Robert R. Reilly > Quotes

“This is imperative for the East as well as the West. “Come now, let us reason together” (Isaiah 1:18).”
― Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis

“There are two fundamental ways to close the mind. One is to deny reason’s capability of knowing anything. The other is to dismiss reality as unknowable.”
― Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis

“Since then Sunni Islam has adopted the official position that no new interpretations of the law can be entertained, and that what seemed right in twelfth-century Cairo or Baghdad must seem right today.”
― Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis

“there are Muslims who know the way out of the morass, but seldom are they able to find audiences or regimes that are willing to listen to and to protect them.”
― Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis

“Obviously, al-Ghazali rejected the Mu‘tazilite position that there is no faith without reason, or that faith requires rational assent, since for him reason is “blind.”
― Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis

“Those eager to make a new beginning must accept beforehand that the traditional mind will lead them to nowhere.”
― Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis

“What, then, of the achievements of Muslim philosophy in Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Ibn al-Haytham, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), al-Razi, al-Kindi, al- Khawarizmi, and al-Farabi? Reformist thinker Ibrahim Al-Buleihi, a current member of the Saudi Shura Council, responds, “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.”21”
― Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis

“The number of books translated in the Muslim world is five times less than of those translated in Greece. In fact, in the past one thousand years, since the reign of al-Ma’mun, the Arab community has translated only 10,000 books, or roughly the number that Spain translates in one year.”
― Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis

“Cage was fooling himself if he thought he was destroying power; he was destroying order. Destroying order creates an opportunity for a certain type of power to ascend. What sort of power that might be became clear from Cage’s infatuation with Mao Tse-tung’s totalitarianism. In the early 1980s, Cage said, “The Maoist model managed to free a quarter of humanity: that gives cause for thought. Today, without hesitation, I would say, for the moment, Maoism is our greatest reason for optimism.”
― Robert R. Reilly, Surprised by Beauty: A Listener's Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music

“Islam does not have a figure of authority corresponding to the pope who could definitively delegitimize Islamism, and it is uncertain, if there were such a figure, that he would do so, since Islamism has a claim to legitimacy despite its adulteration by Western ideology”
― Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis

“In a line worthy of Robespierre, Sayyid Qutb said that a “just dictatorship” would “grant political liberties to the virtuous alone.”26 Hassan al-Banna, whose bedside reading was al-Ghazali, also regarded the Soviet Union under Stalin as a model of a successful one party system.”
― Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis

“The nominalist view of morally indifferent acts was pregnant with two developments that occurred shortly afterward, within a few years of each other. The first was from Niccolò Machiavelli, who understood that, if nature no longer defines what is good for man (and there is no certain God to define it either), then man can. Man’s will fills the vacuum left by nature; he can define his own end.”
― Robert R. Reilly

“With scathing sarcasm, Abdelwahab Meddeb, the Tunisian reformist, said of Islamist terrorists, “No criminal is more despicable than one who not only fails to feel any guilt after [committing] his crime, but also harbors the illusion that this [crime] will bring him . . . divine reward. This conversion of bad into good not only spares him guilt, but also turns an unhappy person into a happy soul.”
― Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis

“The joint commissioner of the Mumbai police, Rakesh Maria, said of the captured terrorist Muhammad Ajmal Kasab, the only surviving perpetrator of the 2008 mass murder in Mumbai, India, “He was led to believe that he was doing something holy.”
― Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis

“Orthodoxy has arrogated to itself the task of guiding the destiny of Muslims. But their prescription for society is an invitation to catastrophe and possibly to a new Dark Age for Muslims.”
― Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis

“The entire edifice of individual rights derived from the natural state of the individual or through a secular ethical or political theory is alien to the structure of Islamic reasoning.”
― Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis

“Those wishing to influence the Islamic world through public diplomacy and the media should take heed of Lawrence Freedman’s admonition: “Opinions are shaped not so much by the information received but the constructs through which that information is interpreted and understood.”30 Unless and until the Sunni world reembraces philosophy, it is difficult to imagine through what “constructs” it could receive the promotion of equal human rights in a favorable way.”
― Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis

“Al-Ghazali immodestly claims that, to prepare for the enterprise, he mastered the sum total of relevant knowledge: “There is no philosopher whose system I have not fathomed, nor theologian the intricacies of whose doctrine I have not followed out. Sufism has no secrets into which I have not penetrated.” He is the master of all.”
― Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis

“Saudi author and reformist Turki al-Hamad gave this epitaph for reform: “From the early 20th century to this day, we constantly hear people say: We should adopt the good things [from the West] and ignore the bad. You cannot do such a thing. When you consider the products of modern civilization—the car, the computer, and so on— these are all products of a certain philosophy, a certain way of thinking. If you adopt the product, but ignore the producer—you have a problem. You cannot do such a thing. [For us,] the product is new, but the thought is not. We move forward with our eyes looking backward.”
― Robert R. Reilly

“Implicit in the last sentence is the Mu‘tazilite belief that God is subject to His own justice and that He cannot act outside of it. He cannot be corrupt.”
― Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis

“Ineluctably, if will and power are the primary constituents of reality, one will, in a series of deductive steps, conclude to a totalitarian regime. There is no other way out of it. The curious thing is that it does not matter whether one’s view of reality as pure will has its origin in a deformed theology or in a totally secular ideology, such as Hegel’s or Hobbes’s; the political consequences are the same. As Father James Schall has shown, the notion of pure will as the basis of reality results in tyrannical rule. Disordered will, unfettered by right reason, is the political problem.”
― Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis

“finding ways of wedding [Islam’s traditional] protective role with modern democratic and economic institutions is a challenge that has not yet been met.”
― Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis

“It understood the crisis as a rebuke from Allah
because Muslims had not followed His way. Just as success is a validation of faith, failure is a personal rebuke. Did not Allah promise, “You shall be uppermost if you are believers” (3:139)? The corollary to this must be that, if you are not uppermost, you must not be believers.”
― Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis

“In Taliban-controlled portions of Pakistan, “Polio vaccinations have been declared haram by the ulema, and the government campaign has subsequently stalled.” Like car insurance, vaccinations are a form of presumption. Only with the expulsion of the Taliban from the Swat Valley in the late summer of 2009 was the Pakistani government able to resume vaccinations.”
― Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis

“The past glories of Islamic civilization show that it was once able
to progress. That progress was based upon a different set of ideas,
antithetical to those of the Islamists, who would have been considered
heretical then.”
― Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis

“The problem today is that the side of reason in Islam lost, and therefore its natural antibodies to this totalitarian infection are weak. What we are witnessing today are the ultimate consequences of the rejection of human reason and the loss of causality as they are played out across the Muslim world in the dysfunctional culture engendered by them. It is not that the side of reason is not still there. 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.”
― Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis

“While the fierce debates between those believing in free will (the Qadarites) and the predestinarians (the Jabrias) were generally resolved in favor of the former,” Pervez Hoodbhoy avers, “the gradual hegemony of fatalistic Ash’arite doctrines mortally weakened . . . Islamic society and led to a withering away of its scientific spirit. Ash’arite dogma insisted on the denial of any connection between cause and effect—and therefore repudiated rational thought.”
― Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis

“The arts are one of our best protections against dogmatism of any stripe and a powerful weapon against complacency. But showing us how rotten reality is and how twisted we are, is not their sole purpose. Nor can it be said that the pursuit of complexity for its own sake is a valid aim. Unfortunately, that seems to be what much 20th-century art was about. Process became synonymous with progress, and a vast array of methodologies—artificially contrived systems and procedures based on mechanical or mathematical concepts—took the place of straightforward communication.”
― Robert R. Reilly, Surprised by Beauty: A Listener's Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music

“The transmogrification of Islam into Islamism is bad news not only for the West but also for the majority of Muslims who have no desire to live in totalitarian theocracies. “For the West it is but a physical threat in the form of terrorism,” said Pakistani journalist Ayaz Amir. “For the world of Islam . . . to be trapped in bin Ladenism is to travel back in time to the dark ages of Muslim obscurantism. It means to be stuck in the mire which has held the Islamic world back.”
― Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis

“An overemphasis on God as One can easily morph into God as the only One, which then ineluctably incorporates everything into the only One, with nothing outside of it. We are left with either monism or pantheism.”
― Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis