Robert R. Reilly on the Closing of the Muslim Mind: Terrorism as a Religious Obligation

I-ARI

“When Bin Laden appears on the television tape [recording] and quotes his spiritual mentor Abdullah Azzam and says that “Terrorism is an obligation in Allah’s religion,” I began wondering what kind of theology must this be if terrorism is a religious obligation? And this led me into a ten year study of Islamic theology and philosophy that drew me back to the period of the ninth century. “When this great struggle that Fazlur Rahman and other Muslim reformers talk about: where Hellenic thinking in the form of the Greek texts from Aristotle and Plato were being assimilated, and the regnant school of theology called the Mu’tazilites said that the first duty of man is to reason, and that reason has a primacy because it’s only through reason one can come to know—first of all—that God exists; and then one must apply one’s reason to the possibility that He has spoken to man and indeed continued to apply reason to the texts of that supposed communication. This was the side of Islam that very few people know today because, unfortunately, fifty years later it was totally suppressed by the opposing theological school—[the Asharite school]—which denied every one of its premises, including that God was reason, that man had free will, that man could know right from wrong through his reason, and that’s why his freedom had moral import. And the Asharites denied all this. And one can imagine the political order based upon the denial of these central suppositions about the role of reason, the ability to know right from wrong and the freedom to choose [between] them ended in the long trail of despotism with which we’re all familiar. So this really has theological roots.

“As part of this deformed theology—the Asherites and the Hanbalites [and] other Islamic schools—said that God’s omnipotence requires that no other thing be so much as potent. In other words, that effects man’s free will—he doesn’t really have free will. Also, there is no such thing as natural law. There’s no cause and effect in the natural world, as in fire burning cotton, or gravity making a rock fall. None of those things happen because of natural laws. Each is a discreet event directly caused by God. And the fire doesn’t burn the cotton, it could turn the cotton into ice. It’s just that God has a habit that he usually burns cotton after fire has been touched to it. But there’s no causal relationship between the two. As a consequence of this, the narrative of cause and effect of the natural world disappears and it’s all subject to mystery and there’s no distinction between what occurs naturally and a miracle. And that’s why Islam is rife with conspiracy theories which become the intellectual currency of a world without cause and effect.

“If I had to put it into one sentence—as I do—my thesis is that Islamism is a spiritual pathology, based on a deformed theology, that has produced a dysfunctional culture. And it is this deformed idea of God—the wrong idea of who God is—that has permeated pretty much all of Arab-Islamic life and turned what once was this thriving culture and civilization into the dysfunctional mess that it is today.”