The Closing of the Muslim Mind

IIIOIII wrote: »

So, let us discuss this matter. I am interested in the views of the Irish Muslims on this.

Why? What are your views on this (which you are supposed to post on these kinds of threads).

The book being referred to is Robert R Reilly The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis, published in 2010. I have not read this book, but (based on the article cited in the original post and also an interview with Reilly on a Roman Catholic website) I think that it over-simplifies the theological debates between the Mu'tazilite school of theology (which Reilly characterises as the "good guys", suggesting that they placed human reason above revelation) and the Ash'ari school (who are clearly the "bad guys" in Reilly's account).

However, this seems to contradict the view of various commentators who see the Mu'tazilite position as ultimately incoherent - among the Muslim scholars, the most obvious person to refer to would be Al-Ghazali, whose many works include The Incoherence of the Philosophers, written to rebut the Aristotelian views of Muslim philosophers and theologians who put human reason above divine revelation. Al-Ash'ari himself has been described (by Hans Küng, Islam: Past, Present & Future [Oneworld, p. 296]), as someone who "combined the naive faith of the adherents to tradition with rational arguments, . . . referring to numerous hadith in which the Prophet himself argues rationally." In The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy, a "chronology of major philosophers in the Arabic tradition" contains Al-Ash'ari's name about one-fifth of the way down the list, implying that philosophical debate continued in Islam long after Reilly implies it was terminated by the dominance of Ash'arite thought.

Al-Ash'ari's position (I'm summarising the discussion on Al-Ash'ari in Roy Jackson Fifty Key Figures in Islam [Routledge: 2006, pp. 57-62]) was that the Mu'tazilites gave too much precedence to human reason, which he believed had the by-product of making thinking about God too abstract and mechanistic. He was not someone who simply adopted a literalist position with respect to the Qur'an, but he believed that reliance on reason alone was as dangerous as relying on literal readings of scripture. "The best approach, he believed, was to combine reason with revelation. The Qur'an can be justified by reason alone up to a certain point, and beyond that it simply must be accepted as revealed truth. Certain aspects of doctrine, therefore, were 'off limits' to rational speculation and one must simply accept 'without asking how' (bila kayfa)." For example, humans simply cannot use reason to predict whether individuals will end up in Paradise or in the Hellfire, as the Mu'tazilites argued - this is a matter for the will of God.

Clearly, this sort of position can be taken to extremes, and it cannot be denied that one of the intellectual strands within Islam has been hostile to the sort of "rationalist" critique of religious belief that Christianity has faced (often from devout Christians) since the 18th century if not sooner. However, to characterise the dominance of Ash'arite thinking over Mu'tazilite in the 9th century as closing the door on reason in Islam is, in my view, a gross overstatement.

As is my custom in this sort of response, I point out that I am not a Muslim, and I am myself probably guilty of oversimplification.

PDN wrote: »

I think the Pope is a bit of a hypocrite given that his own organisation played the 'might is right' card for well over a thousand years by murdering anyone who disagreed with them.

Actually, they hardly ever did. Even the Spanish Inquisition only executed about 4,000 people over 350 years, at a time when the death penalty was used for many minor crimes.

irishconvert wrote: »

Where does the 4,000 figure come from?

I'm not sure where the 4,000 figure comes from, but it is consistent with the analysis provided by Henry Kamen in his book The Spanish Inquisition (first published in 1965, revised edition in 1998). Kamen points out that the Inquisition was more active in the early years (between roughly 1480 and 1530) than in subsequent years. After reviewing the extant evidence, he concludes: "Taking into account all the tribunals of Spain up to about 1530, it is unlikely that more than 2,000 people were executed for heresy by the Inquisition." Although the Spanish Inquisition continued into the 19th century, Kamen suggests that the level and focus of activity varied considerably. In the early years, the main targets were "conversos", who were mainly Jews who had converted to Christianity. The "moriscos", Muslim converts to Christianity, were of less interest to the Inquisition until the second part of the 16th century. Kamen estimates that, even in the worst periods, around 2% of those punished by the Inquisition were actually executed, the remainder suffering imprisonment, loss of assets and a range of lesser punishments. Obviously, some of those who became subject to the Inquisition would have died in prison or during questioning, or as a consequence of impoverishment, or during flight from Spain, so the total of all the victims of the Spanish Inquisition is likely to be higher, but the estimate of 4,000 executed by the Inquisition seems to be of the right order of magnitude.

The Wikipedia article on the Spanish Inquisition supports this, but the article appears to draw heavily on Kamen, so it may not count as an independent source.