That’s the subtitle of a book review (behind a firewall for the moment) regarding the fateful decision by Islamic scholars to make intellectual curiosity among the faithful sure grounds for blasphemy, shunning and death.
The crucial decision to turn away from new information (or even old, Platonic philosophical information) was the force which drove Islam into the corner to sit with a dunce cap on its head. The book, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis gives you the history of this foreclosure (as Freud would've called it). Slouched there even now, fingers in his ears, the fiercely irrational believer maintains that reason has no place in reasoning, and there is no cause and effect. In other words, it’s whatever the current dunce claims that “Allah Sez”…even if Allah’s slave is hiding in a well and waiting for the right moment to End It Fer Everybody.
In the Product Review on the Amazon page (linked above), they have this handy summary:
The Closing of the Muslim Mind solves such puzzles as:
- why the Arab world stands near the bottom of every measure of human development
- why scientific inquiry is nearly dead 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
As the reviewer, David Aikman notes:
but what use is reason in the face of the Iranian education ministry official who claims that the Tom and Jerry cartoons were concocted in the United States to improve the image of mice because, during the 1930s in Europe, Jews were called “dirty mice”?
What use reason indeed? Back in the 90s when I learned Iran didn’t let the printing press into the country until the mid 19th century - and Persians are supposed to be the smart ones - I knew they had a problem. Islam deliberately removes the faculty of reason. No surgery necessary, just endless indoctrination: loud, incessant, and beginning when children are young and malleable. Why develop something that won't ever be used?
The Closing of the Muslim Mind, or rather the review of the book, focuses on the decision that it would be “dangerous” to permit free inquiry. Indeed. Not only did science die at the hands of Islam but it also obliterated historical inquiry, literature, the arts, and music - all the beautiful furnishings of the human mind - and replaced them with submission to life in its nasty, brutish and short form.
Why would there be any inquiry beyond requisite bathroom rituals when rational endeavor is forbidden?
Stumbling onto that review reminded me that I’ve woefully neglected an important book review of my own, one I’ve been waiting to “feel better” enough to write an in-depth essay. Well, t’ hell wid it…I ain’t never gonna feel well enough to do that so you get my scrambled version instead. I hope it’s enough to entice you to buy the book.
Our advisor has mentioned many times the need for Counterjihad fiction. She says contrarian artists need to invade all the arts and present the minority point of view so that the public can judge for itself. This is a challenging idea, but then her strategies usually are. It’s also difficult to create good art when you have an explicit agenda. Sometimes it works, but usually after the fact - e.g., excellent World War II fiction couldn’t rise to the top until we’d had enough time to create an aesthetic distance.
In this war, we don’t have the luxury of waiting. We must go with the literature we have now, the fictional works being created out of an author’s need to share a grim and overwhelming reality. In that spirit, I present a “thriller” (the author’s classification, though "terrorist thriller" is closer to the mark).
What’s the au courant expression for a book you enjoyed? “It’s a good read”? (Before you send me an email about this usage, I already agree. Using verbs as nouns is gauche, but people persist if it works). The Martyr’s Prize is definitely in the “good read” class; the author was right when he said in his cover letter that one ought to read at least a couple of chapters. He promises the reader they’ll be hooked if they do. Yes, indeedy.Brooks William Kelley has written a page-turner. For a first effort, and self-published, it’s exceptionally well done. He’s made believable characters you’ll care about, and he builds the plot like he’s been churning them out for years. Do the gears grind in places? Sure. But this is not (yet) a polished professional author; this is an ardent storyteller, and he will improve with experience. Since he was smart enough to leave sufficient numbers of unresolved plot lines to make you want to find out what happens next, there should be sequels. There'd better be!
The Amazon page reviews are good, almost all of them five star. There is one fellow, a two star loner, who complains about “the overuse of vulgarity” and guesses (wrongly) that therefore the author is young. Well, knock me over with a feather cuz I never even noticed this language quirk. Living in cyberspace as much as I do, perhaps I'm inured. However, I agree with the fellow that Kelley has talent and will improve with time.
The dissenter calls the novel “rambling”…another criticism that passed right by. Kelley’s pacing is tight, given the issues he has to cover. Here’s a bit of outline from another Amazon reader:
Start with raw, believable and well-defined characters, both protagonist and antagonist. Layer the story with current events, genuine techno-babble, actual Quranic verses, and sprinkle a few factual news pieces gleaned from today’s actual headlines that perfectly mirror the storyline, and you have an all consuming adventure that a mere 380 pages is unsuccessful at satiating the pallet.
The locales are strikingly accurate (for anyone who’d ever been to them) to the point one can actually feel what the character feels. Your imagination will soar as you are drawn directly into the mind or geographic location of the scene painted so specifically by Kelley that you feel a part of the story as it unfolds….
Since I’m a technophobe, I can’t tell you whether those details are accurate but they sure are compelling. Not the geeky stuff at the beginning so much (though those details are crucial as plot devices). No, what glued me to the page was the rigging of a flat panel TV so that it would…well, you’ll have to read the book and sweat that part of the plot with the rest of us.
Amusingly, sprinkled in with the other bits o’ reality is a covert description of Robert Spencer playing himself but called, if I remember correctly, Dr. Pennington. RS appears briefly in one incomplete scene as the speaker invited to a college campus to give his lecture on Islam. For a brief moment, there he is, “rotund” and knowledgeable about his subject - and under attack by the usual suspects. It takes a certain amount of physical courage to do that and Mr. Spencer has proved he has this quality.
The fleeting de rigueur sex scenes will be a disappointment to those who want more, but they’ll also be a disappointment for those who’d have liked to see a female character taking her time before jumping in the sack. I realize mores have changed, but sometimes I hear rumblings from the younger generation that they’re changing back. At any rate the “love interest” remains as a hanging chad to be further resolved in book two. When you read it, ask yourself if the woman doesn’t remind you a bit of Ann Barnhardt.
And one so fervently hopes there will be a book two. I like Mr. Kelley’s characters, even the villains. Well, for the latter, they’re easy to ‘like’ because you know they’re going to exit stage left in a big bang. But the heroic ones remain with you after you read the last page. You wonder how Mr. Kelley will develop all those embryo plots you can see in the far distance…
The Baron never has time to read anything. If he has occasion to travel again, I’d like him to wrap this one is a plain brown cover (can’t be too careful with the TSA) and take it on his next wearisome plane ride. Two or three chapters in, he’ll be hooked…
13 comments:
Horse and cart; chicken and egg!! which came first, Islam or the closed mind? Did Islam close the mind or is Islam the result of a closed mind?
That book, "The Closing of the Muslim Mind" -- linked in my post -- gives the historical particulars. If you look at that Amazon page, you'll get more information on what happened and when, and who made the decisions.
Here's what the reviewer says:
Formalized Islamic doctrine holds that the Koran existed from all eternity with Allah, and that it was only when the Angel Gabriel revealed its contents to Muhammad that the world was able to hear, through the Koran, what Allah was saying. A sect of Islamic philosophers called the Mu’tazilites, who had great influence in the court of the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad in the first half of the ninth century, held that the Koran must have been created at a specific point in time. Otherwise, they said, where would free will be, since the events described in the Koran itself must have been foreordained? The Mu’tazilites believed both in free will and the ability of human reason to discern truth and justice. They considered that Allah must be subject to the moral laws that he, himself, created, and that humans themselves, not Allah, were responsible for any evil they committed.
The Mu’tazilite philosophy at first proved useful to the Abbasid caliphs as they attempted to assert the primacy of their political power over the influence of the ulema. But these first caliphs overplayed their hand, requiring all clerics to swear loyalty to the concept of a created Koran, on pain of imprisonment, torture, or worse. Inevitably, there was a reaction, and it then became the turn of traditionalists to insist on the “eternal” Koran and the associated idea that nothing in all of creation could be philosophically or scientifically examined without challenging Allah himself. The opposing school to the Mu’tazilites were called Asharites, after their founder, Abu al-Hasan al-Ashari (873-935). The Asharites completely denied that good and evil could be discerned by human reason. Instead, they argued, Allah’s nature was, quite simply, his will. Will precedes knowledge itself—which is the exact opposite of Christian thought, as it developed in the West. Christian thought proceeded from the assumption that God himself was reason, and that since all creation had come into being through Christ, the Logos, reason could and should be applied to the examination of all creation.
That bit about Baghdad reminded me it had been a repository of Christian philosophers'scrolls, right up to the time of Gregory in the ~800s. He died an old man, sure that his world was safe...
The reasoning of the Islamic sect which scorned "Reason" demonstrates a philsophical quandry know as the double-bind.
But these Muslim "scholars" were too simple-minded to understand the devilish trick their own pompous stupidity played on themselves, thus they were, and are, self-condemned to defending, ~with logic~ deified Illogic. And, with rational arguments, proclaiming Absolute Irrationality.
Catch-23, in effect.
You can only have a Deity who is Irrational if you are irrational, yourself.
But, if you are irrational, yourself, you will not be able to defend the Idea of a Non-Rational Deity.
The Muslims are thus trapped in the web of their own pseudo-meta-philosophic sophistry.
But are such dogmatic imbeciles that they remain unable to think through the calamitous results of their cosmic self-gelding.
Islam.
The faith that lames.
Brains.
Succinct!
Maybe we should have you teaching children about formal fallacies and their role in robust rhetoric.
In my dreams...
islam, the faith that's a function of lame brains...
Secular Liberal thinking: (or, for those who worship at the Altar of Political Correctness)
If we take a position on Islam, then we have to take a position on Christianity, and any other religion we wish to believe irrelevant.
Much easier to equivocate all of them as one massive evil, this way we can take our position against all of them. In equivocating (seemingly embracing Islam) we then have a tool with which to strike at our Christian detractors.
And as long as the Christians and Islamists are fighting each other it leaves them less energy and time to fight our Secularists agendas.
Profitsbeard said..."But are such dogmatic imbeciles that they remain unable to think through the calamitous results of their cosmic self-gelding."
From our point of view, yes.
But if that is what they intended to achieve, and achieved it, then they have been successful. And in this they can claim our calamities as their success, regardless of what we perceive as self-destructive.
Contra-Jihad fiction
Search Amazon or other book sources for author'Tom Kratman'.
Lawrence said...
Profitsbeard said..."But are such dogmatic imbeciles that they remain unable to think through the calamitous results of their cosmic self-gelding."
From our point of view, yes.
But if that is what they intended to achieve, and achieved it, then they have been successful. And in this they can claim our calamities as their success, regardless of what we perceive as self-destructive.
Lawrence-
Of course, I agree.
Madness can be terrifyingly effective, even if it doesn't understand that its "assertion" is essentially demented and its "argument" (to close the "gates of Ijtihad / Revision") is philosophically vacuous.
I.E. ~ We have reasoned that reason is unreasonable.
Archimedes was killed by a soldier who only knew how to swing a sword.
Mohammad and his most devout minions only need to know what asuch a soldier or even termite or a wasp knows, and can be equally as deadly and destructive.
That they are too idiotic to understand that their entire religious claim = that they have reasoned their way to a deified Irrationalism (by some mysterious process that can be "argued" but is not "reason") is a preposterous falsehood, tragically for us still doesn't mean they cannot kill people in an utterly unphilosophical but damned effective manner.
That they are rationally wrong doesn't stop them.
They're too dumb to understand it.
And will keep killing in their ignorance.
Failing to grasp that by "closing the Muslim mind" to "any new prophets" or "any revision to the Koran" they have thereby "shackled Allah", which they say is blasphemy, and have made a "reasoned" argument, when they say Allah is beyond all such limitations.
(Zeno must have invented Islam as a paradoxical joke and somehow it got lost for 2000 years, to be dug up by a camel driver with a Napoleon complex.)
Dymphna is right: we need popular novels on our side, since the War of Ideas needs to broaden its media.
Even more important would be some major popular movies (even one would be nice) as well as TV dramas/comedies.
As far as I know, there have only been two movies made that even come close to being pertinently INcorrect about the problem of Islam:
The Stone Merchant and Civic Duty (both made in 2006). The former is even less well-known than the latter (which isn't saying much). Both also suffer from the flaw of being too tentative about the issue, and "padding" it with PC MC reassurances or explanations. Perhaps The Stone Merchant is a bit stronger in being anti-Islam than Civic Duty, but it suffers from being a rather schlocky low-budget film, with too many distracting subplots that have little or nothing to do with the problem of Islam. On the other hand, it has Harvey Keitel for star power, and F. Murray Abraham is splendid in his role as an extremist Muslim imam inspiring a cell of terrorists.
On the other hand, Civic Duty really delves into the problem on an ordinary level: an ordinary young man who recently lost his job is temporarily depressed about it, and takes a couple of weeks off to spend all day in his apartment. During that time, he happens to be inundated by alarming information about Islam on the Net through his computer as well as TV news. Then some young Muslims move into the apartment on the ground floor, whose door is visible from his window down to the apartment courtyard. Increasingly, he becomes curious about their seemingly suspicious comings and goings, and he decides to start following them -- and finds even more suspicious and odd behaviors. It's all very believable and realistic -- but the director obviously has a PC MC agenda, reflected in two things:
1) he makes the curious guy (a white guy of course, played by actor Peter Krause) seem to be paranoid based on the frustration of losing his job and increasingly getting depressed and having fights with his wife (who, meanwhile, thinks he's "obsessing" and even takes it upon herself to buy some flowers and knock on the young Muslim men's apartment, offering it them as a show of "neighborliness"). Thus, the the writer/director is telegraphing that the guy is kind of obsessing, because he lost his job, etc., and because images from the news and the Net flood the mind and cause it to exaggerate the problem.
2) Near the end, when the guy loses it and invades the Muslim apartment when one of them (the seeming ringleader) is alone, and with gun hand, ties him to a chair and begins to berate and interrogate him: there, the Muslim "prisoner" is given by the writer/director a speech about how his poor wife and children were killed (by Israelis or by Americans, it is unclear) -- and so the writer/director is telegraphing that Muslim terrorism is all about current geopolitical problems partially, or wholly, our fault, not about Islam.
Nevertheless, in spite of these two flaws, the film's strengths could well plant seeds of doubt in a fence-sitter's mind -- but the final 30 seconds are absolutely crucial to pay attention to, when the "obsessed" guy (who meanwhile has been committed to an insane asylum) sees confirmation on the rec room TV newscast -- confirmation that the young Muslims he was suspicious of had actually succeeded in their terror plot (ingeniously poisoning the glue on deposit envelopes of banks all over the city, causing multiple deaths). Too bad it's such an obscure film.
Profitsbeard said..."Failing to grasp that by "closing the Muslim mind" to "any new prophets" or "any revision to the Koran" they have thereby "shackled Allah", which they say is blasphemy, and have made a "reasoned" argument, when they say Allah is beyond all such limitations.
Allah is beyond all limitations, but defined within the constructs of human limitations.
If this is the case, then we are all gods. And Allah just happens to be a more powerful god.
"The Closing of the Muslim Mind, or rather the review of the book, focuses on the decision that it would be “dangerous” to permit free inquiry. Indeed. Not only did science die at the hands of Islam but it also obliterated historical inquiry, literature, the arts, and music - all the beautiful furnishings of the human mind - and replaced them with submission to life in its nasty, brutish and short form."
Along with "poor" and "solitary." Sad but true.
"The Closing of the Muslim Mind, or rather the review of the book, focuses on the decision that it would be “dangerous” to permit free inquiry. Indeed. Not only did science die at the hands of Islam but it also obliterated historical inquiry, literature, the arts, and music - all the beautiful furnishings of the human mind - and replaced them with submission to life in its nasty, brutish and short form."
Along with "poor" and "solitary." Sad but true.
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