by Robert
R. Reilly
The closure of the Muslim mind has created the crisis of
which modern Islamist terrorism is only one manifestation. The problem is much
broader and deeper. It enfolds Islam’s loss of science and of the prospect of
indigenously developing democratic constitutional government. It is the key to
unlocking such puzzles as why the Arab world stands near the bottom of every
measure of human development; why scientific inquiry is nearly moribund in the
Islamic world; why Spain translates more books in a single year than the entire
Arab world has in the past thousand years; why some people in Saudi Arabia
still refuse to believe man has been to the moon; and why some Muslim media
present natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina as God’s direct retribution.
Without understanding this story, we cannot grasp what is
taking place in the Islamic world today, or the potential paths to
recovery—paths many Muslims are pointing to with their rejection of the idea of
God that produced this crisis in the first place. The closing of
the Muslim mind is the direct if somewhat distant antecedent of today’s radical
Islamist ideology, and this ideology cannot be understood without divining its
roots in that closing.
The ideas animating terrorist acts from September 11, to the
bombings in London, Madrid, and Mumbai, to the attempted airline bombing in
Detroit on Christmas 2009, and beyond have been loudly proclaimed by their
perpetrators and their many sympathizers in every form of media. We know what
they think; they tell us every day. But questions arise concerning the
provenance of their ideas, which they claim are Islamic.
Are they something new or a resurgence of something from the
past?
How much of this is Islam and how much is Islamism?
Is Islamism a deformation of Islam? If so, in what way and
from where has it come?
And why is Islam susceptible to this kind of deformation?
The latter part of the book will address these questions.
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