A few years ago, Robert Reilly wrote a book that may offer the key to understanding the advance of Islamic terror against the West: The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis. 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...