretical science that the fulfillment of Belloc’s prophecy would require. You can’t very well build modern weaponry if you don’t believe in efficient causes. Islam seems doomed to remain backward and futile, dissipating its energy in bursts of violence and hysteria.
I have another small bone to pick with this superb and stimulating book. Reilly speaks of Islam as “totalitarian”; I agree with him about its tyrannical potential, but I would reserve the word for regimes (especially communist ones) in which the will of the ruler may change suddenly and arbitrarily (think of Mao, Castro, and Kim Jong-Il), whereas Islamic rulers are bound by the fixed text of the Koran.
On the whole, I find this book reassuring. It makes me more grateful than ever to be a Christian and more doubtful than ever that Islam can ever pose a serious threat to the West, any more than numerology can threaten calculus, or Ptolemaic astronomy overthrow Copernican. As Macbeth says, that will never be!
Islam may remain an irritation to the West for centuries yet, but not a fundamental danger. The real danger is our own apostasy (as Belloc rightly warned us), which has already done so much more harm than Islam ever could. Islam, one might say, has lobotomized itself.
Will Durant once wrote that John Calvin had given us “the most absurd and blasphemous concept of God in the long and honored history of nonsense.” No; that distinction belongs to Muhammad.
In less than a month, Reilly’s small book has earned a place near the top of the tiny library of books I regard as indispensable. How did I live so many years without it?
Has this guy even read the koran?
He does not read the news either or he would have known that the Iranians have or shortly will have an atomic bomb. I would say some Muslims have figured out Western technology.
At some point, they will have nuclear power. It is inevitable.
Joe Sobran was the senior editor at National Review for 18 years. When the magazine was actually worth reading and had something important to say. Not like it is now.
Allah is not. Period.
Islam may remain an irritation to the West for centuries yet, but not a fundamental danger.
I would agree with this but for one unassailable fact.
Political Correctness, Multi-culturalism and Liberalism have so weakened the West that Islam is simply walking in to Europe and conquering the West with out a fight.
The Muslims within and without Europe are breeding prodigiously. The Western countries are not even breeding at replacement rates. Islam need only wait; time is on their side. Islam will inherit the Earth by default.
Things do not make themselves. Everything is formed.
I'm flabbergasted.
In the vast majority of cases, he would be correct.
Trust, me, you will lose the argument.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1011360/posts
I don't subscribe to your views about US foreign policy.
Sobran is a good, decent, America first type of guy. I always liked him and always will, regardless of what the bigots on FR have to say.
Seriously. Sobran has attacked Judaism, Israel, JEws as a group for anti-Jewish leftists, and for communism. He dug up medieval lies about Judaism. Did you bother to read the article and comment, or do you think that any opponent of Israel is magically without sin?
It seems t me that you are the prejudiced one.
The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis
People today are shocked and frightened by the behavior coming out the Islamic world – not only because it is violent, but also because it is seemingly inexplicable. While many explanations have been offered as to “what went wrong” in the Muslim world, no one has decisively answered why it went wrong. In The Closing of the Muslim Mind, Robert R. Reilly locates the roots of contemporary troubles in a pivotal struggle that occurred within the Muslim world nearly a millennium ago. It was a battle over the role of reason – and the side of irrationality won. The theology that resulted, Reilly posits, produced a fertile field for Islamism, and now constitutes the chief obstacle to finding common ground with the Islamic world. In the view of former National Security Advisor John Poindexter, this book is “meticulously researched … must-read for today’s national security leaders.”
Robert R. Reilly is a Senior Fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council and has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Reader’s Digest, and National Review, among many other publications. A former director of the Voice of America, he has taught at the National Defense University and served in the White House and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Reilly is also a member of the board of the Middle East Media Research Institute.
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