The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis - Hardcover

This is a revelatory look at the causes of the crisis in the Muslim world. People today are shocked and frightened by the behavior coming out the Islamic world - not only because it is violent, but also because it is seemingly inexplicable. While many explanations have been offered as to 'what went wrong' in the Muslim world, no one has decisively answered why it went wrong. Until now. In the eye-opening new book "The Closing of the Muslim Mind", foreign policy expert Robert R. Reilly locates the roots of contemporary troubles in a pivotal struggle that occurred within the Muslim world nearly a millennium ago. It was a battle over the role of reason - and the side of irrationality won. The deformed theology that resulted, Reilly reveals, produced the spiritual pathology of Islamism, and a deeply dysfunctional culture. Terrorism is only the most obvious manifestation of this crisis. Reilly solves such puzzles as why peace is so elusive in the Middle East; why the Arab world stands near the bottom of every measure of human development; why scientific inquiry is nearly moribund in the Islamic world; why Spain translates more books in a single year than the entire Arab world has in the past thousand years; why some people in Saudi Arabia still refuse to believe man has been to the moon; and why some Muslim media present natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina as God's direct retribution. Delving deeper than previous polemics and simplistic analyses, "The Closing of the Muslim Mind" provides the answers the West has so desperately needed in confronting the Islamist crisis.

Robert R. Reilly is a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council and has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Reader's Digest, and National Review, among many other publications. A former director of the Voice of America, he has taught at the National Defense University and served in the White House and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Reilly is a member of the board of the Middle East Media Research Institute and lives near Washington, D.C.