Best 18 quotes of Robert R. Reilly on MyQuotes

According to the UN, the production of scholarly and literary books is severely lacking in the Muslim world. Muslims publish just over 1 percent of the world’s books despite constituting 5 percent of the world’s population. Further, their share of literary or artistic books stands at just under 1 percent. Even more telling is that of books published in the Arab market, 17 percent are religious in nature. That’s 12 percent more than the average in other parts of the globe. “Turning to UNESCO statistics on the volume of world publications shows that, in 1991, Arab countries produced 6,500 books compared to 102,000 books in North America, and 42,000 in Latin America and the Caribbean.

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.

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.

As Fouad Ajami observed, the inability to relate cause to effect is pandemic in the Islamic world.

finding ways of wedding [Islam’s traditional] protective role with modern democratic and economic institutions is a challenge that has not yet been met.

For radical Islamists, as we have seen, democracy itself is a blasphemous act of impiety and must be destroyed.

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.

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

Islamists regard democracies as their natural and fatal enemies. Man-made law is a form of shirk in that its purported authority impinges upon that of the divine law that has already been prescribed for every situation. It places man’s laws on the level of God’s. Thus it appears to divinize man and is seen not so much as a form of political order but as a competing, false religion. This is why Sayyid Qutb declared in Milestones, “Whoever says that legislation is the right of the people is not a Muslim.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is imperative for the East as well as the West. “Come now, let us reason together” (Isaiah 1:18).

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.

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

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.