by Raymond Ibrahim<\/p>\n
Jihad Watch<\/em><\/p>\n A review of\u00a0The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis<\/em>\u00a0by Robert R. Reilly (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2011. 244 pp.)<\/strong><\/p>\n Last week, “Saudi Arabia’s religious police arrested an Indonesian housemaid for\u00a0casting a magic spell<\/a>\u00a0on a local family and ‘turning its life upside down.'” The maid “confessed” to using sorcery, and “commission experts took the magic items to their office and managed to dismantle and stop the spell.”<\/p>\n Far from being absurd aberrations to be dismissed, such accounts, which are becoming better known thanks to the Internet, are stark reminders of the incompatibility between the Western and Muslim worldviews, or, more to the point, the difficulty Western peoples have transcending their own paradigms and understanding the Muslim worldview in its own right \u2014 above and beyond the issue of sorcery.<\/p>\n In his book,\u00a0The Closing of the Muslim Mind<\/em><\/a>, Robert Reilly, a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, helps explain the Muslim worldview by thoroughly documenting the historic and doctrinal roots behind it; by refreshingly bypassing the overly dramatized question of “what went wrong,” he explains the more pressing “why<\/em>\u00a0it went wrong.”<\/p>\n The book is a reminder of the importance of epistemology: before understanding Muslim acts, one must understand the Muslim mind that initiates them. We discover that Shakespeare’s dictum “Nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” in Islam becomes “nothing good or bad but Allah says so.”<\/p>\n The author sheds light on the struggles of the different schools of Islam, showing how by the 10th century, the fatalistic, deterministic schools triumphed, delivering the death blow, not only to the notion of free will, but natural law as well: “a theological deformation \u2026 produced a dysfunctional culture.” From here one can understand the full impact of the popular assertion “the doors of\u00a0ijtihad<\/em>\u00a0[intellectualizing] closed in the 10th century.”<\/p>\n Reilly chronicles how the giants of Muslim philosophy, such as Ghazali and Ashari, concluded that knowledge was unknowable, that moral truths can only be ascertained through revelation. Accordingly, all knowledge \u2014 the very bounds of reality \u2014 came to be limited to the words of the Quran and its pronouncer, Islam’s prophet Muhammad.<\/p>\n The ramifications of such intellectual calcification are immense: “All acts are in themselves morally neutral”; “Allah does not command certain behavior because it is good; it is good because he commands it. Likewise, he does not forbid murder because it is bad; it is bad because he forbids it.”<\/p>\n Equivocations, such as the following by Ashari, become commonplace: “Lying is evil only because Allah has declared it to be evil\u2026. And if he declared it to be good it would be good; and if he commanded it, no one could gainsay him.” Of course and as Ashari knew, the Islamic deity and his prophet are on record permitting and even encouraging Muslims to deceive.<\/p>\n Similarly, the spirit of inquiry perishes: “the only thing worth knowing is whether a specific action is, according to\u00a0Shari ‘a<\/em>: obligatory, recommended, permitted, discouraged, or forbidden. The rest is irrelevant.” It is precisely for this reason that in Islam, the law \u2014 what is right or wrong, how one should live \u2014 trumps “theology,” the latter designated as\u00a0kalam<\/em>, that is, mere “words.” This is also why in the last millennium Spain alone has produced more books than the Arab world in its entirety.<\/p>\n Likewise in the realm of science: Reilly cites a Pakistani physicist \u2014 not an uneducated, impoverished “radical” \u2014 saying it is un-Islamic to believe that combining hydrogen and water makes water; rather, Muslims are “supposed to say that when you bring hydrogen and oxygen together then by the will of Allah [which need not always be consistent] water was created.”<\/p>\n The Closing of the Muslim Mind<\/em>\u00a0explains the singularity of Muslim epistemology and its antithesis to Western sensibilities: it explains why a maid is arrested and charged with sorcery and the dread of\u00a0bewitched animals<\/a>; explains why adult “breastfeeding<\/a>” and\u00a0habitual lying<\/a>\u00a0pose no moral problems; explains why top Muslim clerics insist the\u00a0world is flat<\/a>\u00a0and ingesting the\u00a0feces and urine<\/a>\u00a0of Muhammad is salutary; explains why jihadists believe their terror is pious and a\u00a0libidinous paradise<\/a>\u00a0awaits them.<\/p>\n All these “alternate” ways of thinking make sense when one accepts that, in the purely Muslim mind, intuitive reasoning, the human conscience, and even common sense take a backseat to the literal words of Allah and his prophet, seen as the founts of all truth and reality \u2014 or, inevitably from a non-Muslim perspective, the words of a deluded or deceiving 7th-century Arab.<\/p>\n \u00a92011 Raymond Ibrahim<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Raymond Ibrahim Jihad Watch A review of\u00a0The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis\u00a0by Robert R. Reilly (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2011. 244 pp.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[29,87,227],"tags":[1017,30,1060,1077,58,1018],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-vc","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6064,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/saudi-police-arrest-flying-naked-african-sorceress\/","url_meta":{"origin":1934,"position":0},"title":"Saudi Police Arrest Flying, Naked, African ‘Sorceress’","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 14, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Raymond Ibrahim FrontPage Magazine Last month, according to\u00a0Emirates247\u00a0,\u00a0\u201cA Saudi court sentenced two Asian housemaids to 10 years in jail and ordered their lashed 1,000 times each after they were found guilty of indulging in sorcery at their employers\u2019 houses\u2026 Their Saudi employers reported the two maids to the Gulf\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Saudi Arabia"","block_context":{"text":"Saudi Arabia","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/saudi-arabia\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1447,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/in-the-jaws-of-sharia-the-liberal-and-the-temptress\/","url_meta":{"origin":1934,"position":1},"title":"In the Jaws of Sharia: The Liberal and the Temptress","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 19, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Raymond Ibrahim Private Papers Editor\u2019s Note: These postings were taken from\u00a0Jihad Watch\u00a0and\u00a0Pajamas Media, internet journals in which the author posts frequently. Ibrahim\u2019s observations below remind us of the depths of Dante\u2019s\u00a0Inferno\u00a0where the three-headed devil masticates the worst criminals of Dante\u2019s imagination: Brutus and Cassius are second only to Judas.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Egypt"","block_context":{"text":"Egypt","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/egypt\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":910,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/saudi-grand-mufti-calls-for-destruction-of-all-churches-in-region\/","url_meta":{"origin":1934,"position":2},"title":"Saudi Grand Mufti Calls for “Destruction of All Churches in Region”","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 15, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Raymond Ibrahim Jihad Watch According to several\u00a0Arabic\u00a0news\u00a0sources, last Monday, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, declared that it is \"necessary to destroy all the churches of the region.\" The Grand Mufti made his assertion in response to a question posed by a delegation from\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Religion"","block_context":{"text":"Religion","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/religion\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5360,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/real-talk\/","url_meta":{"origin":1934,"position":3},"title":"Real Talk?","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 2, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"The Saudi king ought to stop killing non-Muslims first. by Raymond Ibrahim National Review Online According to the\u00a0Associated Press, Saudi King Abdullah, in an unprecedented move last week, \u201cmade an impassioned plea for dialogue among Muslims, Christians, and Jews\u201d \u2014 going so far as to refer to the latter two\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Raymond Ibrahim"","block_context":{"text":"Raymond Ibrahim","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/raymond-ibrahim\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7216,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-are-slaughtering-us-like-chickens-muslim-persecution-of-christians-december-2013\/","url_meta":{"origin":1934,"position":4},"title":"The Are Slaughtering Us Like Chickens’: Muslim Persecution of Christians, December 2013","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 15, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Raymond Ibrahim \/\/\u00a0Gatestone Insitute As happens at Christmas every year throughout the Muslim world, Christians and their churches were especially targeted\u2014from jihadi terror strikes killing worshippers, to measures by Muslim authorities restricting Christmas celebrations.\u00a0 Some incidents follow:","rel":"","context":"In "Islam"","block_context":{"text":"Islam","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/islam\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6138,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/libyan-intelligence-muslim-brotherhood-morsi-involved-in-u-s-consulate-attack\/","url_meta":{"origin":1934,"position":5},"title":"Libyan Intelligence: Muslim Brotherhood, Morsi Involved in U.S. Consulate Attack","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 27, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Raymond Ibrahim RaymondIbrahim.com According to a Libyan intelligence document, the Muslim Brotherhood, including Egyptian President Morsi, were involved in the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, where several Americans, including U.S. ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, were killed. 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