Customer Reviews

The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist

5 star:		(31)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

In tracing the historical evolution of Islam into the backward and calcified state it now finds itself in, Reilly has done us great service.

The most important point, implicit in this work for those willing to self-examine, is that most of us in the West stubbornly continue to try to understand and explain the Muslim world through the eyes of our own experience and evolution, refusing to see that it cannot be explained by our logic and reason, that it can only be explained by theirs. And theirs is an entirely different worldview, arising from an entirely different history in both thought and in action.

Being originally from a Latin American country, I have always found that most Americans cannot fathom some of what goes on in other countries, and cannot conceive of other peoples' having different values and worldviews upon which they base their actions and thought, and which necessarily do not fit into the rational mold of Westerners and Americans.

This is why we continue to ignore their own words and deeds as they relate to their seemingly irrational and destructive actions, and why we continually try to find "excuses" for them; we just cannot imagine people thinking differently from ourselves and having motivations which seem self-destructive to us. This is best expressed by Hussein Massawi, a Hezbollah leader: "We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you." And yet we persist in trying to find something to "offer", believing that we have something to offer that they want and will stop them. We don't. And not everyone wants freedom and democracy.

In order to understand the reality of Islam and their seemingly irrational actions and words, we must first discard our own notions of right and wrong, our own notions of rational thought and action, and understand theirs. This book does that very well, leading us through the events and processes which led to the current state of development of Muslim thought and worldview.

Reilly meticulously traces the process through which, starting in the 9th Century, Islam discarded the Greek notions of rationality and reason, cause and effect, effectively divorcing faith from reason. It is this process and the consequences derived from it which has placed Islam and those who adhere to it in conflict with reality, and with those who chose a different path.

An important work, which belongs in every thinking man's library.

This is an extraordinary clear, clinical, and dispassionate exposition of the contemporary Islamist crisis and the implications for Islam's neighbors - including the Western cultures to which so many Muslims are migrating. The author masterfully elicits the historical, political-ideological, and philosophical lessons from the fourteen hundred years of political Islam's turbulent history and finds the original locus of that turbulence in Islam's seminal struggle with rationality in its deep past, in which rationality lost out. Reilly evokes parallels to such original crafters of similar analyses as political philosopher Eric Voegelin who charted the links between the Gnostic traditions of antiquity and contemporary "isms" (e.g., Marxism); or to the seminal exposures of the results of such murderous "isms" by Robert Conquest and Richard Pipes in their devastating studies of the bloody-minded and mass murdering intellectuals who created and ran the USSR. After Reilly, the sound bites on Islam by politicians, government officials, and celebrity "experts" are exposed for what they are: ignorant boilerplate. No comfort may be taken in that observation.

By John J. Dziak, Ph.D., author of "Chekisty: A History of the KGB."

A few years ago Bernard Lewis wrote a short book titled "What Went Wrong"--with Islamic countries, that is. As expected of Dr. Lewis' work, it was excellent, but the book never answered the question posed in its title. Amazingly, and beautifully, Mr. Reilly's book does explain what went wrong with Sunni (and to some extent Shia) Islam.

In about a two-hundred-year period (9th through the 11th centuries, A.D./C.E.), the intellectual ferment having to do with Islamic theological issues, and how to examine those issues, ripped through the Islamic world. On one side were those Islamic thinkers whose logical tools derived from Greek philosophy; The other side was made up of those who insisted that the Koran was eternal, and must be simply accepted without question. In fact, for this latter group, the very act of questioning was blasphemous--a capital crime.

Despite the Hellenistic intellectual outlook actually being supported and adopted by three Caliphs, the argument was eventually won by the literalists. It was reason versus power exercised by pure will. Reason lost, and the results are painfully still evident.

Mr. Reilly carries us along from the 9th century up to the present, and his writing is elegantly precise. His book is very clear about the dangers Islam poses to the West and to Islam itself. Despite the war in which we are engaged, in the best sense of the Western Tradition, Mr. Reilly's words will give the reader an appreciation and respect for those ancient (and modern) men of Islam who chose humanity over tyranny. Sadly, of course, they lost.

Bookstores are lately full of obituaries for Muslim civilization describing its decline. (We have a surviving Muslim culture, but the civilization is a faded memory.) Most analyses (like Bernard Lewis's "What Went Wrong") are quite good, but Robert Reilly's highly readable "The Closing of the Muslim Mind" is the best of a good lot. It takes you further, describing the original ideas that inspired Islam's self-inflicted intellectual decapitation--not simply tracing the social the social eruptions which followed.

You might well expect that a book focusing on the intricacies of arguments between Medieval Quranic scholars would be a suffocatingly tedious read, but it's not. The theological hairs these gentlemen sought to split were large and had far larger consequences. The modern Islamic world (make that the anti-modern Islamic world) is largely the product of a thousand years of bad ideas--mixed with oil. (Quick note: this book is about Sunni Islam. Shi'a Islam explicitly excluded.)

It's hard to recall that Islamic civ was once far ahead of Western civ. Early in Islamic history Arab conquests took them into captured libraries full of Greek philosophy, science, mathematics and culture and Islamic intellectual life expanded suddenly and exponentially. Many seminal works the West claims today as its own originally arrived as translations from Arabic. The numbers we use today, "Arabic" (actually Indian) numerals came in on a tide of Arabic words like algebra and algorithm. Arab civilization in the 10th seemed to have a bright future. Then, in the 11th century Islam reversed course. The pendulum swung so far away from the rationalism of Greek philosophy it never came back.

The linchpin of this change was over the alleged power of Allah. It became a theological fetish to ascribe Him flattering new dimensions of potency. Imaginative arguments were made inflate the Creator--always at the expense of the created. Allowing for some necessary oversimplilfication, here are some high points:

-----Omnipotence. Far more God-powers. Even to the point of dismissing all natural law, all cause & effect Every event from the molecular to the cosmic becomes Allah's will. (God is Great!...and getting Greater!)

-----Onmiscience. He knows your fate and all future events. Failure & success, heaven or hell, happiness or misery--His choice, not yours. All entered into history by an Angel before you exist. (Divine determinism, Islamic style: only He is free.)

-----Unknowability. You can know nothing about Him or His motives. To attempt to discover or postulate Allah's nature becomes blasphemy--a capital crime. All His commandments are beyond human logic: arbitrary and absolute. Obedience is the bedrock source of morality, all law, all behavior. No modifications allowed.

This revolt against reason isn't just a theological word game. It has big consequences. If knowledge is impossible and all nature compressed into divine caprice, investigating the world is more than a waste of time, it's a potentially fatal heresy. Science is now useless: what good is physics or psychology if atoms and thoughts--or even tomorrow's sunrise--are subject to Allah's will? You don't need a philosophical turn of mind to see where this leads--or doesn't lead. Most of us in the West are used to thinking on our own, to solving problems without waiting for authority. We can recognize a dumb idea and call it that. But in a world where obedience is prized above (way above) initiative, Allah's potency is a recipe for intellectual inertia, for enforced dogma--and for violence: when the framework for rational mediation is lost, conflicts will be settled by force. Obedience to the victor is as imperative as to Allah.

Untethered from a knowable reality, Islamic fantasy is free to soar. Reilly provides nearly a whole chapter of preposterously paranoid quotations (mostly about the Satanic West and the Evil Jew) from Arabic news media and religious authorities, and statistics like the staggering number of Muslims who believe Mossad and George Bush engineered 9/11 to provide an excuse to kill Muslims. (Probably including believers who danced in the streets when it happened). There's also a bagful of humorously illustrative examples like the Pakistani Mullahs getting weather forecasts banned, or science books obliged to stress the decisive force of Allah's will whenever 3 atoms combine to make a water molecule.

This Islamic cultural lobotomy which gave us nuisance terrorism has given Islamic world much worse: the planet's worst human rights records (especially for women), world class corruption, a subsistence economy (relieved only by oil exports), widespread illiteracy, and an attitude toward problems which favors blame over solutions. The problems are worsening, not improving. Reilly shows today's Islamic rulers and radicals have Islamified many central ideas of 20th C. totalitarianism (both Nazi & Leninist) and made them their own.

It's not a cheery book to read--considering how long it will take to reverse 1,000 years of civilizational decline in a semi-literate culture--but it is more informative about the how & why of current and past events than any other book I've read on the subject.

Students of theology, philosophy and intellectual history will find this work a fascinating expose on the stillbirth of Islamic thought.

Any survey of the Islamic world, from the medieval period to the present, reveals a common social structure that is rigid, inhumane and incapable of adaptation. Westerners typically assume that Islam is a religion analogous to Christianity, but in fact, it is a sweeping ideology that systematically organizes all aspects of human life, from diet to military organization, from politics to art to theology and ethics. Whereas the West rebuilt itself following the collapse of the Roman Empire, going on to ascend to great achievements in art, architecture, music, philosophy and science, Islam remained in stasis following the triumph of the Asharite school of theology over its opponent, Mutazilism.

Reilly explores this key battle between reason and irrationality, when philosophy in the Islamic world was still very much open to the Greek concept of logos. As in Christian theology, the world was seen as the expression of a divine mind, ordered in a rational and predictable way. Man was viewed as a unique being capable of perceiving the rational order and then applying his reason to investigate, explore, solve problems and grow in understanding. The natural theology of Greece, the early Church Fathers and, later, Aquinas was also present in seminal form in early 8th and 9th century Islamic thought. However, the religion's head start in adapting natural to revealed theology was eliminated with the rise of the Ash'ari.

The followers of this school viewed the application of reason to divine matters as blasphemy. The Koran was defined as existing eternally with Allah, but this belief could not be opened to theological speculation without raising questions on the nature of the relationship between God and Koran. Is the Koran like the Logos of the Christian Trinity, a co-eternal, consubstantial being existing in an everlasting fellowship with other divine persons? Inscribed on the walls of the Blue Mosque in Constantinople are the words "Allah has no companion," a terse repudiation of any line of thinking which suggested that the godhead might include more than one person. The Mutazlites understood what was at stake -- God's absolute, exclusive unity -- and reasoned that the Koran was itself a created thing. Anything else would lead toward an incipient Trinitarian theology.

For a short time, it seemed that Mutazilism would establish an influential place within mainstream Sunni thought and that philosophy more generally would find a hospitable faith within which to flourish, much as Greek wisdom did with early and medieval Christianity. However, the Asharites began to challenge the Mutalizites' Hellenic confidence in reason, arguing that human understanding was simply incapable of grasping anything about God or morals by its own power. Revelation and only revelation could teach man how to live and, more importantly, to obey. To approach sacred matters from the mindset of a questioner intent on finding truth became a form of heresy. Averroes and Avicenna, much lauded in the Christian West for their mental acuity in philosophical matters, were ultimately rejected by their co-religionists because of their willingness to perform philosophical theology. Today, these two philosophers continue to hold an honored place in Catholic thought even though they were Muslim, a telling statement about the West's openness to truth wherever it may be found.

Had the Asharite counter attack and eventual triumph been limited to matters properly theological, Islam might have been able to continue to develop intellectually and culturally, but this was not to be. Philosophy and reason more generally remained suspect even when they were limited to matters within the natural order. Thus, the science of causes, first principles and any exploration of the natural world became haram to the Muslim mind. Western theology in the medieval period, rightly noted by C.G. Jung to have been the mental training ground for later advances in science and mathematics, proceeded to advance toward an almost idolatrous respect for human reason under the doctrine of imago Dei. Significantly, the Protestant reformer Martin Luther's criticisms of the cult of reason within Catholicism share much of the flavor of earlier Asharite jeremiads against the Mutazilites.

Reilly provides us with some very stark and frightening examples of how Islamic irrationality continues to be felt in the modern age. In Afghanistan, science textbooks were written to make Allah the intervening agent in chemical reactions between hydrogen and oxygen atoms. One cannot, as in the West, say that atoms drawn from these two elements form water; rather, one must say that water is formed from two elements acting under the immediate intervention of Allah.

Sunni Islam's suspicion of human reason led to an atomistic view of reality. Each microsecond of existence is recreated by the will of Allah and there are no physical laws in play that determine events in the ordinary sense world. Humans only perceive a pattern in things out of a sense of habit. A ball dropped a thousand times always falls to the ground if unimpeded, but according to Islam, it is possible for Allah to completely contradict this habit at any given moment, making the ball instead move sideways, up, etc. With such an epistemology, science and fine arts simply cannot develop. Islam rests on a metaphysics of uncertainty.

In humane matters like politics and ethics, the grip of Islamism on the human mind has meant that Muslim countries have been unable to develop any political frameworks based on recognition of intrinsic human worth. Reason is suspect; the imago Dei of Christianity bears a very different interpretation in Islam. Christianity embraced and extended art that portrayed the human figure, with an increasing focus on realism over time; Islamic art never developed beyond intricate patterns and calligraphy. The human figure was off limits because of the potential for idolatry.

Thus, talk of human rights, the inviolability of the conscience, tolerance, the respect owed to men regardless of their accidental qualities and other marks of contemporary Western political life clash instantly with the prevailing theology and culture of Islamic nations.

The author is quite scrupulous in drawing our attention to Islamic sources for his arguments. Modern Muslim scholars, including those with Mutazilite or reformist tendencies, are cited liberally. These intellectuals are certainly mindful of the wrong turn that their faith made back in the 10th and 11th centuries, but the all-encompassing nature of the Islamic ideology makes reform all but impossible. The point is worth noting because the tendency of both liberals and Muslims is to characterize any criticism of Islam as slander emanating from prejudicial, Western ideas.

Reilly seems open to the possibility that Islam can still change course and recover its roots in earlier reason-based Mutazilism. A return to rationality is critical for Islam in the modern world, but the prospects for its reform appear very weak given the many centuries of Asharite conditioning.

I would like to have seen Reilly explore the strong similarity in authoritarian statist ideology shared by Islam and Western liberalism. I think both ideologies, with their radically atomistic views of reality, end up promoting very inhumane systems of ethics and government. As well, the will to power binding an atomized reality that serves as the fundament of both ideologies would do much to explain the affinity between Islam and leftism in Europe and America.

Many people think that philosophy is "just words" spoken among specialists, but, as has been often noted, everyone has a philosophy. They may not be able to describe it or justify it, but everyone has one. And it actually matters, as shown in the book under review.

Most people are unaware that the early days of Islam saw several contending schools of philosophy and theology, and they are also unaware that all of those schools were permanently banished about seven hundred years ago. The only school which survived was an extremely fundamentalist school, which held such foolish beliefs as "All the science you need is contained in the Koran." The idea of God / Allah which survived was simply one of infinite will (not of reason or love), and everything that happened in the world happened because God willed it, period. "Why did he will that?" became a forbidden question; the only thing required was submission to Allah's will. Investigation of science (outside the Koran) was permanently banned, and so was all theological innovation.

Another way to look at this is to contrast it with the Christian Middle Ages, which were filled with philosophy and theology, as the Christian monks struggled to reconcile the great pagan philosophers with the new faith. (See A History of Philosophy, Vol. 1: Greece and Rome From the Pre-Socratics to Plotinus, as well as A History of Philosophy, Vol. 2: Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy From Augustine to Duns Scotus for more details.) The monks began with Plato, and finally Thomas Aquinas brought Aristotle into the discussion, leading to a huge summary in Aquinas' Summa. NONE of this happened, in any part of the Sunni Muslim world. It was all utterly forbidden.

It is hard to summarize the disastrous effects of this. Most reviewers have rightly noted the jihadi terrorists, but fewer have noted the strange ignorance of the Sunni Muslim world. For example, Spain translates more books in one year than the Arabs have translated in all of history. If you wander into a bookshop in Cairo or Tunis, you will be amazed at the paucity of books on offer. Where are the schools of medicine and engineering? Where are the plants and factories, turning out goods to keep people alive?

More poignantly, how can a "Muslim leader" make the public claim that Mickey Mouse is a Jewish plot? What's missing here?

If God makes literally everything happen, then the idea of "cause and effect" essentially vanishes. One habit universally encountered in the Muslim world is symptomatic: you're finishing tea with a colleague at 9 AM, and say, "Well, see you for lunch at 12:30, then." And his reply is "Inshallah" --- "If God wills." This actually implies that God / Allah is going to make the actual decision about having lunch, and if your friend breaks a leg along the way, well, it was the will of Allah.

The result is that, sub-Saharan Africa aside, the Sunni Muslim countries are the poorest and worst educated on earth. No one would even think of calling them "dynamic." If the one overwhelming attribute of God is his WILL, then political movements might as well follow the example.

Read this book for a much fuller account. The depressing part is that these societies are faced with an enormous array of problems caused by a very bad decision some seven hundred years ago, and nobody can fix those problems for them.

"In Reilly's new meticulously researched book he provides the historical context that

has given rise to the violent nature of Islamism. Robert concludes, `Divorcing reason

from faith (the current crisis of the West), or faith from reason (the crisis of Islam)

leads to catastrophe . . .' We ignore this at our peril. It is a must-read for today's

national security leaders."

--John M. Poindexter, VADM USN(ret), National Security Advisor to

President Reagan

"Lucid and fascinating... Brilliant... This book serves a purpose for which we should all be profoundly grateful."

-- Roger Scruton, author of The West and the Rest

"Robert Reilly's scholarly work is timely and relevant. The battle within Islam

between reason and revelation is an old one, yet it continues with potentially appalling

consequences. Robert Reilly's book is a masterpiece--a must-read for those who

want to understand the struggles within the Islamic world today and why the Muslim

mind is closed."

--Patrick Sookhdeo, director of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity

"Somewhere, the Jewish sages said monotheism can become a form of idolatry. This

has happened to Islam. But as Robert R. Reilly has said lucidly and persuasively in his

forthcoming book The Closing of the Muslim Mind, the most serious fl aw in Sunni Islam

is its erroneous conception of God. I urge especially Jewish scholars--rabbis, theologians,

philosophers, and political scientists--to place Reilly's book on his or her must

read list. You will not only be enlightened, but you may also see how the West might

prevent a new Dark Ages."

--Prof. Paul Eidelberg, president of the Foundation for Constitutional Democracy

( Jerusalem)

"Robert Reilly explains how Islam's mainstream rejected reason and shows what happens

to a civilization when it fails to give reason its due. Reilly's point, like Pope

Benedict XVI's at Regensburg, applies to us as well as to Muslims: shortcutting reason

for the sake of politically preferred conclusions closes minds and makes for lives

nasty, brutish, and short. This book teaches and warns. Read it."

--Angelo Codevilla, author of Advice for War Presidents

"Wars, terror, and expansion are caused and explained primarily by ideas. Economic

or political explanations are only secondary. When religions rapidly expand by the

success of arms, eventually they must explain themselves. Robert Reilly's book grasps

the connection between the political forms and actions of Islam over against its own

ideas developed to justify what Islam invariably does when it obtains political power.

This book is a major, much needed philosophical explication of what is the present

Muslim mind, where it came from and where it leads."

--James V. Schall, S. J. Georgetown University; author of The Life of the Mind

"For some fourteen hundred years, Islam has been both intent on making the West

Islamic, and also in deep turmoil about its own identity and incapacity to govern

itself. In this short book, Robert Reilly offers an intelligent person's guide to both of

these long time struggles."

--Michael Novak, George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy

at the American Enterprise Institute

"After reading the book The Closing of the Muslim Mind by Robert Reilly, I strongly

recommend this book to any one who wants to deeply understand the different ways

of thinking within Islam and the phenomenon of Radical Islam."

--Tawfik Hamid, Senior Fellow and Chair for the Study of Islamic Radicalism

at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies.

"Robert Reilly has done everyone--students of civilization, researchers into contemporary

Islamist ideology, the general reader--a massive service by compiling an

authoritative account of the troubling trajectory that Islamic thought has taken in

history, and the inevitable political and ideological implications of this course. His

work is not only comprehensive in its vision, but also succinct, well-written and eminently

readable, and it will do much to project the study and analysis of the rise of

Islamist extremism onto its more deeply-rooted causes. The Closing of the Muslim Mind

should become a work of reference not only for students of philosophy and comparative

theology but also required reading for all who seek answers to the conundrum of

violence that claims religious faith for its motivation and support."

--Stephen Ulph, Senior Fellow, The Jamestown Foundation

"A penetrating and sympathetic exploration of how minds closed for centuries might be reopened -- and thus recivilized. Required reading for anyone who wants to understand the gravity of the jihadist threat and the imperative of meeting it by deepening the West's civilizational self-awarebness."

-- George Weigel, Ethics and Public Policy Center, biographer of John Paul II

"Bob Reilly's analysis provides a new starting point for American engagement with

the Muslim world--one in which the true enemy is recognized as being not a religion,

a social class or a single terrorist group, but rather a misguided interpretation

of an ancient belief system."

--Edwin Feulner, Ph.D., President of The Heritage Foundation

This book explains in clear terms why Sunni Islam is a religio-cultural worldview that is so different from the worldview of the West (and probably the rest of the world), that it will be impossible for Islam and the West to find common ground. As long as the Sunni sect of Islam is ruled by Asharite thinking, the mainstream of Islam will believe that (1) all of nature is recreated from moment to moment by the will of Allah; (2) reason is not only a deficient method of explaining the universe, but is a sin, a contravention of Allah's will; (3) there is no good or evil, except what the Qur'an says, and what the Qur'an says can be superseded at any moment by the exercise of the will of Allah; (4) there is no guarantee that things will unfold as they have unfolded in the past - if things do that, it is only because that is the habit of Allah and an acorn could just as easily turn out to be a Chevrolet as an oak tree, depending on how Allah wills it. This kind of thinking makes the words I always smiled at in "Lawrence of Arabia," "it is written" makes sense in a way I never considered before. The critic here who pointed out that Americans have great difficulty understanding values and cultural assumptions that other civilizations have is absolutely right. When the Muslims tell us that they aren't interested in negotiating with us, but that they intend to destroy us, this book tells us why that is profoundly true.

Why 9/11? Robert's R. Reilly latest book finally provides a lucid and comprehensive explanation for that deadly day and its aftermath.

The Closing of the Muslim Mind - How intellectual suicide created the modern Islamist crisis goes far beyond the conventional wisdoms that have driven the debate over national security since that sunny Tuesday morning in New York, Washington and over Pennsylvania. In this book you will not find the explanations for the killing of thousands of innocent civilians in the "root causes" of deprivation or lack of education in the Middle East, in the consequences of Western colonialism, or even in disproportionate US support for Israel and autocratic Arab regimes. Instead, the author has taken a scalpel to the body of Islamic civilization and employed a multidisciplinary approach to identify the cancer within the religion that led to 9/11, to Madrid, Bali and the 7/7 attacks in London.

Reilly has located the root of modern Islamic violence in a grand stand-off over a thousand years ago between two ways of seeing the world and its relationship to God, in a theological difference of opinion that would result in one side loosing the argument disastrously and in the soul of Islam changing forever. On the one hand we find the Mu'tazalites, Islamic thinkers who appreciated the insights of the Greek philosophers and who were on the side of seeing Man's reason as valuable in and of itself, as a tool with which to understand God more fully. On the other, we had the Ash'arites and their champion, Imam al-Ghazali. For this elite group of thinkers, reason was the enemy of Islam, a religion defined in Man's submission to Allah, and wherein knowledge of the divine can only be had by way of the immutable revelation that is the uncreated Khoran. For the Ash'arites, all was contingent on the will of God and reason inconsequential. All that mattered for them was submission. Unfortunately for Islam, the Arab world and the thousands who died on 9/11, (as well as before and since), the followers of al-Ghazali won and reason was banished from Islam in favor of un-interpretable revelation. Today, Osama bin Laden and his ilk can trace themselves and their ideological evolution directly back to these victorious deniers of reason, with Jihad - and especially dying whilst executing a Holy War - deemed to be the ultimate submission to Allah's will in the spread of his faith and the word of his one true Prophet, Mohammad.

The remarkable facet of The Closing of the Muslim Mind is that this work of theological archaeology is accomplished whilst leaving the audience an eminently readable book of just 200 pages. Although not an Arabist or a theologian, Reilly's range and wielding of the written word are both impressive and even enviable. Perhaps it will not surprise those that take the time to read this priceless work, that the author is not an establishment insider but instead one of a dying bread of renaissance scholars. Better know for his widely read critical work on classical music, Robert Reilly is not, however, a stranger to issues of national security, nor to the question of how to cope which ideologies inimical to Western values and civilization. Formerly on the faculty of National Defense University, after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he served as the Pentagon's adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Information and in a previous incarnation he was the director of Voice of America prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Those that would today decapitate another human being because of the passport they hold, or detonate an explosives-laden vehicle in the heart of downtown Manhattan are direct descents of the first extremists who initiated what Roger Scruton terms in foreword to the book, Islam's "assault on philosophy." As the DC policy elite digests the Obama administration's recently released National Security Strategy and other previous policy prescriptions that call for United States to globally ameliorate the so-called "up-stream factors" of radicalization, such a poverty and lack of education, those that understand the power of ideas may look elsewhere for the best ways to make America safe.

Ideology is today a dirty word. However, it merely refers to any belief system - a science of ideas - that calls for action. Today we face a deadly foe who challenges our post-modernist way of understanding the world by deploying against us an ideology disguised as a religion. Reilly puts this far more eloquently in his closing chapter, when he describes this thought world as a "spiritual pathology based upon a theological deformation that has produced a dysfunctional culture." Ideology is dead. Long live Religious Ideology. Along with Patrick Sookhdeo's Global Jihad, this book should be compulsory reading at all institutions dedicated to preventing another 9/11.

Sebastian Gorka PhD

Strategic Advisers Group

Atlantic Council of the United States

seb.gorka@gmail.com

I believe this is the best book on Islam ever written. Why? Because it goes to the deepest level of Islamic philosoophy. It shows how Muslims have rejected every premise of a sane, civilized society. The book demonstrates that Islam has rejected: reason, reality, causality, free will, ethics, religious and political freedom and thereby destroyed the very concept of actual thinking. This has made the Islamic world incapable of scientific or any other type of progress, and made violence an inevitable part of their culture. Reilly's book also explains how Islam got that way, going back to their study and ultimate rejection of Greek thought--a choice which doomed their civilation and put the rest of the world at risk. If you want to understand Islam at the most fundamental level, this is the book to read.