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Consequences of Rejecting Reason in Islam


  1. The 3 quotes below help explain Islam’s decline, eventually resulting in the last jihad attempt into Europe at Vienna on September 11, 1683.


Robert Reilly, author of The Closing of the Muslim Mind, said in interview:


  1. How can theology explore a God who acts for no reasons? By definition, He becomes incomprehensible. "Allah does what he wills." (K-14:27) "Dost thou not know that God has the power to will anything?" (K-2:106)


  1. I just returned from Cordoba, Spain, where Averroes lived and worked. It was a thrill to walk the same streets as he and Maimonides had. Avicenna and Averroes represent the highest attempt to assimilate Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy into Islam - to reconcile reason and revelation in the Muslim world. Averroes did have a huge impact, but it was mostly on Europe, not Islam. If you want a date on which the Muslim mind closed, 1195 A.D. might serve as the marker. It was then that Averroes's books were burned in the city square, that he was sent into exile, and that the teaching of philosophy was banned. His works in Arabic today have been back translated from either Latin or Hebrew, the languages in which most of his books were preserved.


  1. Reason was rejected... because there is nothing for it to know. Reality is composed of a series of instantaneous miracles directly caused by God's will. Everything is directly done by God, who acts for no reasons. The catastrophic result of this view was the denial of the relationship between cause and effect in the natural world. Therefore, what may seem to be "natural laws," such as the laws of physics, gravity, etc., are really nothing more than God's customs, which He is at complete liberty to break or change at any moment... If creation exists simply as a succession of miraculous moments, it cannot be apprehended by reason. As a result, reality becomes incomprehensible. ... In The Incoherence of the Philosophers, al-Ghazali (1058-1111), perhaps the single most influential Muslim thinker after Mohammed, vehemently rejected Greek thought: "The source of their infidelity was their hearing terrible names such as Socrates and Hippocrates, Plato and Aristotle." Al-Ghazali insisted that God is not bound by any order and that there is, therefore, no "natural" sequence of cause and effect, as in fire burning cotton or, more colorfully, as in "the purging of the bowels and the using of a purgative." Things do not act according to their own natures - they have no natures - but only according to God's will at the moment.

  2. What was the fate of the great philosophical legacy in Islam from Averroes, Avicenna, Al-Razi, Al-Kindi, etc.? Here is a stark assessment by reformist thinker Ibrahim Al-Buleihi, a current member of the Saudi Shura Council: "What I wanted to clarify is that 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.”

  3. In fact, the rejection continues to this day. Muslim scholar Bassam Tibi states that "because rational disciplines had not been institutionalized in classical Islam, the adoption of the Greek legacy had no lasting effect on Islamic civilization . . . contemporary Islamic fundamentalists denounce not only cultural modernity, but even the Islamic rationalism of Averroes and Avicenna..."

  4. The denial of natural law removed the very objective of science from the Muslim mind. Since the effort of science is to discover nature's laws, the teaching that these laws do not, in fact, exist (for theological reasons) is an obvious discouragement to the scientific enterprise. How can science proceed without cause and effect? You must say that a rock falls because God made it fall at that instant. To say gravity did it becomes a blasphemous statement. The extent of the discouragement and the paucity of scientific research this has produced is, if predictable, still astonishing. Pakistani physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy has noted the major scientific contributions of Islam's Golden Age in the 9th to 13th centuries. Then he writes, "But with the end of that period, science in the Islamic world essentially collapsed. No major invention or discovery has emerged from the Muslim world for well over seven centuries now." I give the statistics from the UN on the paucity of science in the Arab Muslim world in my book.


  1. ... part of the dispute about free will concerned the nature of the Qur'an. Was it created in time, or has it coexisted with Allah in eternity? ...

[...]

  1. There are some extraordinarily intelligent Muslim scholars who would like to see something like a neo-Mu'tazilite movement within Islam, a restoration of the primacy of reason so that they can re-open the doors to ijtihad ...”  (more)


From Raymond Ibrahim’s book review of The Closing of the Muslim Mind:

  1. “Reilly chronicles how the giants of Muslim philosophy, such as Ghazali and Ashari, concluded that knowledge was unknowable, that moral truths can only be ascertained through revelation. Accordingly, all knowledge—the very bounds of reality—came to be limited to the words of the Quran and its pronouncer, Islam’s prophet Muhammad.

  2. The ramifications of such intellectual calcification are immense: “All acts are in themselves morally neutral”; “Allah does not command certain behavior because it is good; it is good because he commands it. Likewise, he does not forbid murder because it is bad; it is bad because he forbids it.”

  3. Equivocations, such as the following by Ashari, become commonplace: “Lying is evil only because Allah has declared it to be evil…. And if he declared it to be good it would be good; and if he commanded it, no one could gainsay him.” Of course and as Ashari knew, the Islamic deity and his prophet are on record permitting and even encouraging Muslims to deceive.

  4. Similarly, the spirit of inquiry perishes: “the only thing worth knowing is whether a specific action is, according to Shari ‘a: obligatory, recommended, permitted, discouraged, or forbidden. The rest is irrelevant.” ... This is also why in the last millennium Spain alone has produced more books than the Arab world in its entirety.

  5. Likewise in the realm of science: Reilly cites a Pakistani physicist—not an uneducated, impoverished “radical”—saying it is un-Islamic to believe that combining hydrogen and water makes water; rather, Muslims are “supposed to say that when you bring hydrogen and oxygen together then by the will of Allah water was created.”

Robert Spencer says:

  1. “Al-Ghazali’s (1058-1111) attack on the philosophers was a sophisticated manifestation of a tendency that has always hindered intellectual development in the Islamic world: There is a prevailing assumption that the Qur’an is the perfect book, and no other book is needed. With the Qur’an the perfect book and Islamic society the perfect civilization, too many Muslims didn’t think they needed knowledge that came from any other source...


  1. But the main coup de grace to Islamic scientific and philosophical inquiry may have come from the Qur’an itself. The holy book of Islam portrays Allah as absolutely sovereign and bound by nothing. This sovereignty was so absolute that it precluded a key assumption that helped foster the development of science in Europe: Jews and Christians believe that God ... created the universe according to rational laws that can be discovered, making scientific investigation worthwhile. Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) explained:


  1. “Since the principles of certain sciences—of logic, geometry, and arithmetic, for instance—are derived exclusively from the formal principals of things, upon which their essence depends, it follows that God cannot make the contraries of these principles; He cannot make the ... lines drawn from a circle’s center to its circumference not to be equal, nor the three angles of a rectilinear triangle not to be equal to two right angles.” (St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Book Two: Creation, Chapter 25, section 14. Translated by James F. Anderson. University of Notre Dame Press, 1975.)


  1. But in Islam, Allah is absolutely free. Al-Ghazali and others took issue with the very idea that there were laws of nature; that would be blasphemy, a denial of Allah’s freedom. To say that he created the universe according to consistent, rational laws, or that he “cannot” do something—as Aquinas affirms here—would be to bind his absolute sovereignty. His will controls all, but it is inscrutable. Thus modern science developed in Christian Europe rather than in the House of Islam. In the Islamic world, Allah killed science.” The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam, p. 95.


  1. Here are 2 consequences of this attitude:


  1. 1) There are roughly the same number of native Spanish and Arabic speakers in the world, 350 million and 250 million. Yet in his article entitled “The Arab World’s Scientific Desert”, in 2004 Daniel Del Castillo claims that a study by the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development found that “No more than 10,000 books were translated into Arabic over the entire past millennium, equivalent to the number translated into Spanish each year.”


  1. 2) The scarcity of Muslim Nobel Prizes.


  1. By the way, the Reliance of The Traveller (Umdat al-Salik) explains Islamic law on killing apostates (o1.0, o8.1), killing adulterers by stoning (o1.0, o12.2, o12.6), amputating hands and/or feet of thieves (o14.1, o15.1), obligatory female genital mutilation (e4.3), killing blasphemers (o11.10), honor killing (o1.2.(4)), killing homosexuals (o12.2, o12.6), wife beating (m10.11), and lying (r8.2-3, r9.1-2, r10.1-3). It’s important to note this book was not certified by Al-Azhar’s Department of Extremism™, it was certified by their General Department for Research, Writing, and Translations. 


Certified 1990 by FCNA & IIIT


“a textbook for teaching Islamic jurisprudence to English speakers,

or as a legal reference for use by scholars...

superior to anything produced by Orientalists” (Reliance XViii)


This book proves those 9 things are condoned by at least some of the highest authorities in orthodox Islam past and present, so people who say they do not even exist in any part of sharia law are either lying or don’t know what they are talking about. This chart shows other authoritative sources.


These universal human rights abuses institutionalized under Islamic law are given cover in the war of ideas by the extraordinarily deceptive term “Islamic Human Rights”. Many are not even aware of this war of ideas because of the lie by Muslim Brotherhood orgs that only a Tiny Minority of Extremists™ take the things in Reliance seriously, and the success they have had keeping the entire topic out of any public discussion. One tactic is promoting the idea it’s Islamophobic™ to even suggest any of it exists.


Another tactic is to squash free speech and simply throw you out of University functions for asking about the book. Brotherhood front groups MSA & CAIR sponsored an Interfaith Dialogue™ at U. of Central Florida that was hosted by Edina Lekovic, the lying Bosnian Muslim American Communications Director for MPAC, and popular university speaker Jamal Badawi, Ph.D., known as a senior Brotherhood leader to the FBI since at least 1988. To see this deception about Reliance watch the video that follows with Badawi & Edina Lekovic sitting next each other on the panel. Even though Badawi sits on the board of FCNA, whose glowing review appears in Reliance, watch this clip where he is asked about the book and throws up a smokescreen by questioning translations and interpretations of the Koran and Sahih Bukhari & Sahih Muslim. Besides being irrelevant, the translations most commonly used (also in this website) being any issue is another deception because they are the same posted on MSA’s website (see Core Islamic Texts).  


Combining the suppression of information about Islamic law with the threat of losing your job or being called an Islamophobe™ for asking works very well to keep people silent and most people in the dark.


Raymond Ibrahim gives examples of extraordinary hypocrisy when the King and highest religious authorities in Saudi Arabia sponsor major international Interfaith Dialogues™, which are used to discuss the problem of Islamophobia™ with no criticism of Islam. Ibrahim:


  1. It still remains to determine which is more surreal, more unbelievable: that Saudi Arabia, which tops the charts of state-enforced religious intolerance, is sponsoring “religious dialogue,” or that the West, including leaders of those religions whose adherents are daily persecuted by Saudi and Muslim intolerance, are going along with the gag—and all of them with a straight face.”


There are Muslims who signed the St. Petersburg Declaration who are not offended when these aspects of Islam are criticized, and live with death threats from other Muslims for doing that. If Islamophobia™ is so dangerous to world peace, do you see the irony when the Muslims or people raised in Muslim countries who reject that term need extra security to speak at American universities, often at their own expense, but MB group members most outspoken about it like Lekovic and Badawi are generally welcomed there not needing extra security because there are no credible threats against them? If anything, as you just saw in the video, there is extra security provided to these people to control who asks what questions under penalty of ejection! American Muslim Civil Rights™ groups like CAIR don’t say what’s wrong with the SPD wording, they say the messengers aren’t qualified, then drop the subject. Meanwhile Sheik Qaradawi, an associate of Badawi’s who in 2009 was named the 6th most influential Muslim in the world in a book by Professor John Esposito, has ruled that when Muslims criticize these aspects of sharia it’s “downright apostasy”, which according to him justifies the death penalty. And in 2013 he said,


  1. “If they had gotten rid of apostasy punishment Islam wouldn’t exist today”.


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