http://www.jihadwatch.org/2011/01/robert-reilly-author-of-the-closing-of-the-muslim-mind-exclusive-jihad-watch-interview.html#comments
Robert Reilly, author of the superb and essential book The Closing of the Muslim Mind, was kind enough to grant Jihad Watch an exclusive interview:
In your fascinating new book The Closing of the Muslim Mind, you expand in important ways on the insight Pope Benedict XVI expressed in his famous Regensburg address--that Islam, as it currently exists in all "orthodox" forms, is fundamentally at odds with reason. Surely, you don't mean that Muslims don't employ reason in their daily lives or even their political conduct. So what do you mean?
I mean what the Pope meant when he spoke of the dehellenization of Islam - its loss of philosophy and reason. I mean that the premise from which many Muslims start is unreasonable in the sense that it is not subject to critical examination. It is not subject to critical examination because the principal theological school of Sunni Islam discredited reason.
In other words, a paranoid person behaves reasonably once you accept the paranoid delusion upon which he is acting. But it is his delusion that is unreasonable, not his behavior. The problem is getting him to see that his delusion does not comport with reality. In the majority of Sunni Islam today, access to realty is blocked because of the abandonment of reason. The premise on which reason was discredited is the delusion from which they are suffering. It is very hard to get them to realize this because the premise is a theological one - that God is pure will and power, not reason.
Also some succinct and interesting comments at the end, and an excerpt
In your book, you identify several turning points in the intellectual development of Islamic thought. I would like you to expand on them:
1) The rejection of free will on the part of Islamic exegetes, and their embrace of predestination--their assertion that man's actions are not in fact free, but are infallibly dictated by the divine will. How and why did this counter-intuitive position win out over the theory that man acts freely? Are the Islamic texts more weighted in favor of absolute divine sovereignty?
You refer to the oldest argument within Islam, which was about predestination and free will. The advocates of free will were called Qadarites, or Qadariyya, after the Arabic word qadar, which can mean divine decree or predestination, or power. They stood for the opposite to predestination: man's free will and consequent responsibility for his actions. Man has power (qadar) over his own actions. If men were not able to control their behaviour, said the Qadarites, the moral obligation to do good and avoid evil, enjoined by the Qur'an, would be meaningless.
Contrary to this view, the Jabariyya (determinists; from jabr - blind compulsion) embraced the doctrine that divine omnipotence requires the absolute determination of man's actions by God. One of the names of God in the Qur'an is Al-Jabbar, the Compeller (59:23), whose power cannot be resisted. God alone authors man's every movement. To say otherwise ties God's hands and limits his absolute freedom. One of the exponents of this view, Jahm b. Safwan (d. 745), argued that man's actions are imputed to him only in the same way as one imputes "the bearing of fruit to the tree, flowing to the stream, motion to the stone, rising or setting to the sun - blooming and vegetating to the earth." As twentieth century Muslim thinker Fazlur Rahman summed up the dispute, "In the eyes of the orthodox, this freedom for man was bondage for God." Their theology made free will anathema. Reality was distorted to fit a deformed theology. Thus we have statements such as this from Ibn Taymiyya, the medieval thinker so in favor with Islamists today: "Creatures have no impact on God since it is God Himself who creates their acts." So freedom for God ended up meaning bondage for man.
The Qur'an offers support for both positions. It is the Hadith that weigh decisively in favor of the predestination position but, as you know, the Hadith were not codified until around the ninth century and after. The struggle between these two views was particularly intense at that time.
2) The abandonment of reason as a tool for understanding the divine nature--and indeed, the insistence that it was blasphemous to assert that Allah had any consistent, knowable "nature" at all, that might constrain his absolute, arbitrary freedom of action. What Qur'anic texts were adduced to support this radical voluntarism? What effect did this have on the development of an Islamic theology?
It had a very dramatic effect on Islamic theology. It ended it. How can theology explore a God who acts for no reasons? By definition, He becomes incomprehensible. "Allah does what he wills." - Qur'an 14:27 "Dost thou not know that God has the power to will anything?" - Qur'an 2:106 This aspect of Allah was also remarked upon by the Islamist radical Sayyid Qutb in The Shadow of the Qur'an: "Every time the Qur'an states a definite promise or constant law, it follows it with a statement implying that the Divine will is free of all limitations and restrictions, even those based on a promise from Allah or a law of His. For His will is absolute beyond any promise of law." You may also recall the famous remark by Ibn Hazm that the Pope used in the Regensburg Lecture that "God is not bound even by his own word."
Also, God is unknowable in Sunni Islam because of God's utter transcendence. This is the doctrine of tanzih. There is nothing comparable to Him. God does not reveal Himself to man; He reveals his rules, and that is all. This is another reason why Islam reduced itself to jurisprudential matters only. The only thing that matters is knowing the law.
3) Western multiculturalists eager to praise Islamic achievements frequently cite Averroes and Avicenna as pioneering philosophers who recovered the insights of Aristotle--and served as the transmitters of the defunct Aristotelian tradition to the West. What was the fate of these philosophers within their own cultural sphere? Why were they rejected? Was "philosophy" as a discipline itself dismissed in orthodox Islamic circles?
I just returned from Cordoba, Spain, where Averroes lived and worked. It was a thrill to walk the same streets as he and Maimonides had. Avicenna and Averroes represent the highest attempt to assimilate Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy into Islam - to reconcile reason and revelation in the Muslim world. Averroes did have a huge impact, but it was mostly on Europe, not Islam. If you want a date on which the Muslim mind closed, 1195 A.D. might serve as the marker. It was then that Averroes's books were burned in the city square, that he was sent into exile, and that the teaching of philosophy was banned. His works in Arabic today have been back translated from either Latin or Hebrew, the languages in which most of his books were preserved.
Reason was rejected because it is too corrupted by self-interest. But the real, deeper reason is because there is nothing for it to know. Reality is composed of a series of instantaneous miracles directly caused by God's will. Everything is directly done by God, who acts for no reasons. The catastrophic result of this view was the denial of the relationship between cause and effect in the natural world. Therefore, what may seem to be "natural laws," such as the laws of physics, gravity, etc., are really nothing more than God's customs, which He is at complete liberty to break or change at any moment. The consequences of this view were momentous. If creation exists simply as a succession of miraculous moments, it cannot be apprehended by reason. As a result, reality becomes incomprehensible. If unlimited will is the exclusive constituent of reality, there is really nothing left to reason about. In The Incoherence of the Philosophers, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058-1111), perhaps the single most influential Muslim thinker after Mohammed, vehemently rejected Greek thought: "The source of their infidelity was their hearing terrible names such as Socrates and Hippocrates, Plato and Aristotle." Al-Ghazali insisted that God is not bound by any order and that there is, therefore, no "natural" sequence of cause and effect, as in fire burning cotton or, more colorfully, as in "the purging of the bowels and the using of a purgative." Things do not act according to their own natures - they have no natures - but only according to God's will at the moment.
What was the fate of the great philosophical legacy in Islam from Averroes, Avicenna, Al-Razi, Al-Kindi, etc.? Here is a stark assessment by reformist thinker Ibrahim Al-Buleihi, a current member of the Saudi Shura Council: "What I wanted to clarify is that these [achievements] are not of our own making, and those exceptional individuals were not the product of Arab culture, but rather Greek culture. They are outside our cultural mainstream and we treated them as though they were foreign elements. Therefore we don't deserve to take pride in them since we rejected them and fought their ideas. Conversely, when Europe learned from them it benefited from a body of knowledge which was originally its own because they were an extension of Greek culture, which is the source of the whole of Western civilization."
In fact, the rejection continues to this day. Muslim scholar Bassam Tibi states that "because rational disciplines had not been institutionalized in classical Islam, the adoption of the Greek legacy had no lasting effect on Islamic civilization . . ." Indeed, "contemporary Islamic fundamentalists denounce not only cultural modernity, but even the Islamic rationalism of Averroes and Avicenna, scholars who had defined the heights of Islamic civilization."
4) You go into considerable detail in the book on how the rejection of philosophy, and the radical voluntarism asserted of the divine nature--God's freedom to make anything happen, in any way, at any given moment--impaired the development of empirical science within the Muslim world. The connections among those things might not be immediately apparent to all readers. Can you explain how that worked?
The denial of natural law removed the very objective of science from the Muslim mind. Since the effort of science is to discover nature's laws, the teaching that these laws do not, in fact, exist (for theological reasons) is an obvious discouragement to the scientific enterprise. How can science proceed without cause and effect? You must say that a rock falls because God made it fall at that instant. To say gravity did it becomes a blasphemous statement. The extent of the discouragement and the paucity of scientific research this has produced is, if predictable, still astonishing. Pakistani physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy has noted the major scientific contributions of Islam's Golden Age in the 9th to 13th centuries. Then he writes, "But with the end of that period, science in the Islamic world essentially collapsed. No major invention or discovery has emerged from the Muslim world for well over seven centuries now." I give the statistics from the UN on the paucity of science in the Arab Muslim world in my book.
5) Central to the triumph of the anti-rationalist strain in Islam was the conflict over the nature of the Qur'an, its status as either an uncreated, perfect book co-eternal with Allah--or a human manifestation of a divine truth that can be interpreted in the light of cultural factors. Can you tell the story of how these conflicting interpretations were defended, and point to the reasons why the anti-rationalist faction won out? Were the texts more on their side?
Yes, part of the dispute about free will concerned the nature of the Qur'an. Was it created in time, or has it coexisted with Allah in eternity? The Qur'an does not say either way. If it had, the dispute could not have arisen in the first place. Doctrinally, the traditionalist school held that the Qur'an was not created in time; the Qur'an has forever co-existed with Allah on a tablet in heaven in Arabic, as it exists today. God, in other words, speaks Arabic. The Qur'an is outside the scope of history; it is ahistorical. The time at which it was revealed and the culture into which it was received are irrelevant. Although coeternal with God, the Qur'an is somehow, like his attributes, distinct from God's essence. The profound problem with this position, which the Mu'tazilites pointed out - that this made the Qur'an another God, and those who held this position were therefore polytheists - was dismissed by Hadith collector al-Bukhari (d. 933), who said, "The Qur'an is the speech of God uncreated, the acts of men are created, and inquiry into the matter is heresy."
Nevertheless, to the utter dismay of the traditionalists, the Mu'tazilites did inquire into the matter, and this difference between them became the most bitter and costly of their disputes. The Mu'tazilites held that the Qur'an had to have been created; otherwise, the historical events it relates would have to have been predetermined. The doctrine of Khalq al-Qur'an, the createdness of the Qur'an, means that room would be left for free human choice. And why, asked the Mu'tazilites, would commandments exist before the creation of the human beings to whom they apply?
The Mu'tazilite teaching was made state doctrine by Caliph al-Ma'mun (813-833), a great supporter of free will and Greek thought. However, three caliphs later, al-Mutawalkil (847-861) reversed the teaching and made it obligatory to hold that the Qur'an is eternal. Since then, this has become the general orthodox view. Unless it changes, Islamic reform is not going to get very far.
6) You point to the period of Mu'talizite domination in Islam as a kind of golden age of philosophical reason, intellectual innovation, and openness--followed by a very long dark age of irrationalism, mysticism, intellectual rigidity and intolerance that culminated in the 19th century with the backwardness and subjugation of the Islamic world. You suggest that the Mu'talizite precedent can be used today by Muslims who wish to "re-open" the Islamic mind. Can you point to Islamic thinkers today who are trying to do this? How are they faring?
There are some extraordinarily intelligent Muslim scholars who would like to see something like a neo-Mu'tazilite movement within Islam, a restoration of the primacy of reason so that they can re-open the doors to ijtihad and develop some kind of natural law foundation for humane, political, constitutional rule. They know that the issue of the status of the Qur'an has to be reopened in order to create some latitude in interpreting the Qur'an. They point to this precedent to show that Islam was once open to this position. In fact, Indonesian scholar Harun Nasution (1919-1998) was willing to wear the neo-Mu'tazilite label openly, despite the imprecation of heresy that it carried. He explicitly called for the recognition of natural law and opposed Ash'arite occasionalism and determinism as inimical to social, economic, and political progress. He insisted on man's free will and accountability. Reformist Tunisian-born thinker Latif Lakhdar calls for a revival of "Mu'atazila and philosophical thought that subjected the holy writings on which the religion is based to interpretation by the human mind." He said "it is absurd to believe the text and deny reality." In Egypt, Nasr Abu Zaid tried this. Unfortunately, he was declared an apostate and had to flee the country with his wife, whom he would have been forced to divorce (or rather she would have been forced to divorce him). Safely in exile, he said, "One important school of Koranic scholarship, Mutazilism, held 1,000 years ago that the Koran need not be interpreted literally, and even today Iranian scholars are surprisingly open to critical scholarship and interpretations." Unfortunately, Zaid died last year. So, the model is there but it is a dangerous one to use.
How are they faring? Unfortunately, as Bassim Tibi has warned, "Those intellectually significant Muslims who . . . still hope to apply reason to Islamic reform, had better do so in their Western exile, be it Paris or London or Washington. Their ideas are discussed in Scandinavia, but not in the Islamic world." Even in Europe, such Muslims have problems and have to confront the dangers of being labeled apostates. For several years in Germany, Tibi himself required armed body guards provided by the German state to protect him from assassination. Taj Hargey, a British imam, laments that "iconoclastic thinkers, liberals, and non-conformists who dare to challenge this self-assumed religious authority in Islam by presenting a rational or alternative interpretations of their faith are invariably branded as apostates, heretics, and non-believers."
7) Critics of your book have argued that the Mu'talizite movement is almost universally vilified as rank heresy in Islamic circles--and suggested that attempts to revive it are as likely to succeed in the Muslim world as a push to revive the Arian heresy would fare at the Vatican. How do you answer that criticism? Are there real grounds for hope?
My book attempts a diagnosis of the problem. Like the Regensburg Lecture, I believe the most profound woes in the Muslim world stem from its dehellenization. If this is so, then the prescription for recovery would be its re-hellenization, which is also what the Pope says. Does this mean that it is likely? No, it does not. It would require a sea-change in the Islamic world for this to happen. Unfortunately, things are headed in the opposite direction. However, the diagnosis is still valuable for understanding the nature of the problem we are facing. The correct diagnosis shows at least that most of the solutions proffered by Western governments in terms of social and economic reforms are a waste of time and resources because they do not touch upon the fundamental theological problem.
Still, outside of prayer, I think it is the only hope, and by this I don't mean only a neo-Mu'talizite movement, but also a resuscitation of the heritage of Muslim philosophy, especially Averroes. As Fatima Mernissi says so poignantly, "the fact that the rationalist, humanistic tradition was rejected by despotic politicians does not mean that it doesn't exist. Having an arm amputated is not the same as being born with an arm missing. Studies of amputees show that the amputated member remains present in the person's mind. The more our rational faculty is suppressed, the more obsessed we are by it." As a twentieth century Moroccan Muslim philosopher put it, either the future of Islam will be Aristotelian or it will not be. That is how critical this matter is.
8) What is the connection between the rejection of philosophical reason, and absolute voluntarism regarding Allah, and political/cultural supremacism, intolerance, and jihadi terror?
If reason is illegitimate, how are differences to be adjudicated? Force will decide. The stronger will decide. Why does Islam use violence to affirm its theology? Because it is the theology of power, of the doctrine that "right is rule of the stronger," raised to the level of God. The primacy of the will always seeks success through force.
Benedict XVI told his audience in Regensburg that not only is violence in spreading faith unreasonable and therefore against God, but that a conception of God without reason, or above reason, leads to that very violence. This is the problem in Islam. That which is unreasonable is against God only if God is reason. This is not so in majority Sunni Islamic theology. He is pure will and power, unconstrained even by his own word. Therefore, there are no solid barriers between the statement that God is pure will and power, and the startling declaration of Abdullah Azzam, which Osama quoted in the November 2001 video, released after 9/11, that "Terrorism is an obligation in Allah's religion." This can only be true - that violence in spreading faith is an obligation - if, as Benedict XVI said, God is without reason. This is why the problem we are facing is primarily a theological one.
The Closing of the Muslim Mind tells the extraordinarily dramatic story of the struggle within Islam over the relationship between God and reason - in other words over who God is - and of the dreadful effects of embracing a conception of God without reason. The deformed theology that resulted from this produced a dysfunctional culture. It has also produced a spiritual pathology that seeks it success in death.
Posted by Robert on January 23, 2011 12:15 PM
57 Comments Just some comments that seem succinct to follow, though there are many other interesting ones
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Boston Tea Party
January 23, 2011 1:15 PM
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"When all that says "it is good" has been debunked, what says "I want" remains."---C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
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sean
January 23, 2011 1:16 PM
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Aren't there logical contradictions between 'compassionate' Allah's unfettered power to do as he wills, and Allahs's omniscience about all events past, present and future?
There is a contradiction in the idea of a supreme being who is omniscient, compassionate and yet creates souls in the knowledge that they are damned to eternal agony burning in hell. If Allah is omniscient then He knows all events past and future, including how people will behave, and their ultimate fate before they are even born. The future is already laid out before him like the frames of a movie.
And that leads to an even more serious contradiction:
If Allah is omniscient about the future, then he can never make a decision or choose a course of action, because he knows in advance exactly what his future actions will be for all eternity. He cannot decide to change his mind because he will know in advance when and how he will decide to change his mind, so his mind will already be made up. Such a supreme being would be totally paralysed by his own pre-ordained future, and would be incapable of performing any voluntary action whatsoever. http://crombouke.blogspot.com/2010/01/tawhid-or-tawheed-versus-christian.html
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profitsbeard
January 23, 2011 1:41 PM
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Kudos to Robert and Mr. Reilly for the most profound posting ever to grace Jihadwatch.
This penetrating and pertinent analysis of the major crippling element inculcated into Islam (by the theocratic tyrants who found, and find, that Power is gained more effectively by despots through unleashed Unreason rather than restrained Reason) should be on the front page of every major publication in the West by tomorrow morning.
Our future and the survival of a free human species depend on absorbing this terrible truth: Islam worships Absolute Irrationality.
With such a belief system there can be no reasonable compromise.
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profitsbeard
January 23, 2011 1:56 PM
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A question for Mr. Reilly:
How would "Islamic scholars" answer this reort:
Isn't the declaration in the Hadiths that Mohammad is the "last prophet" a restraint upon Allah?
Why should Allah not put forth as many more prophets as He pleases, if He changed is mind tomorrow?
How do we know that every further Islamic "prophet"- from the Amadiya's to the Baha'i's to the Sikh's -was not a valid "changing of Allah's unrestrainable mind", since to chain His will and forbid Him the power to create new "prophets" is a clear confining of the Unconfinable and and an illegitimate "rationalizing" of the Supra-rational?
Any such enforced Closing of Allah's Mind by men would seem to be a presumptuous and arrogant kind of human blasphemy against their deity.
They chain Allah to their own dogmatic needs, failing to see the fatal paradox.
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john printer
January 23, 2011 2:34 PM
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This is one great interview, no fluff and right down to business. As I read it and thought through some of the ideas presented, I realized there is a parallel struggle now in some evangelical Christian churches, viz: Devine Will vs Man's Free Will. In fact, three of the churches I have attended have been "taken over" by Pastors who passed through the vetting process, only to later reveal they were "5-point Calvinists". Calvinists also believe in the total, unchangable authority of G-d's will, that it will be done despite anyone's choices or intentions. Makes a mockery of personal responsibility. And how could a Creator punish any who were led wily-nily by Him, and who had no say in matters whatsoever?
If these Calvinists win, and they wage a keen battle, the effect will be the same on Christiandom as was the closing of the debate in Islam.
Elohym - Mighty G-d - gave humankind free will so that we can choose to obey His will, not be shaved and branded and castrated by it.
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raven_
January 23, 2011 3:27 PM
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If one rejects reason one rejects explanation since explanation is reasoning based on a set of givens (axioms). Where the gives are the cause and the conclusions are the effect. If there are no explanations there can be no interpretation of the Quran.
The result is not so much a closed mind but a decomposed mind. A mind that incessantly plays the whack the mole of reason.
So where do the Islamo-Socialists find common ground? Or are they just using each others zobies?
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john spielman
January 23, 2011 3:47 PM
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Islam is evil whether "reformed"or not! It trivializes sin and the consequences of it, and each one's personal responsibilty for their own sins against God. Instead of "Allah wills it",the bible says we are responsible for our own decisions and actions. If we are led away by temptation into sin, there is no excuse possible. We are quilty as charged (by God) and THE PENALTY IS HELL OF FIRE forever! there is no GOOD WORKS off setting our sins as Islam teaches, only death and hell. The whole world, including me, is guilty! The one true God how ever loves the world and has given us a way for the penalty of our sins to be payed without the mandatory death penalty we all deserve! Jesus the "lamb of God" was sacrificed for our salvation.
The other big difference is that unlike muslims the true followers of Christ are being treansformed into His image by the internal workings of His HOLY SPIRIT! Thus Christians are comanded to not only love their brothers and sisters that are in Christ but our neighbors and even our enemies as well! How different the world would be if all were followers of Christ instead of Mohammed and his alter ego Allah!
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lilredbird
January 23, 2011 4:39 PM
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This sounds like an extraordinary work and one of great importance for everyone who is deeply concerned about the encroachment of Islam upon Western Civilization. What both "practical" and "hard-headed" politicians and nihilist or at least relativist academics have in common is their impulse to dismiss such examinations of the current state of Islam as "irrelevant", when instead Mr. Reilly's analysis is of the deepest, gravest importance, uncovering the depth of the self-imposed psychosis under which today's Islamic "scholars" and jihadists operate. My admiration to Mr. Reilly for writing it and Robert for this discussion.
And then there are the John Spielman's of the world, who will not be the least bit interested in the critical importance of Sunni Islam having explicitly renounced reason centuries ago because he is a good bible-thumping fundie Christian who would rather rant about "sin!" and "Hell!" and "Jesus the Lamb of God!" and the "Holy Spirit!" and all the other thought-stopping words and phrases that make him feel warm and safe and comforted in the bossom of his Brothers and Sisters.
As Christians with at least a stated commitment to reason, I know you will nevertheless not allow yourselves to understand how those of us whose commitment to reason is absolute, with no room for "miracles" performed by bearded flying old men in nightshirts or their "sons" or their son's "virgin" mother, shake our heads in wonder and dismay at the emotional hold that belief system maintains over you.
Nevertheless, in the spirit of wishing to be as well prepared as possible when these holy psychotic warriors of Islam finally make something go boom loudly enough for even the fools currently infesting Western Civilization to start paying attention again, "Closing of the Muslim Mind" has just shot to the top of my list of "must-reads".
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Ole Hartling
February 2, 2011 3:38 AM
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SOURCES OF ISLAMISM AND THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD
The excellent Wellington makes a historical comparison between the Muslim Brotherhood and the raise of the Nazi movement in Germany; and epistemology agrees:
“Very good observation about Hitler and the likes of him, dear Wellington. We all know what happens, when Pandora's box is opened. Having been founded in 1928 the Muslim Brotherhood is the first terrorist organisation of modern times.”
The similarities between MB and the Nazi movement is not just the totalitarian aspect or downplaying the dangers they pose, but the grievances from which they grew and gained power. The triumph of Nazism became an inspiration for the MB, the Mother of modern Islamism and terrorism.
In “The Closing of the Muslim Mind” Robert R. Reilly writes about the sources of Islamism and draw lines to Nazism. Here an excerpt:
“... A narrative of grievance and potential recovery exists throughout the Muslim world, but particularly among the Islamists, who are still in a state of shock over the abolition of the caliphate by Kemal Ataturk in 1924. With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, the caliphate was but a shell of itself. Nevertheless, its abandonment left some Muslims completely adrift. It was as if the Vatican had abjured its authority to represent the Church. How could the end of the caliphate be explained?* Islamism is used here as a form of shorthand for Muslim totalitarian ideology. It is in some ways an unsatisfactory term, as there are selfproclaimed Islamists who would not subscribe to this meaning of the term. However, it is useful to designate the transmogrification of Islam into an ideology.
Its abolition called onto existence the first Islamist organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, the “al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun”, dedicated to its restoration. While most Muslims may not share in the Islamist mythology regarding the caliphate, which did not exist continuously from the time of Muhammad, they nonetheless do require an explanation for the decline of their civilization.
A somewhat similar situation existed in Germany after World War I, which Adolf Hitler was able to exploit with the Nazi Party. In fact, there are striking parallels to this sense of grievance that can be found in Mein Kampf. The comparison id not adventitious. There were associations between the Nazis and the early Islamists going back to the 1930s, when Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Ikhwan, modeled the Muslim Brotherhood on the Brownshirts. The German sense of grievance came from the defeat in World War I and the metaphysical shock of the collapse of the Second Reich. This loss was inconceivable to them. The world had somehow been turned upside down. To comprehend the loss, Hitler and his companions explained it in terms of first the internal enemy and then the external enemy. Germany was stabbed in the back. Where was the rot in German society from which this betrayal came? The racist Nazi answer was the Jew. Germany must expunge the Jew and purify itself for the battle against the external enemy in order to bring about the millenarian vision of the Third Reich and the supremacy of the Aryan race.
Similarly, Islamists try to focus the widely shared sense of grievance and humiliation in the Muslim world on the loss of the caliphate because they wish to restore it. Their explanation for the decline of their civilization is, as indicated above, a loss of faith. The solution to this problem is obviously not imitating the West, but restoring Muslim faith to a pristine condition, as defined by them. They, too, began looking for the internal enemy and then the external enemy. Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, gives typical expression to this formulation in describing “the apostate domestic enemy and the Jewish-crusader external enemy.” It is here, at the heart of the effort to restore past glory, that the questions asked in the introduction reappear.
Are the Islamists of today something new or a resurgence of something from the past? How much of this is Islam and how much is Islamism? If so, in what way and from where has it come? And why is Islam susceptible to this kind of deformation?
… Islamist authors cannot be accurately understood in the terms of Islam simply, but only within the perspective of the twentieth-century Western ideologies that they have assimilated, most especially those based on Nietzsche and Marx. (We shall shortly see how thorough the assimilation was). The seminal thinkers in Islamism, like Sayyid Qutb in Egypt, were very well versed in Western philosophy and literature.
Qutb went to the United States for two years of postgraduate studies (1949-50). He was completely repelled by what he saw as a materialist culture. For example, he thought that the way Americans cared for their lawns was a sign of materialism and that the parish dances he witnessed were examples of sexual degeneracy. His exposure to the West intensified his hatred of it. The solution to what he diagnosed as Western alienation was Islam. Islam could overcome the relativism and the moral degeneracy that he had observed. Islam could save the West as well as the East.
In order to do this, Qutb said that Muslims must emulate the behavior of the Companions of the Prophet to prepare for the struggle ahead. But he used Leninist terms and means, espousing a “vanhuard” of the faithful which would lead the restoration of the caliphate. (In fact, Qutb, though he despised Marxism, was the Muslim Brotherhood's liaison to the Communist Party in Egypt and to the Communist International). Because of his opposition to the Egyptian government, Qutb was hanged by Nasser in 1966. He is said to have gone to the gallows smiling, leaving that iconic image to inspire hi followers today.
… Qutb blamed the Jews in Istanbul for conspiring in the collapse of the caliphate (“The Jes have always been the prime movers in the war declared on all fronts against the advocates of Islamic revival throughout the world”), and lebaled impious Muslims as the internal enemy, who must be vanquished so that the infidel West could be confronted and overcome. This much of the program can be understood from Islam alone, without any contamination by Western ideology.
The rest of the appeal stems from the result of the ancient struggle within Islam over the primacy of power versus the primacy of reason, which has been the subject of this book.
As we have seen, the outcome of this contest decisively affected that character of the Islamic world in which Qutb could find such a ready audience for his ideology. The infection of Western millenarian ideological thought from Nietzsche and Marx would not have made Islamism the attraction it is unless Islamism was not also able to claim legitimacy by drawing upon something within the traditions of Islam itself. For this, Islamist (*) thinkers selectively chose one, albeit a primary one, of the many theological and philosophical traditions within Islam's rich history. The nexus between this school of thought and Western totalitarian ideology was the primacy of will."
(Quoted from “The Closing of the Muslim Mind” (2010) by Robert R. Reilly, Chapter 8: “The Sources of Islamism”).
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jackdiamond
February 2, 2011 6:41 AM
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"The Muslim Brotherhood is a global movement whose members cooperate with each other throughout the world, based on the same religious worldview--the spread of Islam until it rules the world...(they are) an all-encompassing Islamic organization, calling to the adoption of the great religion that Allah gave in his mercy to humanity..all the members of the Muslim Brotherhood in the international arena operate according to the written charter that states that Jihad is the only way to achieve these goals...ours is the largest organization in the world."
---Muhammad Mahdi 'Akef, Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood Asharq Alawsat, London 11/11/05
(The United States is) "a satan that abuses the religion. I expect America to collapse soon. I have complete faith that Islam will invade Europe and America." (Akef, Memri 2/4/2004).
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katharina
February 2, 2011 8:49 AM
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What is wrong with the Rep Party? Why are they silent on continuous atrocities of forcing the Western world to bow down to Islam and now, the Islamic Nazis that include the Muslim Brotherhood, under Hussein Obama? What a traitor this Hussein is and his Dem Party SLAVES! We can see the continuous eerie pattern - under that most dangerous suspected Islamic Trojan horse and Nazi-lover Hussein Obama, where such Muslim sociopaths and Islam is on the rise; everywhere Islamic rule is expanding including in oil-rich once Christian-dominated Africa. The Arabic Muslim Brotherhood is an Islamic Nazi party for goodness sake - they haven't been put on trial for Nazism since the founder, Hassan al-banna, together with the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem, and the Turkish Ottomans were among or main Hitler/Nazi’s biggest collaborators or advisers! And the evil Nazi tradition under Islam continues with the top Arab-Egyptian Muslim cleric, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a follower of Hasan al-Banna and a longtime member of the Muslim Brotherhood, who made this evil call to mass murder the Jews, recently: At – http://europenews.dk/en ; In - http://www.investigativeproject.org/2315/moderate-qaradawi-defends-hitler-and-nuclear
“Moderate” Qaradawi Defends Hitler and Nuclear Terror
IPT News
November 9, 2010
….According to excerpts of a speech that aired on Al-Jazeera in January 2009, Qaradawi called on Muslims to put Jews in “their place” as Hitler had done, in revenge for Israeli military operations in Gaza several weeks earlier. “Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption,” he said. “The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them – even though they exaggerated this issue – he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hands of the believers.” At a January 2009 “Gaza Victory Rally” in Doha, Qatar, Qaradawi prayed for the opportunity to kill a Jew before his death.
“The only thing that I hope for is that as my life approaches its end, Allah will give me an opportunity to go to the land of Jihad and resistance, even if in a wheelchair. I will shoot Allah’s enemies, the Jews, and they will throw a bomb at me, and thus, I will seal my life with martyrdom. Praise be to Allah.”……-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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