Allah Is Not Great
Robert R. Reilly’s The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist (ISI Books, May 2010) will, I am sure, fascinate other readers as it did me. I could hardly put it down until I’d read it twice.
Reilly (a dear friend of mine, by the way) contends that Islam suffers from a flawed metaphysic that deforms its theology. It rejects reason and exalts will. It has no room for natural law: Murder is not wrong by definition but only because Allah chooses to forbid it. If he’d decided to enjoin it, it would have become our duty.
Islam understands his omnipotence to mean that he is superior to reason itself (thus, if he said that two and two make five, so it would be). Allah’s will is the direct cause of everything; no need to look for secondary causes. No wonder, given this primitive conception of nature, Islam rejects Western science. Allah’s will accounts for everything that happens. The world continues to exist because he recreates it continuously from moment to moment. He could decide to annihilate it at any time.
Harold
