WASHINGTON – “You might think the title of my book is somewhat provocative,” the author of The Closing of the Muslim Mind,” began, “but the publisher didn’t think it was sufficiently incendiary, so they added the subtitle: ‘How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis.’”
Robert R. Reilly’s book, published in May, examines that alleged closing, how it came to be – and its present-day consequences. Reilly spoke about the book at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. recently.
The reference to suicide in the subtitle, Reilly said, comes from a statement made by Muslim intellectual Fazlur Rahman in his own book, “Islam & modernity: Transformation of an intellectual tradition:” “A people that deprives itself of philosophy necessarily exposes itself to starvation in terms of fresh ideas – in fact, it commits intellectual suicide.”
Indeed, many scholars – Muslim and non-Muslim alike – challenge Reilly. They say that Islam – and Islamism, or the political Islamic movement—have been at the forefront of enlightened religious debate and dialogue for many, many centuries. And while Reilly acknowledges this, he says the religion has essentially been hijacked by those who blindly follow a violent and unyielding version of the monotheistic religion.
During his Papal Address at the University of Regensburg in 2006, Pope Benedict XVI said that Islam has de-Hellenized itself. By de-Hellenization, he meant the abandonment of reason in terms of the use of violence in spreading faith. Is such violence unreasonable and thus against God? In the pope’s view, it is – and thus acting unreasonable is acting against God.
But what if God is without reason or above reason? Reilly asked. “Then the inhibition to violence disappears – that very conception of a God without reason can directly lead to violence.”
In her introduction to Reilly’s talk, Heritage Foundation’s Senior Fellow in Public Diplomacy studies Helle Dale said the existing philosophical direction Reilly describes in his book has created the conditions for Islamist activism and terrorism today, “a problem that people are shocked and frightened by in the U.S. and elsewhere.” Many have speculated on how this came to be. Dale contends that in the Sunni-Shiite struggle, irrationality has won and now constitutes the main obstacle to finding common ground in the Muslim world.
“It is a battle that we too in the Western world are familiar with,” Dale said; “the battle between reason and irrationality.”
Reilly described what he called one of the greatest intellectual dramas in the history of mankind: Through its conquest of large swaths of the Byzantine Empire, the Muslim world came into contact with centers of Greek learning. The first fully developed school of theology in Islam ingested Greek philosophical notions into its concept of God: “They discerned that God must be justice and rationality,” Reilly said, and the discernment between good and evil was through reason. These same Greek influences produced similar viewpoints in Christianity in terms of moral philosophy, Reilly said.
But the Islamic theological school of Ash’arites denied the viewpoint that man knows that God exists through speculative reason: According to the Ash’arites, God is not reason. God is pure will and power, unbound by anything, including his own word, Reilly said. And man doesn’t – and can’t – through his own reason know good and evil, partially because man is so corrupted by his self-interest that the only thing he can consider good is that which advances that self-interest. Additionally: there’s nothing to be known, Reilly explained: God is limitless, omnipotent and willful in the Ash’arite view. And there is only God: There is nothing else. God is the primary cause. There are no secondary causes and no natural law.
Reilly outlined the consequences of this philosophy: “You remove cause and effect from natural order.” And no narrative ties life together; it’s just a series of succeeding miracles that you can’t understand because they are acts of God. There’s a loss of objective morality and a loss of justice there: “Allah does not prohibit murder because it’s bad,” Reilly said, “it’s bad because he prohibits it.”
Where to go from here?
The Muslim world is in bad shape, Reilly said – adding that that’s just not his personal opinion: UN Arab Human Development reports, written and developed since 2001, show that the Arab-Muslim world comes in last or second-to-last (to sub-Saharan Africa) in health, education, gross domestic product, number of patents. How and why did this occur? Reilly said his book attempts to answer the “why” through tracing how an influence of ideas came to reign through the triumph of the Ash’arite world, which suffused the Shiite world and transformed it into the “stagnant culture it is today.”
Al-Qaeda and its terrorism are only one manifestation of the serious crisis Islam faces today, Reilly said. And even if al-Qaeda were wiped out tomorrow, that crisis would remain.
The book’s title, said Dale as she introduced Reilly, references Allan Bloom’s “Closing of the American Mind.” Not all American minds are closed, Dale said, and so too not all Muslim minds are closed.
Reilly said that the only way to effectively fight this crisis is to delegitimize extremist Islamists at the theological and moral level, and that would aid those in the Islam world who are themselves trying to do so.
