Tea at Trianon: Robert Reilly Deciphers Islam

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, May 10, 2016

Robert Reilly Deciphers Islam

From TFP:

Mr. Reilly, a former Reagan and George W. Bush Administration official, witnessed firsthand the events in the Middle East over the last decade. In his 25 years of government service, Mr. Reilly served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where he was Senior Advisor for Information Strategy (2002-2006). In 2003, he participated in Operation Iraqi Freedom as Senior Advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of Information.

His talk was based largely on the themes of his 2011 book, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis. Mr. Reilly very competently described the theological reasons for the decline of Islamic culture and civilization over the last several centuries, and why they help to understand Islam today.

The United States encountered many problems after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Much ink has been spilled debating the causes of this difficultly, but Mr. Reilly places the blame squarely on political correctness. In his classic work The Art of War, Sun Tzu wrote that “if you do not know your enemies or yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.” Westerners, for fear of being labeled an “islamophobe,” have generally chosen not to know Islam as it is. The consequences of this self-inflicted blindness continue to bear bitter fruits for our country.

A key to understanding Islam is to understand its philosophical worldview. Mr. Reilly explained how the Christian worldview, based on Aristotle, sees God as the Creator of a rational and intelligible universe that man can understand and interpret. The phenomenas we see in nature, from gravity to the weather, are the results of secondary causes based on the fundamental laws of nature.

The Islamic mind has increasingly rejected this Aristotelian understanding of the world, and this shift has coincided exactly with the degeneration of Islamic civilization. Muslims by and large think everything is caused directly by Allah. When an apple falls from a tree, a thunderstorm passes over a city, or the moon revolves around the Earth, it is not laws of gravity, thermodynamics, or physics that cause such phenomena, but Allah himself, every time. And no one can say for sure if Allah will do so again. Even worse, to say that gravity and not Allah caused the apple to fall from the tree is not merely wrong, but a “blasphemy” against Allah.

This worldview has utterly devastated economic and social development across the Islamic world. Spain, for example, translates more books in one year than the whole Islamic world has done in the past one thousand years, and South Korea registers more patents than the whole Arab world combined. This decline has occurred for centuries and shows no signs of abating. (Read more.)