Book Review: The Closing of the Muslim Mind

Islamism (not Islam or Muslims) is grounded in spiritual pathology and has produced a dysfunctional culture

Robert R. Reilly's book, The Closing of the Muslim Mind, grabbed my attention on the very first page and held its grip through the last. It is well written, but that is not the main reason. The main reason is that Reilly hit on one of the most overriding issues of our age, a tsunami capable of sweeping away the foundations of civilization. The tsunami is the rejection of reason or the rise of anti-reason. He focuses on the tsunami's passage through the Muslim world, but it is not limited to any one culture. It knows no boundaries. Thus, Reilly's book is not only informative, it serves as a warning for us all.

P>KNOXVILLE, TN (Catholic Online) - Robert R. Reilly's book, The Closing of the Muslim Mind, grabbed my attention on the very first page and held its grip through the last. It is well written, but that is not the main reason. The main reason is that Reilly hit on one of the most overriding issues of our age, a tsunami capable of sweeping away the foundation of civilization. The tsunami is the rejection of reason or the rise of anti-reason. He focuses on the tsunami's passage through the Muslim world, but it is not limited to any one culture. It knows no boundaries. Thus, Reilly's book is not only informative, it serves as a warning for us all.

Some of his main points, as I understand them, are as follows. On page one he says that our power to reason influences our view of reality, that it determines what we are able to know and the meaning we find in the things and events around us. For Reilly, then, the fundamental cause for the violence and upheaval we are currently witnessing in the Muslim world can be traced backed to a time when reason was rejected. In his book, he traces this act back to early Islam. Then he indicates how this rejection is connected to Western secularism.

Reilly tells us that there were two competing schools of thought in early Islam, Mu'tazilitism and Ash'aritism. The Mutazilites engaged in philosophical inquiry. In other words, they used reason to understand their faith and relate it to their experience of the world. However, the Ash'arites won out. Apparently their views best served the interests of the caliph, who did not want his authority or his methods questioned. The Ash'arites rejected reason and the use of philosophy. The main reason for the rejection had to do with their beliefs about God and reality.

For instance, the Ash'arites believed that the oneness of God means that only God exists and everything else is an illusion. They also believed that God is absolute and unlimited pure will and power. Thus, they assumed that all events are caused directly by God and that there are no natural or secondary causes. Consequently, Reilly says the idea of "cause and effect," which is central to Western science, does not exist in the Muslim mind. They do not see an inner logic to things. Everything is uncertain, unknowable and incomprehensible.

It should not surprise us, then, that Muslim scholars lost interest in philosophy, and it died out, as did the Greek influence on their culture. It also became dangerous to do philosophy. Furthermore, critical thinking was not taught, and education was reduced to rote learning. As a result, Reilly says that the Muslim mindset became "insular, regressive and unreceptive to new ideas." Without a foundation of fixed knowledge, there is only opinion and sophistry. Reilly says that this promotes irrational behavior, that it forces people to live in a world where myth and the supernatural seem real.

We can see an indication of such behavior in the way the press operates and reports news. In Muslim countries, news is generally rife with conspiracy theories and fantastic accounts of natural events. It does not mention causal relationships or have continuity, and there is little effort to place events and facts in a meaningful context. Rather, the news tends toward narration and description. It focuses on the partial, successive, isolated, immediate events and facts. Therefore, the news is generally weak in investigation and analysis, often distorted and without depth.

In other examples, Muslims have been known not to purchase car insurance or get polio vaccinations because they believed doing so would amount to acts of presumption against Allah's will. In another example, Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy, a Pakistani physicist and university professor, says it is not Islamic to say that combining two hydrogen atoms with one oxygen atom make water. Proper Islamic phraseology requires that you say water is created by the will of Allah when you bring these elements together.

As you can imagine, science and scholarship have not thrived in this environment. Reilly tells us that there has not been a major discovery in the Muslim world for over seven centuries. On average, there are only 8.5/1000 scientist in Muslim countries. The average is 40.7/1000 in non-Muslim countries. During the past 1000 years, approximately 10,000 books have been translated by the Arab world, while Spain approximates this many translations in only one year. Not surprisingly, the Arab world is near the bottom of the scale in all areas of development such as health, education, GDP, and productivity.

Such thinking also has serious political ramifications. Reilly says that the primacy of reason is a prerequisite for democracy and that constitutional government is based on metaphysical support of the natural law. But according to Muslim belief, there is no free will or freedom of conscience. Only God's will is free. Therefore, people's actions cannot be said to be autonomous or moral. It is not for the people to choose right or wrong, but to obey the will of Allah. As a consequence of these beliefs, the law has no foundation, the idea of individual rights is alien to Islamic reasoning and democracy is seen as an affront to Allah.

Reilly says that one of the greatest affronts or humiliations to Muslims is the decline of their status and power in the world. According to Muslim belief, Allah promised victory, and Muslims are obliged to gain power over other nations. Yet, since they failed to capture Vienna, Austria in the 16th and 17th centuries, halting their expansion into Western Europe, their status and power began to decline. Furthermore, in 1774 the Ottomans were forced to sign a treaty with Russia; there was also Napoleon's victory over the Egyptians in 1798; then there was the collapse of the Caliphate in Turkey in 1924 and the subsequent colonization of the Ottoman Empire by foreign powers.

As a result, some Muslims, like the Nazis before them, looked for an enemy to explain their declining status and power. The growth of radical fundamentalism and violence ensued. Once the will and power gain primacy over reason, Reilly says, violence is the only path left open. So he sees the Islamic upsurge as a force not meant to solve problems but to intoxicate and incite those who can no longer abide by their failure to solve them. But he does not believe that the violence can be fully explained within Islam itself. For this reason, he distinguishes Islam from "Islamism," which is a particular view of Islam. To better comprehend Islamism, he says, it needs to be viewed in the light of 20th century Marxist and Nietzscheian philosophies.

As with the Nazis, the violent school of thought known as Qutb is derived from Nietzsche's idea of the primacy of will. This directly connects Islamist violence and totalitarianism with the West. Certain modern Western ideologies, such as secularism and liberalism, assert that the primary constituent of reality is the will. Per Nietzsche, the instrument of will is force. And Karl Marx said that "In order to change humanity, one must use force."

Modern Western ideologies and Islamism achieve their goals through politics, that is, through the control of every aspect of life. They seek justice here on earth. However, they do so at the expense of reason and reality. Thus, they corrupt justice by demanding that it conform to their vision. Reilly believes that this is the heart of these ideologies. Consequently, he says the believers of such ideologies live in a magical world, a second reality. And the fuel for these ideologies is hatred. Lenin said, "We must hate; hatred is the basis of communism."

According to Reilly, Islamism (not Islam or Muslims) is grounded in spiritual pathology and has produced a dysfunctional culture. In general, he believes the primary reason Muslim countries are poor is because their culture is dysfunctional. Societies need people who can relate cause and effect. He says Islam needs a view that integrates it with the real world. It needs a philosophy detached from religion, but not in opposition to religion, as is modern Western philosophy. In his closing comments Reilly says the Koran has philosophical teaching in it, and Islam needs a Saint Thomas Aquinas.

After reading Reilly's book, the thought occurred to me that the West has also become dysfunctional. Do not ideas like Nietzsche's will to power, subjectivism and relativism amount to a rejection of reason and morality? Has not metaphysics been rejected in the West? Are we not experiencing an intellectual crisis? Do we not emphasize rote learning at the expense of critical thinking in many of our schools? And aren't our constitutional rights being trampled by government? Though the new left claims to be rational and scientific, it appears that they are strongly anti-reason, fundamentalist in nature, prone to hateful rhetoric, and attracted to violence, much like their radical Islamist counterparts.

Based on these thoughts, it seems that the main force in the world today is not democracy or capitalism or secularism or socialism or communism. It is more fundamental. It is the rise of anti-reason and totalitarianism. Reilly's book, then, not only helps explain the tsunami passing through the Muslim world, but it also warns us that the tsunami is heading our way and threatens to engulf the West. Thus, the imperative for the Muslim world and the Western nations is clear. It is the recovery of reason. This does not mean that reason is the answer to everything, but it is the foundation and essential if we hope to build a more fair and moral society. So as it says in Isaiah, "Come now, let us reason together. . ." (1:18, NIV).
 
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Michael Terheyden was born into a Catholic family, but that is not why he is a Catholic. He is a Catholic because he believes that truth is real, that it is beautiful and good, and that the fullness of truth is in the Catholic Church. However, he knows that God's grace operating throughout his life is the main reason he is a Catholic. He is greatly blessed to share his faith and his life with his beautiful wife, Dorothy. They have four grown children and three grandchildren.

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